Interview with Sir John Templeton by Eleanor Laise

Sir John Speaks --- He bought low during the Depression, sold high during the Internet boom and made more than a few good calls in between; Sir John Templeton, dean of contrarians, tells us where to invest now.

A 1934 Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar, Templeton has a voracious
appetite for information. The small-town Tennessee native became known
as the Marco Polo of his Oxford class, thanks to a round-the-world
postgraduation jaunt. In his late 20s he opened his own
money-management firm and began to put international investing on the
map. His flagship Templeton Growth fund has posted a 13.8 percent
annualized return over 50 years, well ahead of the Standard & Poor's
500's 11.1 percent.

SmartMoney: How did a kid from rural Tennessee become a pioneer of
global value investing?

John Templeton: In Tennessee I didn't meet anybody who owned a share of anything. At Yale there were hundreds of boys from wealthy families, but not a single one who was investing outside one nation. I thought that was just not sensible. Surely they'd get better results if they
searched everywhere rather than limiting their search to one country. Then I investigated the investment counsel profession and couldn't find any investment counselor who specialized in helping people invest outside America. So I saw a wide-open opportunity.