📖John Templeton

Spiritual Principles for Investing

🌱 Beginner★★★☆☆

Spiritual principles enhance investment wisdom.

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Begin each meeting with a prayer. Spiritual principles applied to investing lead to greater wisdom, patience, and humility — the foundations of good investment judgment.

— Templeton's Way with Money,2012

🏠 Everyday Analogy

A process is like a pilot checklist: discipline prevents simple mistakes when pressure rises and keeps outcomes more repeatable.

📖 Core Interpretation

John Templeton advocates a repeatable process: define criteria, execute consistently, and review decisions against evidence. Process quality drives outcome consistency.
💎 Key Insight:Humility and gratitude sharpen investment judgment.

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❓ Why It Matters

Without process, there is no reliable feedback loop. Structured execution and review improve decision quality over time.

🎯 How to Practice

Run a decision loop of research, thesis, execution, and post-mortem; document assumptions and update playbooks with evidence, not hindsight bias.

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Having opinions without execution criteria
Reviewing outcomes but not decisions
Abandoning rules during volatility spikes

📚 Case Studies

1
Postwar Japan Recovery (1949)
Templeton bought deeply depressed Japanese stocks amid post-WWII devastation, when many investors avoided the market due to political and economic uncertainty.
✨ Outcome:Massive multi-decade gains as Japan industrialized and export growth surged, validating global value investing beyond the U.S.
2
Early Investment in South Korea (1962)
Templeton invested in obscure South Korean companies when the country was poor, politically unstable, and largely ignored by foreign investors.
✨ Outcome:Substantial returns as South Korea transformed into an export-driven Asian tiger, reinforcing his case for broad global diversification.

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