The COVID-19 pandemic and the grueling economic slowdown before it in India have not changed the optimism Lauren Templeton, founder and principal at Templeton & Phillips Capital Management, has for the country.
“...there are a few positive things we see about India and we really do consider it the eighth wonder of the world,” Templeton told Moneycontrol in an interview on the sidelines of CFA Society India’s 12th India Investment Conference.
Templeton, who belongs to a family that has cherished the value investing style for decades, however, will not pay any price to have a piece of the “eighth wonder”. “So there are a lot of things we like but would caution investors to be careful about the price they're paying,” she said.
Edited excerpts:
Nobody has the insight on the Templeton way of investing as you do and given your own experience of working under your great Uncle, how would he have reacted to the anomalies of the investment world today such as cryptocurrencies, QE infinity etc.?
Well, I did have the privilege of working with my great uncle, Sir John Templeton for about a decade and he was incredibly focused on bottoms-up stock picking. I'm quite sure that he would not be invested in crypto and would view that as a bubble. But, he would probably be very interested and researching crypto since he was a big advocate of individual freedom and free markets. He actually tried to establish his own country and got pretty far in doing that. It was an island near Tonga and it was called the Republic of Minerva.
Of course, the never-ending quantitative easing, low-interest rates have created bubbles in the markets. Clearly, the bond market in the US is in a bubble. And we've seen that with interest rates low, investors have really reached further out on the risk spectrum. I think as things start to change and rates rise, you will find that value investing comes to the fore more than growth investing as growth stocks get penalized by a higher interest rate environment.
Read More at https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/markets/india-still-the-eighth-wonder-for-investors-says-lauren-templeton-7979361.html
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