The true objective for any long-term investor is maximum total real return after taxes.
Keep an open mind
Never adopt permanently any type of asset or any selection method. Try to stay flexible, open minded and skeptical. Long term top results are achieved only by changing from popular to unpopular the types of securities you favour and your methods of selection.
Never follow the crowd
If you buy the same securities as other people, you will have the same results as other people. It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different from the majority. Buying when others are despondently selling and selling when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward.
Everything changes
Bear markets have always been temporary. And so have bull markets.
Avoid the popular
When any method for selecting stocks becomes popular, you will need to switch to unpopular methods.
Learn from your mistakes
'This time is different' are among the most costly four words in market history.
Buy during times of pessimism
Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.
Search worldwide
To avoid having all your eggs in the wrong basket at the wrong time, you should diversify. When you search worldwide, you find more better bargains than when you monitor only one nation. You also benefit from more safety thanks to diversification.
Hunt for value and bargains
Too many investors focus on outlook and trend. Therefore, more profit is made by focusing on value. In the stock market the only way to get a bargain is to buy what most investors are selling.
No-one knows everything
An investor who has all of the answers doesn't even understand the questions.
Of course, those aren't the only words of wisdom Templeton had to offer. He also once said, "It's nice to be important, but it is more important to be nice."
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For Sir John Marks Templeton, the road not taken really did make all the difference in the world.
Contrarian to the core, the legendary investor literally became a billionaire by "avoiding the herd". He bought low and sold high, always working against the grains of extreme bullish and bearish sentiment on Wall Street.
He pursued those strategies by buying up companies, and even nations, when the streets were the bloodiest, snapping up rock bottom bargains along the way.
It was at these moments of what he called "points of maximum pessimism" that Templeton began to stir. True to form, as the herd made the bum's rush for the exits, Templeton began to wade in.
