Investor philanthropist John Templeton dies at 95

Mumbai: John Marks Templeton, investment pioneer and a champion of spiritual research who founded the annual Templeton Prize, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Nassau, the Bahamas. He was 95.

 John Marks TempletonTempleton, who created one of the first global mutual funds in 1954 and became a billionaire investing in foreign stocks, devoted his latter years to philanthropy and the promotion of religion.

Templeton, perhaps ''the greatest global stock picker of the century," started his career when most Americans hated Wall Street ''that seemed to operate for the benefit of insiders and the very wealthy.'' The market was looked upon with suspicion after the the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.

Templeton didn't invent the mutual fund, but he made it popular. Before the 1950s, the vast majority of stocks were held directly by individuals, most quite wealthy. Templeton ''helped popularise mutual funds and put stocks in the hands of the individual investors.''

In 1939, when World War II began in Europe, the 26-year-old investor bought 100 shares each in 104 companies for $1 or less each on borrowed cash of $10,000 and made a huge profits years later.

A $10,000 investment in the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 would have grown to $2 million by 1992, when Sir John sold his company to Franklin Resources, the San Mateo, California-based fund giant, for $913 million. That translates to an annualised return of 14.5 per cent.