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Showing posts from January, 2013

Lauren Templeton shares investing lessons from Sir John Templeton

Investor Lauren Templeton shares some life wisdom and investing lessons from her great-uncle, Sir John Templeton in this VIC 2012 video.  By way of background, John Templeton was a pioneer of global share investing who founded the Templeton Growth fund in 1954. As his wealth increased, he also became known for his philanthropic efforts and writings. In the 1960s, he renounced his U.S. citizenship (an increasingly popular move among the rich of late) and continued to live in the Bahamas as a Bahamian citizen. In her talk at the Ben Graham Centre for Value Investing, Lauren Templeton shares some insights on Sir John's investment philosophy and his life. A few notable lessons and quotes :  1 . Born in Tennessee, Templeton was an excellent student who attended Yale and Oxford. While at Yale, young John found he had to work to pay for a large part of his schooling. His skill with probabilities helped him earn a good part of the money playing poker.  2 . After studying at O

Nassim Taleb on Antifragile at Google

  Authors @ Google presents Nassim Taleb , discussing the concepts from his latest book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder .  Here, Taleb offers his view that the opposite of fragility is not "robustness", as commonly supposed, but anti-fragility. Whereas things that are fragile need to be handled with care and kept in a state of tranquility, things that are anti-fragile benefit from volatility.  According to Taleb, fragility and anti-fragility can be measured, whereas risk cannot (in spite of what Ivy League academics with risk models may think). You'll hear why anti-fragile systems have benefits that outweigh their risks, and why some fragile systems are vulnerable to "prediction error" and hidden, intolerable risks which vastly outweigh any associated benefits. Using the example of Seneca, a wealthy Stoic philosopher who often imagined himself to be poor, Taleb suggests we should always try to have more upside than downside from random eve