Often known as the “Dean of Emerging Markets”, Mark Mobius was born in New York, the USA in 1936. He attained a PhD in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Post his education, he had an illustrious career at Franklin Templeton spanning over 30 years. In 2018, he quit his position at Franklin to start his own investment firm called Mobius Capital Partners.
Mark had stints working various jobs in Asia, early on in his career, before entering the investment industry, which included working at a talent agency, educational university and in a marketing company. He then joined Investment Trust Corporation, the largest investment company in Taiwan. His work at investment trust caught the eye of John Templeton, one of the founders of Franklin Templeton. At the time they were one of the few western investment firms to have an emerging markets fund. During his 30-year stint at Franklin Templeton, he held several key positions in the company, with his latest as the Chairman of the Templeton Emerging Markets Group, before he quit in 2018. During his years at Franklin, Mark developed an in-depth understanding of emerging markets, managing over $5b in AUM. He received several accolades for his work and served on the advisory board for policy recommendation for some of these economies.
He founded his own investment firm Mobius Capital Partners in March 2018, along with 2 of his colleagues at Franklin Templeton, Carlos von Hardenberg and Greg Konieczny. Their investment focus was (you guessed it!) emerging markets. ESG as a theme became central to their investment philosophy.
Mark Mobius is an Old-time value investor. He believes in a through bottom-up long-term research of company fundamentals. Several of his bets including those in Africa have played out well, giving his investors multi-bagger returns. He is known to be a hands-on investor and often makes personal visits to his target companies before making investments.
More recently, he has been a big advocate of Investing in India and China. He believes that by the end of the year we are likely to see emerging markets outperform other regions, as a V-shaped recovery is likely to benefit these countries to a greater extent. On the other hand, he has also been advising investors to continue adding gold to their portfolio, even at these levels and believe they too can deliver higher return a than other asset classes.
Gold and emerging market equities both rallying, is that an unlikely scenario, or will this trend that we have witnessed since March continue to hold? Do let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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