It's unknown who first nicknamed Mark Mobius, the legendary US stock-picker who has died aged 89, the “Indiana Jones of emerging-market investment”. But he certainly enjoyed playing up to the moniker. “The places I like to be are the places where nobody else wants to be” was a typical pitch, says The Telegraph. “I want to be there when there's blood on the streets,” he said. “Problems, crashes, people jumping out of windows… Fantastic.”
Mark Mobius, who ran the Templeton Emerging Markets Fund for nearly three decades until 2018 – growing it from $100 million to more than $40 billion under his leadership – certainly made many winning bets during crises, says Forbes India. He cleaned up buying quality stocks at rock-bottom prices during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the Russian panic a year later, continuing the theme through the dotcom bust, the 2008 global financial meltdown and all subsequent dips. “If you see light at the end of the tunnel, it's too late to buy” was a favourite maxim.
At his peak, Mark Mobius was famous for criss-crossing the world in his Gulfstream jet (he travelled for 250-300 days a year), swooping down on bashed-up bargains. But his gung-ho rhetoric concealed more nuanced thinking, and his many books “offered an unusually human view of global finance”, says CNBC. “If you want to understand a market, start with its people,” Mobius wrote. The line distilled his belief that on-the-ground observation mattered more than abstract theory.
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Mark Mobius observed in his biography that he had “toured rubber plantations in Thailand and road-tested bikes over the pothole-ridden roads of rural China”, says the Financial Times. He elaborated how he'd “choked on roast camel's meat, sheep's eyeball, guinea pig and dined (surprisingly well) on scorpions on toast”. He was a great storyteller whose calm manner and encyclopaedic knowledge reassured Western investors uneasy about political risk, currency volatility and opaque governance. “People say emerging markets are dangerous places to invest,” he once remarked. “But Bernie Madoff operated in the US for years.”
Mobius is quite rightly acclaimed for opening up a massive new investment class. But the nattily dressed “godfather of emerging markets” was held in equal affection in many of the territories he targeted, says Business Today (India). “He came to India during the economic liberalisation phase of 1991-1992 and fell in love with an expanding economy and its booming stockmarkets,” as well as its people and culture – and remained “a perma Indian bull” all his life. It was a similar story in China and Hong Kong, says the South China Morning Post.
Mark Mobius was a master at finding value
Mark Mobius' family background had nothing to do with finance – but it did open him up to different cultures. His German-born father, Paul, was a ship's cook and baker; his mother Maria was from Puerto Rico. Brought up on Long Island, he studied communications at Boston University, completed a doctorate in economics at MIT in 1964, and worked as a teacher before turning to investment, says The Telegraph. He moved to Hong Kong in 1967 and established his own research and investment business, later working for the British stockbroking firm of Vickers da Costa before the veteran investor John Templeton – himself a past master of spotting hidden value and a pioneer of global investment – invited him to create an emerging-markets fund. The rest is history.
Mobius's lean features and shaved head – a look he adopted in the 1960s after a fire in his apartment damaged his hair – made him a ringer for the Russian-American actor Yul Brynner. But he had his own unique magnetism, says Business Today. There was nothing of the US economic imperialist about him. He was a bridge-builder – and will be sorely missed.
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