Mark Mobius, emerging markets investing pioneer, dies at 89

[SINGAPORE] Mark Mobius, who put emerging markets on investors’ radar with on-the-ground insights over more than four peripatetic decades, has died on Wednesday (Apr 15), according to a post on his LinkedIn page attributed to his spokesperson, Kylie Wong.

John Ninia, a partner at Mobius Investments, said he died in Singapore. He was 89.

In more than 30 years with Franklin Templeton Investments, officially Franklin Resources, Mobius became an evangelist for money-making opportunities in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. In a crowd of investing advisers, he was distinctive in part for his impeccably shaved head, which inspired the nickname Bald Eagle.

Hired in 1987 by John Templeton, a pioneer in leading American investors to companies abroad, Mobius started one of the first mutual funds dedicated to rapidly developing new markets.

He oversaw the Templeton Emerging Markets Group until 2016, was lead manager of its flagship Templeton Emerging Markets Investment Trust until 2015 and retired in January 2018.

From 1989 until his retirement, the closed-end fund returned 13.4 per cent a year on average, according to Morningstar Direct. From 2001, when the MSCI Emerging Markets Index was introduced, the Templeton fund beat that benchmark by 1.9 per cent a year on average, according to Morningstar.

“Mark Mobius is to emerging-market investing what Colonel Sanders is to fried chicken,” Peter Douglas, a principal at the Singapore chapter of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association, said when Mobius stepped aside as portfolio manager.

“He is the icon of the industry and has been the global cheerleader of emerging markets.”

Partly based in Singapore, Mobius travelled 250 to 300 days a year in a Gulfstream IV private jet, visiting factories and distributors in remote corners of the globe to identify investment opportunities.

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“What was unique about him was that he really rolled up his sleeves and got into where the opportunities were,” Wall Street veteran Ed Yardeni said in a Bloomberg Television interview, calling him a “giant” in the global investment community. “Because of his leadership on that, I think we saw that investing in emerging markets has caught on.”

Mobius correctly predicted the start of a bull market that began in 2009, snapped up bargains during the Asian financial crisis after Thailand floated its currency in 1997 and bought Russian stocks as panic selling took hold in Russia in 1998.

He was also one of the first institutional investors to identify Africa as a promising frontier market, setting up the Templeton Africa Fund in 2012.

“I believe in getting out and kicking the tyres,” he wrote in 2015. “I would rather see with my own eyes what’s happening in a company or country. Lies can be as revealing as truth, if you know what the cues are.”

Just last month, via his Substack column, he shared his thoughts on the war in Iran and its impact on equity markets.

Mobius founded London-based Mobius Capital Partners in 2018 and oversaw actively managed funds investing in emerging market equities. He left there in late 2023, but continued to seek out investing opportunities, setting up a new venture in Dubai, where he had lived for three years.

Franklin Resources was founded in 1947 and is based in San Mateo, California. It acquired John Templeton’s investment firm – Templeton, Galbraith & Hansberger – in 1992 to create Franklin Templeton Investments.

Joseph Bernhard Mark Mobius was born on Aug 17, 1936, in Bellmore, on New York’s Long Island. His German father, Paul Mobius, was a ship’s cook and baker. His mother, the former Maria Louisa Colon, was Puerto Rican. With his two brothers, Hans and Paul, Mobius grew up with German and Spanish spoken at home.

In 1955, Mobius received a scholarship to study dramatic arts at Boston University and worked as a pianist in a nightclub to help pay for his education. He earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and a master’s in communications.

He successfully applied for a scholarship to learn Japanese culture and the Japanese language in Kyoto, triggering his desire to live and work in Asia. After earning a PhD in political science and economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1964, he took a job with International Research Associates, conducting surveys and other consumer research in Thailand and Korea for a year each.

He ended up in Hong Kong, where he started his own industrial research consulting firm. One project – a report on the Hong Kong stock market – was his entry into securities analysis. His Yul Brynner hairstyle, as he described it, was conceived at this time after a fire in his apartment damaged his hair and he shaved the rest off, according to his 1997 memoir.

He was hired by Vickers Da Costa, a UK stock brokerage, to start a Taiwanese fund management company, International Investment Trust. He travelled to the Bahamas to present investment opportunities to Templeton, who in 1986 asked if he would be interested in running an emerging-markets fund.

The following year, they raised US$100 million in capital, listed their fund on the New York Stock Exchange and opened a small office in Hong Kong for Mobius and two Chinese analysts. They began investing in six places: Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico and Thailand.

“You must remember, in those days, most countries did not welcome foreign investment,” Mobius recalled in a 2022 interview with Barry Ritholz for Bloomberg’s Masters in Business podcast series.

“They were also either socialist or communist like China and Russia. Eastern Europe was out of the question, of course. So we had only six markets in which to invest, and then we started expanding. Gradually, markets opened up. And eventually we were investing in something like 70 different countries around the world.”

After losing a third of his fund’s value in the October 1987 stock market crash during his first year with Templeton, Mobius diversified to other markets including Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia and Russia.

Mobius wrote more than a dozen books on investing and economics, including The Investor’s Guide to Emerging Markets (1994) and Passport to Profits (1999). He shared rules and aphorisms including: “If you see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s too late to buy.”

In 1999, he was tapped to serve on the World Bank’s Global Corporate Governance Forum as a co-chairman of a task force on investor responsibility.

Mobius never married. BLOOMBERG