Mark Mobius died this week at 89, still managing money.
You’ve likely never heard of him… but the first thing I’ll tell you is that he was still running the Mobius Emerging Opportunities Fund, right up until the end.
This is a man who built Franklin Templeton's emerging markets operation from a $100 million fund into a $40 billion, 70-country operation… and had been at it for over five decades.
But the most impressive part of this isn’t the $40 billion figure…
It was that Mobius didn't become a fund manager until his 50s.
Before that he worked at a talent agency… marketed Snoopy merchandise in Asia and did political consulting.
Not exactly the career path you’d expect of a world class money manager…
Then one day he walks into Franklin Templeton, talks his way into managing an emerging markets fund… back when investing in developing economies was considered somewhere between eccentric and reckless…
He then proceeded to spend the next three decades travelling to 112 countries searching for undervalued companies.
He ate scorpions and sheep's eyeballs… drove pothole-ridden roads through rural China… hobnobbed with royalty one day then visited rubber planatations the next… all while accumulating enough air miles to reach the moon and back.
In his own words…
"I enjoy so much going to these countries and learning how things change."
There's a version of this story where Mobius picks a sensible career in his 30s, climbs a predictable ladder, and retires at 65 with a decent pension.
But makes his story so cool isn't the exotic travel or the fund size.
It's the timeline of it all…
This is a man who spent decades accumulating skills that seemed completely disconnected… then combined them in a way nobody had done before… in a market most of his peers wouldn't touch.
Plus he was doing this at an age when most investors are thinking about de-risking their portfolios.
His views are summarised by this sentence…
"Nothing is impossible if you stop putting limits on yourself... The world belongs to optimists."
I don't use the word optimism loosely in investing… because blind optimism is how you end up bag-holding a garbage company for an entire decade.
What Mobius was describing was something more specific… the willingness to take calculated risks in places other people won't go.
That's essentially what great investing is all about…
Yes the risk is real, but it's defined and deliberate and you know exactly what you're taking on before you take it on.
Which brings me to Investormania II.
On May 14–16 in Tampa, Florida, there will be a room full of people who think this way…
People who've decided the world belongs to optimists with a process — will be spending three days together in Tampa.
We'll have speakers, sessions, and the kind of unscripted conversations that happen when serious investors share the same space for three days.
If you've been waiting for the right moment to get serious about your portfolio, this is it
Oliver