John Templeton was born in Winchester, Tennessee, in 1912. In order to continue his university level education, he got a scholarship as he was from a poor family, but he was a good student.
He was one of the best students of economics at the Yale University. He graduated in 1934, right in the midst of the Depression. He mastered at the Oxford two years later. When he returned to the USA, he got a working place in a New York based Fenner&Beane company where he was a trainee.

John Templeton was a co-founder of a company that is now known as Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance at the end of the Depression in 1937. Their company became worth about 300 million dollars in a short time and under their management they had 8 mutual funds. John Templeton founded a fund in the Bahamas in 1954. The old company changed the name not long before Templeton sold his share of the company in 1962.

He was known for creating successful funds during his career. In 1992 the Franklin Group bought his funds. Queen Elizabeth II made him a knight, as he was a naturalized British citizen, because of his great achievements.

His John Templeton Foundation is one of the world’s most recognized foundations that donate most of their funds to scientific research.

John Templeton trading style
His methods of investing were by many carved during the time he studied, as it was during the Great Depression.

He was looking to buy stocks of the companies around the world. He saw opportunity to gain profit by acquiring many small companies that were low priced with a good long-term perspective.
He made success with stocks that other investors would bother to research. He found those companies through his connections that would gather at his Lyford Key Club in Bahamas – his home – where he would discuss with them about that sort of companies nobody would want to look at in terms of investing.
He preferred communicating with his friends and other investors at his own terrain, literally his own, in casual atmosphere at his Lyford Key Club, rather than in the Wall Street, where everything was fast and the information were way too formal, which – for him – meant that the information were not accurate. Therefore, he would create an attractive ambience for the people who would gladly discuss matter with him. He saw people as the power for his research.

Ben Graham
Ben Graham was born in London in 1894 and he passed away at the age of 82, in 1976. He is a matchless investment manager and a surpassing financial educator. He is the author of many classic writings that have no match in the world if investing. He is the pioneer of security analysis and value investing. His career was marked by working for Newburger, Henderson & Loeb, and later at Graham – Newman Corporation.
Many professional investors hold his books the best for stock market. Two of many titles that exalt him from the crowd are “Security Analysis” written in 1934, and “The Intelligent Investor” published in 1949. Even now, those two books are being considered as a must read, and they are used literature at the universities. Ben Graham is regarded as the most influential analyst of applied portfolio investment. He is known for teaching Warren Buffet and many others famous and successful investors, which demonstrates his ability to pass on the knowledge, and not just to present the ways and methods of his work.
Ben Graham migrated to New York with his family when he was just a twelve months old baby. When his father died eight years later, his life became preoccupied with financial problems. He got a job as a messenger at a Wall Street company “Newburger, Henderson & Loeb”, after graduating from Columbia University in 1914. In just 6 years he became a partner in the company. After 6 years, he founded a company together with Jerome Newmand. His work until his retirement was teaching at Columbia University about finance. During the Great Depression, Ben Graham bankrupted, but he successfully revived his financial status very soon after that. Ben Graham explains his investing style in his book “The Intelligent Investor”, but in short, the basics of his investing methods are that an investment needs to be bought for the less of its actual value. “Margin of safety” is the phrase that he uses to describe how an investor should find what to invest into. That means that an investor should find a company whose value is temporarily low, but that the company has got a bright future. So the “Margin of safety” is the difference between the real value of a company and the price (lower than real value) that the company is to be bought for. Lover the price in comparison to the real value is – the better. He was a firm believer that the market price of a stock is never the same with the real value. He explained that Mr. Market – as he called it – will always have the value of the stock prices changing, and how that is an opportunity for wise investors to buy something for a lower price than its real value is and to sell it when the price gets a greater value. He pointed out how following the crowd needs to be avoided, and the lower priced stocks needs to be searched for.

Benjamin Graham Quotes

If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.

Finance has a fascination for many bright young people with limited means. They would like to be both intelligent and enterprising in the placement of their savings, even though investment income is much less important to them than their salaries. This attitude is all to the good. There is a great advantage for the young capitalist to begin his financial education and experience early. If he is going to operate as an aggressive investor he is certain to make some mistakes and to take some losses. Youth can stand these disappointments and profit by them. We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgment on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.

Basically, price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.

Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it – even though others may hesitate or differ. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.

The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.

Books :

Security Analysis, ISBN 978-0-07-159253-6
The Intelligent Investor
Storage and Stability: A Modern Ever-normal Granary, New York: McGraw Hill. 1937 ISBN 0-07-024774-9[30]
The Interpretation of Financial Statements
World Commodities and World Currency, New York & London, McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1944 ISBN 0-07-024806-0
Benjamin Graham, The Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street (1996) ISBN 978-0-07-024269-2

Interesting fact from Ben Graham wikipedia page :

Graham’s most famous student is Warren Buffett. According to Buffett, Graham said that he wished every day to do something foolish, something creative, and something generous. Buffett said that Graham excelled most at the last.Some of Graham’s most famous disciples, who have drawn on the works of several Columbia Business School alumni, many of whom were direct disciples of Benjamin Graham himself, include famous Value Investors such as Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Philip Fischer, Walter Schloss, Peter Lynch, John Templeton, Mohnish Pabrai, Amit Ayare, Whitney Tilson, Prem Watsa, Lauren Templeton, Jerome Chazen and many more.

Canadian David Dreman was born in 1936 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He had worked for companies such are Rauscher Pierce Refsnes Securities Corp., J&W Seligman, Value Line Investment Service, The Journal of Psychology and Financial Markets, International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE) and Dreman Value Management, L.L.C. His name is mostly known for his classic book “Contrarian investment Strategy: The Psychology of Stock Market Success” that was published in 1980. It is a book about investment and every investor during the 80’s and forward who is known for any success has probably read the “Contrarian Investment Strategy”.

David Dreman has written numerous articles in different scholarly investment articles in famous economic journals such are the “Financial Journal”, Journal of Investing and “The Journal of Financial Behavior”. Readers of Forbes magazine have known him for his columns that he has written for more than two decades. In the year 1958, he graduated from the University of Manitoba in Canada, after which he became a research director at Rauscher Pierce. Later he worked for Seligman as a senior investment officer. After that in 1977, at the Value Line Investment Service he became senior editor. That was the year when he was working for others and when he decided to found his own investment company where he acted as the president and the chairman of the company. That was Dreman Value Management, Inc. Dreman’s method of investing is the contrarian investing. But he saw many hard times coming to that.

When he was a junior analyst back in 1969, Dreman was only following a majority of investors as the stocks with minimal earnings turned over and became worthy. He lost three quarters of his net worth by following the majority, and that taught him to psychoanalyze investor behavior after what he became a contrarian investor. For him, the most important factor in the market is psychology. He is strict with his discipline and that is a part of his success. He explains that he buys stocks when they are battered. He buys stocks that have a low ratio of costs-earnings. Analysis shows that buying stocks with low selling value in the long term is better. Patience is for him the main asset in terms of investing and dealing with your stocks. His famous “If you have good stocks and you really know them, you’ll make money if you’re patient over three years or more” quote is what his style of investment is determined by. He is well known for his publications among which the “Contrarian Investment Strategy: The Psychology of Stock Market Success” published in 1980 gained a huge success and is a part of every investors elementary literature. “The New Contrarian Investment Strategy” and “Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation” are also the titles that gain popularity in the world of investing.

David Dreman Quotes:

Patience is a crucial but rare investment commodity.

Graham’s observations that investors pay too much for trendy, fashionable stocks and too little for companies that are out-of-favor, was on the money… Why does this profitability discrepancy persist? Because emotion favors the premium-priced stocks. They are fashionable. They are hot. They make great cocktail party chatter. There is an impressive and growing body of evidence demonstrating that investors and speculators don’t necessarily learn from experience. Emotion overrides logic time after time.

When advisors go one way, markets go the other.

Ingesting large amounts of investment information can lead to worse rather than better decisions.

Volatility is not risk. Avoid investment advice based on volatility.

I buy stocks when they are really battered.

If contrarian strategies work so well, why aren’t they more widely followed?… It is not enough to have winning methods, we must be able to use them. It sounds almost simplistic, but it isn’t.

Positive and negative surprises affect ‘best’ and ‘worst’ stocks in a diametrically opposite manner.

It’s very hard to go against the crowd. Even if you’ve done it most of your life, it still jolts you.

Favored stocks underperform the market, while out-of-favor companies outperform the market, but the reappraisal often happens slowly, even glacially.

Getting in near the bottom and out near the top is not as easy as market timers or asset allocators would have you believe.

It is one thing to have a powerful strategy; it’s another to execute it.

David Dreman Books:
Psychology and the Stock Market: Investment Strategy Beyond Random Walk. 1977. American Management Association. ISBN 0-814-45429-1.
Contrarian Investment Strategy: The Psychology of Stock Market Success. 1980. Random House. ISBN 0-394-42390-9.
The New Contrarian Investment Strategy. 1982. Random House. ISBN 0-394-52364-4.
Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation. 1998. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-81350-5.
Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Psychological Edge. 2012. Free Press. ISBN 0-743-29796-2.

Michael H. Steinhardt
Michael Steinhardt is a New York born investor who holds the Wall Street’s record, with his partners, of 24% compound annual returns, which is more than twice than S&P 500 for more than 28 years. He deals well with different sorts of trades, long and short options, bonds, stocks and currencies, and he had proved himself as a versatile investor.
He actually started showing his talents in the economics before he was 20. He was born in 1941, and he finished his high school at the age of 16, to graduate at the age of 19; he stormed through the Wharton School of Finance.
His career started at the Wall Street, where he worked at Calvin Buolock and Load Rhoades& Co mutual fund for several years. He worked as a researcher and analyst for seven years, after what he conjoined Howard Berkowitz and Jerrold Fine and started their own business under a New York based company that they named Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz&Co. Steinhardt was the head of the group under whose leadership the company blossomed. But after Fine and Berkowitz left the company, it was renamed to Steinhardt Partners.
After a loss in 1994, he gave it a try for another year which was a success as his fund managed to gain 21% in 1995. That was the last year of his life as an investor.
After retiring from the investing, he turned to humanitarian work. He worked at multiple universities as a board member.
Even though he was an investor who was usually investing long-term, on many occasions he often invested short-term, but he was always backed up by a team of his analysts in such cases. He needed a team of analysts because with investing short-term, he was actually making a risk, because it was not the field of his expertise. His motto said that if you want to take risk and invest, than invest big and reward yourself big. He thought that following intuition should not be ignored.

Michael Steinhardt Quotes :

Speculative joy, the joy derived from being right and being rewarded, may well be similar to the rush felt by a winning gambler.

Art is a form of asset. Hedge-fund managers who have made money fast should diversify into other areas.

Books about Michael Steinhardt :
Schwager, Jack D. (1993). Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders. 27 pages: Collins; Reissue edition. ISBN 0-88730-610-1.
Steinhardt, Michael (2001). No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-66046-9.