We Need To Talk About Franklin Templeton (ft.com) 94
FT Alphaville: Making fun of corporate brands embarrassing themselves online is like shooting fish in a barrel. It's not hard, but washing off the resulting splatter of blood, scales, innards and half-digested crab is, so no one wins. Honestly though, what the hell Franklin? Really? OK maybe Alphaville should tread carefully here, given some readers see our ~cough~ somewhat different approach to news and commentary as at odds with mainFT's brand. But like Meb Faber we prefer our trillion-dollar asset management groups to be boring. Stick to solid, sober and purportedly smart investing. Don't tweet that 60/40 retirement portfolios should include "assets" where it gleefully says "speculation is a feature, not a bug."
Especially when said asset manager was famously named after Benjamin Franklin, because according to founder Rupert Johnson he "epitomised the ideas of frugality and prudence when it came to saving and investing." We get that Franklin needs to revamp itself. Despite a spate of aggressive M&A swelling its assets to $1.4tn, its share price has sagged over the past decade, giving it a current market cap of $13.6bn. That's less than AppLovin, Domino's Pizza and the world's biggest producer of frozen potato chips. It's only barely enough for inclusion into the S&P 500. Beyond the obvious and well-documented challenges of being a very traditional active asset manager in a world that mostly loves alternatives and passive funds, Franklin also has a rep for being a bit old-fashioned. Promoting crypto therefore probably seems like an obvious, fellow-kids way to seem more cool and edgy.
Especially when said asset manager was famously named after Benjamin Franklin, because according to founder Rupert Johnson he "epitomised the ideas of frugality and prudence when it came to saving and investing." We get that Franklin needs to revamp itself. Despite a spate of aggressive M&A swelling its assets to $1.4tn, its share price has sagged over the past decade, giving it a current market cap of $13.6bn. That's less than AppLovin, Domino's Pizza and the world's biggest producer of frozen potato chips. It's only barely enough for inclusion into the S&P 500. Beyond the obvious and well-documented challenges of being a very traditional active asset manager in a world that mostly loves alternatives and passive funds, Franklin also has a rep for being a bit old-fashioned. Promoting crypto therefore probably seems like an obvious, fellow-kids way to seem more cool and edgy.
As Benjamin Franklin said: (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seemed like a bunch of ramblings by someone coming down off a bad acid trip...
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you're not. My initial thought was 'WTF is this word salad?'. LLM-derived garbage text about crypto scams. What could be more useless?
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Insightful)
The first question it raised for me was "who the fuck is Franklin Templeton? and why do I care?"
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Wikipedia tells me he went public in 1971... so I'm guessing he's some kind of a LGBT icon or something.
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Franklin Templeton is an investment firm founded in 1947 in New York City, but headquarters moved to San Mateo, CA in 1973. It was a mutual fund pioneer and is a Fortune 500 company. Over the years it has acquired many smaller investment firms including Putnam and Legg Mason.
As to the relevance to the article or what the heck it is about... no idea.
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Paraphrasing: once respected investment firm now worth much less than it should be, despite mergers and acquisitions growing it's size, and because it's an old safe fuddy-duddy then the author wants it to either stay safe or flirt with crypto. It's unclear on that last line (without reading full post), since a mixture of finance and sarcasm makes it night incomprehensible.
Could be AI, or could be how this guy speaks, having learned finance back in the acid fueled 70s.
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or typical AI generated ramble-gibberish
LLM-generated text is formulaic, unoriginal, and often wrong.
But it is not rambling gibberish.
TFA was written by a human. No LLM writes that badly.
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No, I'm with you. No idea what the hell is being talked about there.
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Informative)
No idea what the hell is being talked about there.
The author is upset that Franklin Templeton offers a cryptocurrency ETF.
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Insightful)
And somehow your single sentence is infinitely clearer than the two paragraph synopsis.
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Man slashdot is full of the olds (self included, daily blood infusions of younger blood helps).
Yeah, I keep myself hooked up to a baby hanging from an IV poll while I'm at my desk but I keep having to interrupt what I'm doing to squeeze the baby to keep flow going. Clearly I've gotta figure out a better system.
Re: Am I the only one...? (Score:2)
Don't forget the scratch baby.
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I've moved to a two baby system. It's always good to have redundancy. It's really hard to implement a full 1-2-3 backup system though.
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Even with it being full of "the olds," I'm still fairly well-versed in the slang of "the youts" as a side effect of my work, and it was still relatively impenetrable.
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But nobody would spend ten minutes reading it and looking at ads. Nor would they subscribe to his newsletter and tell all their friends he's a brilliant investment analyst and they should all go and look at his ads.
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And they apparently write for ft.com which I guess is franklin templeton?
I like the part where they link knowyourmeme to be cool like the fellow kids while also talking about the fellow kids meme. Beautifully meta.
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And they apparently write for ft.com which I guess is franklin templeton?
ft.com is the Financial Times.
It's the WSJ of the UK.
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No idea what the hell is being talked about there.
The author is upset that Franklin Templeton offers a cryptocurrency ETF.
Well, they CALL it an ETF, but then they have this fine print on their website. Hey I'm not a lawyer but it smells a little like trying to pull a "bitcoin isn't money so I don't need a money transmission license anywhere" kind of move. Not sure how this is supposed to work.
"The Fund is not an investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 (1940 Act), and therefore is not subject to the same regulatory requirements as mutual funds or ETFs registered under the 1940 Act. The Fund is not
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Thank you btw. I should have included that in my first reply.
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Me either. No fucking clue what this is about.
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Well thank god. I thought I was having a stroke.
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Well thank god. I thought I was having a stroke.
Not you. The stroke was happening in whatever editor let this slide through without so much as a single-sentence summary of who the hell they're talking about.
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Maybe the most low-effort editing in Slashdot history.
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Re: Am I the only one...? (Score:1)
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You need to click the link to the Twitter/X post, then it will all make sense.
Basically, these guys suddenly went from being a stodgy investment firm to a bunch of meme-loving crypto bros overnight. If I had my money invested with these clowns, I'd be scared right now.
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to click the link to the Twitter/X post, then it will all make sense.
The point of the summary should be to tell me why I should click on the link - it should not be to make me click on the link so that I understand the summary.
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Hell, yes.
I had CDs and a bank account with Washington Mutual, a then 192 yr old national firm. Then I started seeing their ads about a "WO-Hoo moment", and other "cool to ad agency" type ads, and *knew* the bank was gone.
A year later, my accounts were now in Wells Fargo,and WaMu was no more.
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Are you insinuating any WaMu customer lost money? Or did Chase get a bargain when it bought WaMu during an emotional, irrational, spreading panic that temporarily devalued some of its assets?
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Agreed. Perhaps we do need to talk about Franklin Templeton, but not like that.
"What the hell" defines financial risk about as well as "thicc" dismisses an obesity problem.
more enshittification (Score:2)
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Did you know Franklin sells North Korea bonds, kinda under-the-table?
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Am I the only one that didn't get a damned thing out of reading the synopsis for this article?
Seemed like a bunch of ramblings by someone coming down off a bad acid trip...
This style of writing / talking has been around since at least the 1970s. Typically you only see it with "Hollywood Reporter"-ish vapid celebrity gossip.
Think about the old Eric Idle gossipy gay TV reporter bit on Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Informative)
I'll try and provide background.
Bonds pay dependable interest. Stocks pay dividends and usually return more than bonds but sometimes lose value. The traditional rule of thumb for retirement is 60/40: 60% stocks 40% bonds. The goal here is get most of the stock market's good returns with less volatility. Putting the stock portion in an index fund--- a fund with a large collection of stocks--- is another way to reduce volatility. The allocation of stocks in an index fun is determined by a formula, so these "passive" funds have low overhead. Passive funds tend to out perform actively managed funds after fees are payed.
Crypto speculation can be fun and potentially profitable. However, it is zero sum and does not throw off cash. Therefore it does not have a place in a retirement account.
Franklin Templeton is an investment company selling actively managed funds. This is ok, but index funds are generally better. Now they are encouraging their retirement account holders to speculate in crypto. This is bad advice: speculate in crypto if you like but don't think that is a sober plan for retirement.
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Thank you! Now I can make sense of this article.
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Holy fuck. Thank you. I do not want to EVER see an article like this again on Slashdot. WTF? Whomever wrote the summary has a BADLY broken thought process and an extreme inability to communicate to anyone other than their small subset of peers.
Was this some sort of test to see who had the energy to decipher that mess?
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Clearly, we aren't brilliant enough to understand the glory of Franklin Templeton -- whoever TF he is. If we were awesome cryptobros, we'd know all this awesome great stuff.
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I kept reading, hoping there would be some revealing thing at the end, like in the movies. There was not.
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I have zero clue what this is about and came to the comments to see.
Re: Am I the only one...? (Score:2)
You are not the only one. I have no idea what that word salad post was about.
Go home, @msmash. You are drunk again.
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Franklin Templeton is a pretty well known investment firm.
The story seems to be about how they are writing crypto memes, and for people without a sense of humor (like the author), they come off as giving bad investment advice.
Why this is being posted to Slashdot is beyond me. This is a story maybe relevant to investment groups or crypto / DeFi groups. Not Slashdot.
Re: Am I the only one...? (Score:2)
"Why this is being posted to Slashdot is beyond me."
That's because you don't know who owns Slashdot, or what they do.
This is trivially rectified, so I will leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Nope (Score:2)
Read the synopsis, came to pile on to this comment
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Well, you managed to get everyone on /. to agree with you.
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Indeed.
Rarely on slashdot (or anywhere these days) do you find such widespread consensus.
Hey, let's enjoy it while it lasts.
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It just goes to show that humans are more alike than different. Which gives me hope while filling me with dread.
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I never even heard of "Franklin Templeton",
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If you don't use the first couple of paragraphs from the linked article and instead write your own synopsis, they'll just reject your submission.
No, we don't. (Score:5, Informative)
WTF is this bullshit anyway? Can the editor English?
Re:No, we don't. (Score:4, Informative)
I have read the summary 3 times now. I have no fucking clue what it is trying to tell me.
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No shit. It is either a new drug, or a new kind of qbit AI that is incomprehensible to us humans.
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Nein sprachen sie gibberish.
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"Gibberish" to iu kotoba ha honto ni doitsu go desuka? Bikkuri! Romaji wo yurushite, surasshu-dotto ha yuniko-do ni mada taiyou shiteinaisoudesu.
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I find myself going days between checking /. these days. This is absolutely why.
No more news for nerds, not even the pretense of editing. Just absolute garbage slapped into the feed, hoping for clicks.
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Prolly like the STEM section on fark.
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Do not feed trolls (Score:2)
A huge rambling summary just to say - I do not like Bitcoin.
If you do not like it, ignore it. Simple.
Stick to index funds (Score:3)
Save money
Invest in a diversified portfolio of index funds
Use tax advantaged accounts (401k and IRA in the US)
Buy, hold and rebalance
Avoid flavor of the month/year
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So true. Zero effort investing amounts to this, and it does better than watching markets and speculating.
WUT? (Score:2)
I mean, WUT?!
Let's start at the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
Who or what is Franklin Templeton? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
An investment firm.
As far as the meme they posted, I'm familiar with the template but in this context I have no idea. Something about a 60/40 split and bitcoin?
Wow! (Score:1)
That's a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. I have not the slightest hint of what the article might be about.
Rambling huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Ma'am, this is a Wendys.
Some Slashdot editor ... (Score:5, Informative)
... is either off his meds or took to many. ... Who the eff is Franklin Templeton and why should I even care?
This is one of those - admittedly quite rare - slashdot posts that stick out like a sore thumb and look like someone accidentally pushed some obscure peronsal sub-sub-redit post into the slashdot mainfeed.
Seriously man, this blurb is a bummer.
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This is the third such post in around 24 hours.
I can't even look at the original article because it's on ft.com.
What is journalism anyway? (Score:2)
Who is Franklin?
What is Alphaville?
When did this happen? (it says 'sagged over the past decade,' well ok).
Why? should I even care?
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What is Alphaville?
Alphaville is a financial blog. It appears to have either been bought out by Financial Times (of London). Believe it or not, FT.org was, once upon a time, a quite financial paper. Or perhaps, Alphaville contracted FT to put up this stupid blog article, and then somehow got it posted on slashdot.org, which is the weirdest form of SEO I've ever seen.
Very bizarre form of advertising, I must say.
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a quite financial paper
^quite^quite reputable^
Re: What is journalism anyway? (Score:1)
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Well, most of us do start sagging as we get older...
Re:What is journalism anyway? (Score:5, Funny)
What is Alphaville?
They're very big in Japan.
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Sorry folks, just testing... (Score:3)
Slashdot forgot to mention they're testing a new ChatGPT persona to generate appropriate "news for nerds" articles. This is merely the first one.
Plus it ends up being a great way to test if msmash is even reading the articles before posting them or whether he has just been reduced to going through the motions. Seems like it's more of the latter...
This Just In (Score:4, Funny)
Since increasing numbers of articles seem to be a hallucinating AI, I thought I'd generate some real news for nerds!
Title: Franklin Templeton Ventures Beyond Earth: Announces Bold Plans to Invade Mars
In a surprising move that has left the financial and space exploration communities buzzing with speculation, Franklin Templeton, the renowned investment management firm, has declared its intention to venture beyond Earth's boundaries and set its sights on Mars. The company, traditionally associated with managing assets and providing financial services, has unveiled a groundbreaking initiative to invest in the future of interplanetary colonization.
Franklin Templeton's foray into space comes amidst a growing interest from private enterprises in the race to explore and potentially inhabit the Red Planet. The firm is reportedly collaborating with leading aerospace companies and experts in the field to develop a comprehensive strategy for its Martian invasion.
While details remain sparse, industry insiders speculate that Franklin Templeton's move may signal a new era of financial involvement in space exploration. The company's bold announcement has sparked debates on the potential economic opportunities and risks associated with extraterrestrial endeavors, as well as the broader implications for the future of humanity beyond Earth.
Observers are keen to learn more about Franklin Templeton's ambitious plans, including the scope of their investment, the timeline for Mars colonization, and the specific partnerships they are forging in the space industry. As the financial giant steps into the interplanetary arena, the world watches with anticipation to see how this unexpected merger of finance and space exploration will unfold. Stay tuned for updates on this unprecedented chapter in the history of space finance.
Mars is so old news, let's go Jupiter (Score:2)
Just leave Europa out of it!
In an ambitious endeavor, Franklin Templeton, a leading global investment firm, has set its sights on a monumental project: colonizing Jupiter. Building on their expertise in technology, finance, and strategic planning, Franklin Templeton believes that the limitless potential of space exploration presents significant opportunities for long-term growth and sustainability. Recognizing Jupiter as a fascinating celestial body with its vast resources, they aim to establish a self-sust
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Who? (Score:2)
No really, who?
What? (Score:2)
Robin Wigglesworth should learn to write (Score:2)
Rage-fueled snark is good for catharsis, but not for communication. It's also unprofessional.
No One Upvoted This AI Garbage (Score:1)
Smurf oil sand cloud.
We didn't have a story about Dunning-Krugerrands (Score:2)
in a while. I know.
But if there's nothing to write about ... maybe there is just nothing you should write about. Instead of trying to hype up non-stories about something nobody gives half a fuck about.
Quite seriously, I'm glad the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" label is off. It's about as outdated as Googles "don't do evil" bit.
Who upvoted this garbage? Can we have a show of hands? Who?
worst summary ever (Score:2)
I got a few snippets of info but mainly snark.
I assume this article has a paywall, too (Score:2)
What the fuck is this? (Score:2)
And why was it posted? And what is there to say about it? WTF?
Corrected summary (Score:2)
Corrected summary: Bitcoin is bad. Look at how mainstream the foolishness is becoming. Ha ha ha.