Mark Mobius plans to step back from Mobius Capital Partners

Mark Mobius

Mark Mobius, the veteran emerging-markets investor, plans to step back from his namesake investment firm he co-founded five years ago.

London-based Mobius Investment Trust will continue to be managed by Mobius Capital Partners LLP, which is led by Founding Partner Carlos Hardenberg, according to a statement from the trust on Friday. The fund had $250 million in assets under management as of February.

Mobius, 87, set up his investment management firm in 2018 after retiring from Franklin Templeton Investments, with a goal of raising about $1 billion within two to three years. The focus of the fund was developing regions such as China, India, Latin America and frontier markets.

“I am proud of the investment team’s strong performance during the last five years,” Mobius said in the statement.

Mobius was one of the early architects of the emerging-market asset class that began in the 1980s and has now grown into a $25 trillion opportunity. John Templeton saw his expertise in tracking markets alien to the typical US investor and asked him to set up a fund to invest in those countries.

With decades of experience in emerging markets, Mobius has been well known for some of the prescient calls he has made.

He 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 there 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. In 2021, he predicted a “50-year rally” in Indian stocks.

Mobius has often credited his mixed-race background for his openness to different cultures — his father was German and mother Puerto Rican — and the ability to spot opportunities different from the US.

Born in Hempstead, New York, Mobius grew up on Long Island speaking German and Spanish at home. In 1955, he won a scholarship to study at Boston University and worked as a pianist at a nightclub to help pay for his tuition. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and a master’s in communications before completing a doctorate in economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.