Stock picking, it is often said, is an art. But what kind of artist does it actually require?

If you observe the arc of global capital over the last half-century, fund managers generally fall into two distinct camps.

The first are the visionaries, the prospectors who venture into the wilderness, locate the goldmine, and pry open a new market.

They take the early, outsized risks. The second camp comprises the excavators, the highly trained technicians who arrive after the mine is mapped, optimising the extraction and figuring out exactly what grade of gold will fetch the highest market price.

Last week, the passing of the legendary investor Mark Mobius served as a reminder of an era when the prospectors ruled the earth.

When emerging markets like India began to crack open their economies in the early 1990s, Mobius was already there. He arrived at a time when foreign capital was viewed by developing nations with a mix of desperation and suspicion.

Venturing Into The Unknown

Flying across the world in a private jet, previously owned by an Arab oil sheikh, Mobius lived the life of a financial Indiana Jones.

I interviewed him on one such short trip, from Mumbai to Bangalore on his jet and discovered that like him, his pilots too were adventurers.

“We routinely fly into obscure airports with decrepit runways where the navigation maps were either outdated or printed in languages other than English,” the pilot told me in a separate interview.

But where others saw insurmountable risk, Mobius saw the undeniable trajectory of economic liberalisation.

He was buying into the promise of a burgeoning, skilled workforce, recognising the potential of the IT sector and companies like Infosys, before the broader world, and frankly, many Indians, understood what was brewing.

An Anomaly Who Triumphed

When Mobius partnered with Franklin Templeton in 1987 to launch an emerging markets fund, they started with $100 million and a tiny Hong Kong office.

Eventually, he would help grow that emerging markets group to over $40 billion across 70 countries.

I always found Mobius's resume striking.

Modern finance is an industry obsessed with the credentialed uniformity of MBAs and financial engineering degrees.

Mobius, by contrast, studied dramatic arts at Boston University. He played the piano in a nightclub. He held a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, a master’s in communications, learned Japanese in Kyoto, and ultimately earned a PhD in political science and economics from MIT in 1964.

To the modern HR department, someone like him would be an anomaly and, in all probability, rejected.

But to the history of global capitalism, he was exactly what was needed.

Curiosity As Capital

Like Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund along with George Soros, armed with degrees in history, philosophy, and politics, Mobius was an adventurer first and an investor second.

That worldly curiosity is precisely what allowed them to discover new markets and find the diamonds hidden within them.

Contrast this with today’s financial ecosystem. India’s top fund managers, much like Wall Street’s, are predominantly MBAs, Chartered Accountants, and cost accountants.

This is not a slight on their abilities; their track records of compounding wealth speak for themselves.

They are very good excavators.

But as the last few years of global market volatility have demonstrated, extracting returns is getting increasingly difficult.

Not every era requires a Mark Mobius to hack through the jungle and unearth entirely new asset classes. But markets will always require inventive minds that can see beyond a spreadsheet.

Mobius’s worldly perspective was forged on the ground.

Same Melodrama, New Economy

Long before the private jets and the billions in assets under management, he told me how he spent time in Chennai, most likely in the 1970s, doing a project for the UNDP at the Central Leather Research Institute.

With nothing to do in the evenings, he spent his time watching local Tamil films.

When I asked what he thought of them, he recalled only that they consisted mostly of heated arguments between mothers and daughters-in-law, punctuated by endless weeping.

The melodramas of Indian cinema may not have changed much since the 1970s.

But the Indian economy, and the vibrant global market system it now anchors, certainly have.

Navigating its next chapter may require fewer technocrats and a few more adventurers.