Templeton Dragon Fund, Staying Closed-End (BEN, TDF)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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There was some interesting news over at Franklin Resources, Inc. (NYSE:BEN) today.  The company manages the Templeton Dragon Fund, Inc. (NYSE:TDF), a closed-end mutual fund run by legendary emerging market investment manager Mark Mobius which invests at least 45% of its total assets in Chinese equities.

The fund announced today that the votes at the Fund’s Annual Meeting of Shareholders held on May 30, 2008 have been tallied.  Shareholders approves the election of directors, but the voted down a shareholder proposal to consider approving and submitting for shareholder approval at a future shareholder meeting a proposal to convert the closed-end status of the fund to an open-end fund.

The Fund currently has total assets in excess of $1.2 billion, and while that is big in size it is small compared to Franklin Templeton’s $617+ Billion in assets under management as of April 30, 2008.  It won’t have any impact at all on franklin Resources, but this will at least in theory keep one more fund from raising several billion that could have run up more Chinese shares.  It also allows the fund managers to work within size constraints without having to make investment decisions based largely upon inflows and redemptions.

Jon C. Ogg
June 2, 2008

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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