Like aging people, many fund firms let birthday's slide by with just a quiet celebration among the best of friends and family. Then there are those that let the whole town know. Franklin Templeton's Mutual Series falls into the latter camp.

This morning the Wall Street Journal's Fund Track column joins the birthday bash, with a look at the firm founded by Max Heine as Mutual Shares Corp. six decades ago. Since 1996 the Mutual Shares family has been owned by Franklin Resources.

The paper focuses on Mutual Shares contribution to deep-value investng, dredging up the depression era metaphor of "cigar-butt" investing. (There was a day a frugal smoker would save cigar butts to put together enough tobacco to make yet another cigar).

Peter Langerman, the current CEO of Mutual Series, sums the strategy up in a way that more modern readers will more easily grasp: "It's about buying a dollar value for 50 cents," he told the paper.

"We still spend time and energy looking at companies in prebankruptcy or that are distressed, and try to figure out what they're worth in normalized versions of today's market," Langerman added.

Happy birthday, Mutual Shares! 

Edited by: Sean Hanna, Editor in Chief


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