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Jim
Rogers
Rogers Holdings |
Jim Rogers is the author of Investment Biker: On the Road with Jim
Rogers and The Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Investor's Road
Trip. He is an investor who has been chronicled in Jon Train's Money
Masters of Our Time, Jack Schwager's Market Wizards, and other books. He
has been frequently featured in Time, The Washington Post, The New York
Times, Barron's, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial
Times, and most publications dealing with the economy or finance. He has
also appeared as a regular commentator and columnist in various media
and has been a visiting professor at Columbia University.
Rogers' entrepreneurial efforts started early in Demopolis, Alabama,
where he was reared. He had his first job at age five, picking up
bottles at baseball games. At age six, he won the concession to sell
soft drinks and peanuts at Little League games. His father lent him one
hundred dollars to buy a peanut parcher, which put Rogers in business.
Five years later, after taking out profits along the way, he paid off
his start-up loan and had a hundred dollars in the bank.
Winning a scholarship to Yale, Rogers was coxswain on the crew. Toward
the end of his four years there, he received an academic scholarship to
Oxford, where he attended Balliol College and studied politics,
philosophy, and economics. He also became the first person form
Demopolis ever to cox the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames. It
was during the summer of 1964, while working for Dominick & Dominick,
that Rogers fell in love with Wall Street. And that's exactly where he
headed after Oxford and a stint in the Army.
After apprenticing with Arnhold and S. Blichroeder in the early 1970s.
Rogers co-founded the Quantum Fund, a global-investment partnership.
During the next 10 years, the portfolio gained more than 4000%, while
the S&P rose less than 50%. Rogers then decided to retire ? at age 37.
However, he didn't remain idle.
Continuing to manage his own portfolio, Rogers kept busy serving as a
professor of finance at the Columbia University Graduate School of
Business, and, in 1989 and 1990, as the moderator of WCBS's "The Dreyfus
Roundtable" and FNN's "The Profit Motive with Jim Rogers". At the same
time, he was laying the groundwork for an around-the-world motorcycle
trip.
In 1990-1992, Rogers fulfilled his lifelong dream: with a companion
motorcycling 65,065 miles across six continents, a feat that landed them
in the Guinness Book of World Records. As a private investor, he
constantly analyzed the countries through which he traveled for
investment ideas. He chronicled his one-of-a-kind journey in Investment
Biker: On the Road with Jim Rogers. Rogers showed one nation after the
next in which gradually weakening currencies and political structures
have suddenly collapsed, resulting in total national ruin. He gets to
the heart of what's driving successful nations and economies upward and
what's slashing troubled ones downward.
Incidentally, Rogers found the peanut parcher in his parents' attic a
few years back. It still works.
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