Printable Biography of Jim Rogers

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Jim Rogers is the author of Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip and Investment Biker: On the Road with Jim Rogers. 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.

Jim also embarked on a Millenium Adventure. He and his companion arrived back home in New York on 5 January 2002, just 1101 days since they departed on their round-the-world, Guinness World Record journey. Passing through 116 countries, they covered more than 245,000 kilometers during their travels, which began in Iceland way back on 1-1-1999. Their non-stop, self-contained, three-year trip in a one-of-a-kind Mercedes-Benz took them to six continents, where their goal was to explore as much of the world as possible at the turn of the millennium, to learn what people and countries were doing and to see how well they were doing it. They met extraordinary and ordinary people, drove through war zones, blizzards, deserts, jungles, faced epidemics, and tasted divine and sometimes horrible food, while covering vastly diverse landscapes, cultures, and societies.

Incidentally, Rogers found the peanut parcher in his parents’ attic a few years back. It still works.