Book Summary
Jim Rogers was a Wall Street legend long before he wrote Investment Biker. In the 1970s he made what he describes as "more money than I knew existed in the world" managing the Quantum Fund with George Soros. At age thirty-seven he retired. Since then he has invested his own funds, been a finance professor at Columbia University, and hosted television programs on WCBS, FNN, and CNBC, among many other things.
But he's also renowned for being cut from a different cloth than most of the people on Wall Street. He's a contrarian, and a daring one at that - Rogers was the one who realized that the perennially moribund Austrian stock market was a Sleeping Beauty, kissed her, and woke her up. The Austrian economy boomed as a result; Rogers made another fortune for his trouble.
Besides that, he's a smalltown southern boy (his hometown was so small that his family's phone number was just 5) who's never forgotten where he came from - or where he wants to go. One of his passions, in fact, is motorcycling. He'd always dreamed of taking a trip around the world on his bike, and in 1990, with his girlfriend, Tabitha Estabrook, he did just that. They set out not only to travel, but to learn about the world's developing countries and investment markets by actually going to them.
It took twenty-two months, but together they drove 65,067 miles on land and traveled thousands more on sea, air, barge, and rail links across six continents, setting a world record for land travel on the way. Investment Biker is the story of this amazing trip, and it's about the world economy and society - who's sinking and who's swimming, which countries are on the rise and which are collapsing, where you can make a million and where you could lose one.
Every place he stopped on the trip, Rogers talked to businessmen, bankers, investors, and regular people, and learned reams of information that you'd never learn from reading the financial pages or any periodicals. All in all, it's quite a ride. Investment Biker not only thrills with its account of the journey of a lifetime, but provides the tips that just might allow you to pay for a trip just like it.
