Investment Biker: Around the World with Jim Rogers [Paperback]

Wealth does strange things to people. It can either control them or set them free. Jim Rogers falls into the latter camp. Like an angst-free Marlon Brando, this Wild One quit his Quantum fund job alongside George Soros at the age of 37, saddled up a powerful BMW and revved his way into a personal dream.

In 1990, Rogers set out with his girlfriend on a marathon global tour, chasing the summer and the prevailing economic climate across six continents and reporting home in his easily adopted role of Investment Biker. The result, even after all these years, is a gloriously entertaining flight of reality. Part travelogue, part investment guide, Rogers himself is the real centrepiece, at times railing (if that's the right word) against local custom/ideology/policy, on other occasions providing eye-opening investment tips on where the sensible money should be going. Shunning the usual tourist routes, Rogers' odyssey takes him through landscapes and economies unique in culture and currency where his natural charisma shines through in easy-going commentary. It's not all image though; Rogers' predictions on emerging markets have proved by and large to be unerringly accurate.

Whatever you want from a book, Investment Biker can probably supply it: thrills, spills, rampaging elephants and economic theory. Dig out those leathers and enjoy the ride. --Jake Bond

"Eclectic and didactic, yet strangely compelling." –– Business Age

This book is about the author′s amazing trip across six continents and the world economy and society. It discusses 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. He learned reams of information that you′d never learn from reading the financial pages of any periodical. Delivers a thrilling account of the journey of a lifetime and provides tips that would enable you to pay for a trip just like it.

"Investment Biker is an unlikely concoction of classic travelogue and investment-cum-economics manual. Rampaging elephants in Zimbabwe come within inches of flattening the hero biker and his girl; the poor countries border guards could have been penned by Graham Greene... One of the best books we've seen this year - read it." Investors Chronicle

"In 1990 [Jim Rogers] set out on a 65,000-mile motorcycle journey, through six continents, with not much more than his girlfriend, a short-wave radio and two bow ties, to explore some emerging markets... The resulting adventure is the subject of this wonderful book, which is sure to achieve the cult success of , say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It will tell you not only where to make a million and where to lose one, but how to dig a BMW motorbike out of the Sahara sand." Good Book Guide

"The investment business has few genuine heroes, but one with a good claim to belong to any Hall of Fame that exists is a charming but unorthodox American called Jim Rogers." The Independent

Jim Rogers grew up in Demopolis, Alabama, and got started in business at the age of five, selling peanuts. He graduated from Yale University and has a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University. After a career as a hedge fund manager and investor, he now periodically teaches finance at Columbia University, and appears regularly on the CNBC cable network.