Jim Rogers

James Beeland Rogers Jr. was born on October 19, 1942, in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Demopolis, Alabama, where he sold peanuts and collected empty bottles as a boy. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University in 1964, where he was a coxswain on the rowing team, then read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, on a scholarship, graduating in 1966.

After a stint in the U.S. Army, Rogers worked at Bache and Neuberger Berman before teaming with George Soros in 1973 to launch what became the Quantum Fund. The partnership produced one of the strongest decade-long records in hedge-fund history, with Quantum reportedly returning more than 4,000 percent during the 1970s while the S&P 500 rose roughly 47 percent. Rogers retired from active fund management in 1980 at thirty-seven.

He then turned to teaching finance at Columbia Business School and to long-distance travel as research. Between 1990 and 1992 he rode a motorcycle across six continents, a journey chronicled in Investment Biker. From 1999 to 2002 he and his fiancee Paige Parker drove a custom Mercedes through 116 countries, recorded in Adventure Capitalist. Other books include Hot Commodities, A Bull in China, and Street Smarts, and he created the Rogers International Commodity Index in 1998.

Long bullish on Asia, Rogers moved his family from New York to Singapore in 2007 so that his two daughters could grow up speaking Mandarin. He continues to appear as a commentator on global markets, agriculture, and currency policy, often warning about U.S. debt levels.

The name Jim derives from James, an English form of the Hebrew Yaakov meaning supplanter or heel-grabber. It is a thoroughly masculine nickname long favored for its plainspoken, no-nonsense feel — a fit for an investor who built his reputation on contrarian common sense.