Category: Famous Traders

Jim Rogers is a multi-multi millionaire, outstanding investment market forecaster, and visionary of the future. Who could argue with this man?

Here is Jim Rogers on Dubai. “Dubai doesn’t have much oil, you can see this from doing your homework, Dubai will be out of oil in five years or something. Dubai is doing their best to become a center for the Middle East: for shopping, for finance, for technology, for everything else, because they are running out of oil.”

Jim Rogers is one of the most famous investors of the 20th and 21st centuries. After graduating from Yale in 1964, he got his first job on Wall Street, even though he knew virtually nothing about investing. Shortly afterwards by great luck he met George Soros and the two went on to found the Quantum Fund, one of the first hedge funds. The success of the Quantum Fund made Rogers and Soros fabulously wealthy billionaires.

Rogers retired a rich man at 37 and set out on a two year adventure, touring the world on a motorcycle. Investment Biker: On the Road with Jim Rogers , a best seller, chronicled that trip, revealing one nation after the next in which gradually weakening currencies and political structures had 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.

Richard Dennis was already a highly successful commodities trader when he came up with his idea of what soon became known as the “trading turtles”.

Dennis had an office tucked away on the antiquated twenty-third floor of the Chicago Board of Trade building. The outside hallway had dingy brown paneling. Etched in small lettering in his office door was “C&D Commodities, Richard J. Dennis and Company.” It was a very plain rather drab office.

No marble. No glass. No impressive entrance of any sort. Immediately next door was a grimy looking men’s room. The office entrance disguised the performance of an individual who, in his own estimate, made up to $200 million from trading commodities.

According to Dennis, “I don’t think trading strategies are as vulnerable to not working if people know about them, as most traders believe. If what you are doing is right, it will work even if people have a general idea about it. I always say you could publish rules in a newspaper and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline.”

Dennis had a theory about commodities trading that he wanted to test out. Dennis placed small classified ads in newspapers and magazines stating “trader wanted.” He got some 1,000 responses from people eager to learn his methods. He settled on fewer than two dozen novices–among them two professional gamblers and a fantasy-game designer.

George Soros was a relatively unknown fund manager, speculator, and founding principal of the Quantum Fund when he made his mark in 1992 by taking on the Bank of England and WINNING.

He reportedly made over one billion dollars on that play by figuring out that the British Pound was over 25% overvalued and that the Bank of England could not defend the inflated  evaluation. Soros shorted Pound Sterling massively and within a few weeks make a killing.

Soros rose from being an almost unknown currency trader to world wide fame as the smart guy who took on the Bank of England. By making a correct analysis of the state of the bank and the pound, and by having the guts to put on a massive trade, Soros made over one billion dollars from the bank and other British Pound Sterling supporters.

That was a lot of money in 1992. One billion in trading profits isn’t too shabby even today. Indeed, it was a gutsy and very profitable speculation.

I was working in Pakistan as a financial consultant in currencies at the time. One of our good smart, brave, brazen and bold Pakistani clients rode on the back of George Soros’s brass balls speculation and made over one million US dollars for himself. Thanks George.

Whatever you may think of George Soros he is a smart man. He was one of the front runners in taking the hedge fund industry to the dizzying financial heights that it has reached today.