Rogers - Street smarts: adventures on the road and in the markets

ALSO BY JIM ROGERS

Hot Commodities:
How Anyone Can Invest Profitably
in the Worlds Best Market

Adventure Capitalist:
The Ultimate Road Trip

Investment Biker:
Around the World with Jim Rogers

A Bull in China:
Investing Profitably in the Worlds
Greatest Market

A Gift to My Children:
A Fathers Lessons for Life and Investing

Copyright 2013 by Hilton Augusta Parker Rogers Trust and the Beeland Anderson Parker Rogers Trust

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rogers, Jim, 1942
Street smarts / Jim Rogers.
p. cm.
1. Investments. 2. Investment analysis.
3. Portfolio management. I. Title.
HG4521.R686 2013
332.6dc23 2012027063

eISBN: 978-0-307-98609-2

Jacket design by Jessie Bright
Jacket photography by Danny Santos

v3.1

To Baby Bee

May You Enjoy More Adventures

Than Your Daddy

and Be Twice as Smart

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

My hometown, Demopolis, sits in the heart of the Alabama Cane-brake, where the Black Warrior and the Tombigbee Rivers meet. The largest city in Marengo County, it lies in the center of a region of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi known historically as the Black Belt, so named for the layer of naturally rich, thick black prairie soil that almost two hundred years ago nourished the growth of vast cotton plantations, some of which outlasted slavery, none of which survived the boll weevil.

It was in that soil, when I was a boy, that my friends and I would dig for bait before setting off to spend the day fishing. Channel catfish are omnivorous and will strike at just about anything they can smellthey are able to smell just about everythingand earthworms, on a hot summer day, are a lot easier to gather than crickets. I must have been eight years old and we were digging in the backyard of my house when my cousin Wade, who was about ten months older than I, ventured a remark that, while entirely incomprehensible at the time, remains vivid to me to this day.

If we keep digging, he said, well end up in China.

I was not ignorant of the fact that the world was round, but not until I was able to consult a globeI was an enthusiastic researcher even thendid I come to appreciate that directly opposite Alabama, on the other side of the planet, sprawled the vast landmass of the Peoples Republic, where covered in dirt and drenched with sweat I would eventually emerge if I were energetic enough to keep digging.

Decades have intervened since then, and I have followed a more circuitous route, but on the very doorstep of China is where I find myself living today, the father of two little blue-eyed blondes who speak Mandarin as fluently as they speak English.

How I came to be a permanent resident of Singapore is a story about digging of a different kind, excavation perhaps less arduous, though no less energetic. It is a result of my endless effort to experience firsthand the inner workings of the world, to get out and unearth the real story, to explore it all for myself.

I have circumnavigated the globe twice now, once by motorcycle, once by car, investigating the world at ground level, charting the shifting circumstances of more than a hundred nations in the course of those five years. For me, understanding history and its consequences has not been an armchair endeavor, but a hands-on adventure. It has led to great personal and material rewards, and it inevitably led me here, far from the backwoods of Alabama, to this largely Chinese outpost on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula.