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I first met Jim Rogers more than 10 years ago when I joined CNBC television. I was fresh from the Chicago commodities markets and ready to share what I knew with everyone. It wasn't until I met this incredibly erudite and charming man that I discovered how little I knew about investing.
My frame of reference was raw materials, especially U.S. agricultural products. Rogers had just returned from his first Guinness Book of Records journey across six continents and written Investment Biker. He quickly opened my eyes and disabused me of some long-held investment notions. And today Rogers is still rattling cages and revealing that many emperors have no clothes.
It's no easy feat to have successfully navigated the vagaries of the market. Maybe Rogers was born with a lucky charm - he shares the same birthday as my mother, October 19. For those of you who like to remember important dates, October 19, 1987 certainly stands out among the top-market moving days in percentage terms.
But long before the infamous Black Monday crash of '87, Rogers co-founded the Quantum Fund with another the legendary George Soros, who appeared on Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE back in September. Quantm was the fund of the 1970s, returning a blistering 3,300 percent during that decade compared to a nearly 50 percent return for the S&P 500. Rogers retired from the fund at the tender, young age of 37, but he continued to manage his own portfolio while teaching at Columbia University and appearing on the budding financial networks of the time.
Rogers continues to challenge conventional wisdom, so he may not tell you what you want to hear -- but if you listen to him you get a much better understanding of what's happening in the world. Rogers believes the market is almost always wrong. And he taught me to be suspicious of what is generally accepted as gospel: data from the U.S. government.
His view is anything but myopic, and reminds me a bit of one of those three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles that confound me at every turn. He studies arcane interrelationships between markets and prices and comes up with opportunities. For Rogers, it may seem like child's play.
He researches key economic data not just for this country, but for foreign countries that have intriguing investment possibilities. Remember the introduction of the Euro, the single European currency at the start of 1999? The problems inherent in trying to manage the disparate fiscal and monetary policies of the European Union's 12 nations are huge, which is one of the reasons Jim says the Euro is flawed.
Rogers also has concerns about the market at home - literally. During the three years he traveled the world, real estate values in this country soared, but it also caused many homeowners to borrow on their equity. Jim is alarmed that we as a nation are overleveraged, a recipe for disaster.
We'll be talking to Rogers on this week's show. We have had an ongoing discussion about the level of inflation in this country and around the world, and I can't wait to engage Rogers in the discussion du jour, deflation.
So where is he putting his money? Those who know him realize that he is an equal opportunity investor -- stocks, bonds, currencies, futures -- but also a very private one. He doesn't talk specifically about his choices, but I think I can get him to talk regions and countries. What would you like to ask Jim? Send me an e-mail at wsw@pbs.org. I'll take the best 5 questions and ask him for you. And don't forget to tune into Friday's program. You won't be disappointed.
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