Investment Biker: Around the World with Jim Rogers by Jim Rogers is a great read for anyone who wants to improve themselves, not just for investors or anyone interested in investment. This book is about Rogers’ round-the-world trip on a BMW motorcycle from 1990 to 1992.
Published in 1994, it documents not only the author’s 160,000 km journey across six continents but also his life philosophy and thinking, his life experiences that shaped his thinking and his predictions about the future based on his on-the-ground travel experience.
Being the first hedge-fund manager who had managed to travel round the globe, this trip earned him an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. The reason I think this is more than just an investment and adventure book is because having an investment mindset in life is so very important. It enables us to live a more fulfilling life.
Rogers officially retired from Wall Street when he was 37. But his investment knowledge and philosophy has served him well throughout his life. If one has an investment mindset, he or she will realise that the most important investment one can make is in him or herself. The wisest way to use our time is to invest in ourselves – improving our knowledge about the world.
This book taught me that the most important thing in investment is to know enough about the thing that you are investing in and also the context in which you do it. According to Rogers, everyone knows a lot about something in life.
And that should be the starting point of our investment decision. And that we should not invest in something just because everyone else is doing it. Also, when most people are investing in the same thing (or market), that thing (or market) will very soon be over-priced, which is the main symptom of a bubble. We must also be aware of the true meaning of investment as opposed to speculation (which is not very different from gambling).
One of the sections that impressed me most was when he wrote about how he travelled from western China across to the east coast and then crossed the Sea of Japan over to Japan, to Russia and then journeyed on eastward across Siberia towards Eastern Europe.
What Rogers saw and noticed in those three countries was that there was an abundance of human labour in China (with a serious lack of technology, financial capital and natural resources), an abundance of technology and financial capital in Japan (with a serious lack of labour and natural resources) and an abundance of natural resources in Russia (with a serious lack of human labour, technology and financial capital).
From this observation, Rogers’ made his conclusive prediction that in the years to come(when the Chinese and Russian economies open up even more), there will be a lot of cooperation and joint-ventures among the three countries whereby resources will be deployed from Russia to China and Japan using Chinese human labour, Japanese technology and financial capital.
True enough, if you go to Russia today, these things Rogers’ had predicted back in the early 1990s are already happening right now as we speak! A case in point is Lake Baikal located in southern Russia. This freshwater lake with greatest volume in the world supplies the much needed clean water to the Chinese.
I strongly recommend this book.
This article is contributed by Ken Soong, who currently lives in Australia – migrated from Malaysia in 2004. He has been a college lecturer and an occasional university tutor in strategic management and marketing subjects since 2006. He enjoys reading, writing blog posts and spending time at home.
Some of people Ken follows on the internet are Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, Dambisa Moyo, Seth Godin, Kishore Mahbubani, KC Lau and Danny Quah. Ken, along with his brother Michael, wrote Migrating to Australia: Good Meh??? to help Malaysians make a more informed decision in the subject matter of migration to Australia. In early 2016, he set up www.australiagoodmeh.com to further his cause.
