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Jim Rogers: My First Million

jim-rogersSince Jim Rogers, 67, co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros he has worked as a guest professor of finance at Columbia University and as an economic commentator. In 1998, he founded the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI).

Raised in Alabama, Rogers started in business at the age of five, collecting empty soda bottles at the local baseball field. After graduating from Yale University in 1964, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He then got his first job on Wall Street.

Rogers now lives in Singapore with his wife and their two young daughters.

Did you think you would get to where you are?

No, I am as surprised as anyone. I certainly wanted to get somewhere and was willing to work hard. I wanted to retire young, but I never thought I would retire before 40.

When you realised that you had made your first million were you tempted to slow down?

I can remember the exact day of my first million dollars’ net worth. It was in November 1977. I was 35. I knew I needed more than that to do what I wanted when I was 37 – the age I decided to stop working to seek adventure.

What is the secret of your success? (more…)

Ray Dalio eclipses George Soros as most successful fund manager

Bridgewater founder with ‘radically transparent’ approach to investing has the last laugh

Almost 40 years ago, a young Harvard graduate called Ray Dalio was trading futures at a brokerage called Shearson Hayden Stone. His boss was one Sandy Weill, who would go on to become famous as chairman and chief executive of Citigroup.

It was a promising start in finance. But the promise did not last long: Wall Street legend has it that after just a year in the job Dalio was sacked for taking a stripper to a client presentation.

Such a debut could have led to the rookie drifting off into obscurity – or just as easily have been the beginning of prolonged fame. Yet neither happened.

Instead, the son of a jazz musician sloped off and founded his own hedge fund, Bridgewater, from a two-bedroom apartment. It took three decades operating out of Westport, Connecticut before people outside the sector started to talk about Dalio once again.

The credit crisis was the trigger that propelled the money manager’s name back into Wall Street conversation, after providing him with the platform to outshine rivals and reap massive rewards.

This week the 62-year-old’s fortune was put at $10bn (£6.3bn) in Forbes’s latest list of billionaires. Last month he was lauded as the most successful hedge fund manager in history, after new rankings compiled by LCH Investments showed the $13.8bn that his Bridgewater Pure Alpha fund made in 2011 had propelled Dalio past the grandaddy of hedge fund investing, George Soros, in terms of returns to investors. (more…)

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