Jim Rogers’ background

As an active manager, Mr. Rogers read: 40 newspapers from five different countries, 8 trade journals in various industries, and hundreds of annual reports, and oversaw insider trading for many companies.

Along with George Soros at Quantum Fund, Jim Rogers had among the best investment results for a fund ever, 4200% in 10 years.

However, he has not done as well on his own. While he admits he doesn’t work nearly as hard as he did at Quantum Fund, it still makes you wonder if he and Soros’ big advantage was as a joint team.

Jim Rogers’ strategies for value investing

As a value investor, Jim Rogers is very good at fundamental analysis and likes to look at a stock’s numbers 10 years in the past. Like John Templeton, he invests around the world and not just in any single market. But unlike Templeton, who mainly invested long-term in equities, Jim Rogers invests in all sorts of asset classes and doesn’t mind making big trades.

Here’s what we, as value investors, can learn from Jim Rogers:

• Be the first to invest in a new market in a country that is just becoming democratic (“emerging markets”). Jim Rogers has done this several times, including in Portugal and China.
• How he invested in Portugal is indicative of his approach: when the stock exchange was founded, he invested in all (about 10) stocks. Then he instructed his broker to continue investing in every new company introduced on the exchange for the next 1-2 years. This was more than enough.
• This simple strategy gave him several hundred percent profit over a couple of years, without having to take any major risk. The reason for this was that Jim Rogers did not bet on the quality of the companies themselves, but on the inflow of capital into the stock market (from pension funds, banks, wealthy individuals and foreign investors) to boost share prices. And he was right.
• Otherwise, Jim Rogers likes to invest or trade on change. He mainly looks for four kinds of change: (1) Disasters, (2) Worsening situations, (3) Major new trends, and (4) Government intervention in the market, such as aid, subsidies, and bailouts.
• Jim Rogers is an expert at keeping excel sheets on companies, and he looks over a 10-year horizon, usually.
• The most important rule of thumb for investors is supply and demand. And the best habit to become a better investor is to read widely and study new markets.

Quotes from Jim Rogers:

“The trick to getting rich is to correctly assess supply and demand.”

“Discover things that others have not noticed yet.”

“If you get the basic facts wrong, a geometric stack of errors will follow”

 

• Read about other value investors and their strategies.