Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: new asian crisis, best capitalists, pakistan india bangladesh, United States, Saudi Arabia, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Financier Rogers retired at 37 and motorcycled around the world, turning the trip into the book Investment Biker, a hybrid of business advice and travelogue. That journey, however, failed to squelch his wanderlust. Instead of enjoying his sedate life teaching finance, Rogers decided to take his fiancée and a souped-up Mercedes on a frighteningly intense road trip: three years, 116 countries and 152,000 miles. Like the car that plowed through snow, mud, sand and highways on every continent, Rogers's memoir of the journey is its own breed. Although Rogers writes, far too briefly, of life-changing events like getting married and hearing of his father's death, the book has an uncommon level of detachment. Also, even though Rogers shares investment advice and observations about the planet's political economies, his thoughts are too general to serve as business lessons. The result is an adventure tale without heart and a finance book without teeth. Rogers tries to make up for this by describing experiences like eating fried silkworms and watching prostitutes caught in the world's sex trade. Mainly, though, he chronicles prosaic details, like taking car ferries and talking to border guards, and then riffs on politics, money, immigration and culture.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Rogers, a Wall Street success story who has been called "The Indiana Jones of Finance," once circled the planet on a motorcycle, which landed him in The Guinness Book of World Records and resulted in his first book, Investment Biker (1994). In 1999 he set out on another world-record drive around the world in a custom-built yellow Mercedes convertible with his fiancee, Paige Parker. Starting out in Iceland, the trip took three years and encompassed 116 countries, many of which are rarely visited, in a continuous swath across Europe, the former Soviet Republic, China, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. No one had ever driven overland following these routes, a total of 152,000 miles, another Guinness world record. Rogers' insightful commentary on the political and historical topography of these diverse countries cuts through stereotypes to give us a glimpse of the world the way it really is, for better or worse. This is a gutsy travelogue adventure from a guy who shoots straight from the hip, and it really hits the mark. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (May 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375509127
• ISBN-13: 978-0375509124
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #400,311 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Should Be Two Books, and Both Would Be Stronger, July 22, 2003

By	doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Jim Rogers has been smashingly successful in two different areas - international investing and international travel. He tries to tackle both successes in this book but unfortunately doesn't adequately cover either. His remarkable achievement covered here is his three-year drive (with his wife and some suspiciously anonymous assistants) around the world, knocking off 116 countries and 152,000 miles, along with all the life-threatening travails and crises that you would expect in so many hostile territories. He was also on constant lookout for international investing opportunities, and his most interesting assertion is that you learn most about the dynamics of any foreign economy by talking to real people at street level. That's opposed to know-it-all politicians and bureaucrats who make vast judgments on places they have never been and couldn't nearly understand.

The main problem here is that the journey was so extensive that Rogers doesn't have the space to relate an effective travelogue about all the places he visited. Entire nations are often described in a sentence or less. Meanwhile, yes/no pronouncements on the viability of investing in each location are tossed off quickly like afterthoughts. Rogers does impart some great investment advice here, like the contention that the next bull market will be in commodities (raw materials) rather than securities, most of the currencies in the world are collapsing, and that the surprise up-and-coming nations will be Angola and Bolivia. But otherwise, Rogers quickly dismisses most of the visited countries due to political strife. He also spends a lot of time on his soapbox, making vast pronouncements on how to solve the world's ills, most of which involve a simplistic belief in free trade (the phrase "the miracles of international trade" pops up once), and the predictable disdain for globalization's critics that we keep hearing from those with vested interests. Rogers fails to notice that much of the political strife he encountered around the world resulted from mismanaged globalization efforts.

Rogers should have written two books inspired by his remarkable journey. The first would be a travelogue and adventure story about the perils and rewards of death-defying travel. The second book would be a solid examination of worldwide investing opportunities and the futures of developing vs. declining nations and their economies. Both would be much stronger than this book that unsuccessfully tries to blend the two, but leaves both poorly covered.

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Let My People Trade - The Gospel according to Jim, June 20, 2003

By	"sasov" (Grand Rapids, MI United States) - See all my reviews

Jim Rogers may never hit the list of top 10 best selling authors but that's not because his latest book lacks any of the important characteristics of a bestseller. The only disqualifier is self-imposed by the author. The book is designed to blow away many common illusions and prejudices about the world we live in. It is not the stuff popular fiction is made of.

Jim is a former hedge fund manager who retired at 37, following a successful stint on Wall Street alongside George Soros. In the early nineties he published his first book Investment Biker, a story of his round-the-world trip by motorcycle.

His new book called Adventure Capitalist-The Ultimate Road Trip describes his second round-the-world trip, this time by a custom built Mercedes-Benz car. He set out with his wife Paige and a team of two other guys in 1999. The trip took them on a 240,000 kilometer journey through 116 countries and ended three years later.

I believe that this book should be required reading at schools and colleges not just because it beats Phileas Fogg's journey hands down in intellectual stimulation, but because the book is also a compendium of free-market ideas and live comparative social analysis.

Jim's starting point was to search for investment opportunities. He set out with the open mind of a moneymaker on pilgrimage to find the truth about market conditions. He is looking for profitable opportunities, businesses and countries to invest in and is not prepared to accept conventional wisdom, official or ideological distortions. He has equal contempt for the party politics in US as with those of any other country he visits. He lashes out against Turkmenbashi, the dictator in charge of Turkmenistan, for perpetuating his own brand of Stalinist cult of personality and destroying the country in the process. But then shows the same contempt for President Bush for confusing devaluation with depreciation and also with former President Clinton who he blames for failing to observe and react to the creation and bursting of the biggest market bubble in decades. "I would cast a pox on both their houses-the Democrats and the Republicans" he proclaims in exasperation.

Adventure Capitalist exposes some official and popular myths for what they are in a way that made me look at politics and religion from a very different perspective. In China, Jim tells of attending service in a Chinese Christian Church, where the local worshipers, while singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" never realized that in lands as far as North Carolina there are people like Jesse Helms who are frothing at the mouth while bemoaning religious persecution in their country.

Despite not being able to obtain a visa to drive freely though Iran, Jim still admits to holding some small investments in the country and suggests forgetting the official analysis coming from Washington. "...there is a lot of positive change coming from Iran." he claims.

Jim squarely lays the blame on the British for their Imperial invention of the passport and for the subsequent regulation of immigration by Government bureaucrats worldwide. His prediction is that in some parts of the world passports will not manage to stop the changing of borders.

He talks of countries where he likes to invest and economies that he believes are on the verge of collapse. Which ones are those? Well, let's say I don't expect he will be a best selling author in Moscow.

Jim Rogers will probably not be officially proclaimed as prophet any time soon, but I know there will be people who will quote passages of the Adventure Capitalist for the years to come.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Right Road, May 21, 2003

By	Betty Toole (Sausalito, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I received "Adventure Capitalist" from Amazon less than 48 hours ago and with many other things to do I have still managed to read over half of it. ... I find it a great read, especially for couch adventurers who can take vicarious pleasures in crossing Siberia, eating exotic food, and meeting 10 years later some of the characters introduced in "Investment Biker."

As to financial advice I disagree with Publisher's Weekly. I think Jim Rogers is right on target for what he gives the reader, if the reader really pays attention, is effective criteria for deciding where to invest: look at the currency at borders, watch the black market, internal and external debt, and bureaucracy. Way back in October when I heard Jim on CNBC, I listened, bought euros, and made enough to re do my kitchen. He does not specifically say buy, this or that, but by looking at economies in a fresh, common sense and "real way," from Russia to Japan to China to Korea, he does get to the heart of the matter.

Rogers has has updated the fascinating material from his website which chronicled his journey. The pictures on the web site really give a complete picture of the journey. However, hopping and skipping through the journey on the web site I missed some of the personal events. The book puts those personal events in context. There is enough of the personal saga in the book to engage the reader, but not enough to distract from the title of the book, "Adventure Capitalist." It is a fun adventure that everyone can take along with Jim