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Hello to all the readers of my books, my blog, my investments, my YouTube channel subscribers, and those who follow me on various social media platforms. Today, we'll continue our recurring series on legendary stock market investors and focus on Jim Rogers, who is, in fact, a rather atypical investor in the eyes of some.
Jim Rogers was someone who, very early in his career, was interested in foreign investments. He liked to bet on truly unattractive, unpopular countries, and he managed to get bargain prices because he liked to be, in a manner of speaking, the first and only buyer in those countries. The four conditions that led him to consider a country a good place to invest were: it had to perform significantly better than in previous years; it had to outperform the average investor; its currency had to be convertible; and there had to be sufficient liquidity for the investor so that they could always withdraw if they realized along the way that they were making a mistake.
He invested heavily in Portugal in 1974 and in Austria in 1985 when there were very few foreign investors in those countries, and at that time he bought all the stocks in those countries' indices. He's also an investor who knows how to short; he did so in Norway and Sweden in 1985-1986. He said it's a lot of fun and pleasure to find a country that nobody knows anything about.
The only thing better is to find a country where everyone is crazy about it and short it. So he doesn't just want the stock to be cheap, which is his good reason in many circumstances; he also wants to see the reasons why it can and should change. His sense of risk and opportunity in a given country is acquired through his travels, where he goes in person.
He observes whether the demand for the stock will increase; he essentially applies a supply and demand law to the stock market in his analysis. He is characterized by his independent thinking, since he once declared that following Wall Street research was... The best way to go bankrupt, and his success, came from his ability to foresee very broad changes—somewhat secular, general changes, not cyclical ones.
Basically, rather than focusing on what will happen in the next quarter and the results of the next quarter, they seek to understand how socio- economic and political factors will affect the fate of an industry or a group of stocks for a certain period of time. In short, unlike many, he has a rather top-down approach, not a bottom-up one.
However, Jim Rogers doesn't define himself as a contrarian on this subject either. For example, he explained that if someone had gone against the grain, they would have bought the American steel sector every year since 1959 and would have systematically lost money. His quote that really explains this is when he says, "You have as much to be right as you do to be different." Well, he was a hard worker, and in his domestic market, he adopted a similar approach to the one he had with countries, but this time with business sectors and industries.
Basically, he bet on entire industries, trying to To anticipate a secular shift and ignore the slightly shorter-term fluctuations of business, Roger, precisely regarding these secular shifts affecting his entire industry, identified four types of changes. The first is a bit of a disaster, when two or three industries were close to bankruptcy.
He said that a rebound could be imminent if there was a catalyst to change the fundamentals, for example, a change in regulation, the government coming in to provide support, a bit like we see in the automotive industry when manufacturers are really struggling, there are scrappage schemes, things like that, etc.
That was one of those four criteria. The second is when he shorts, and that was a change for the worse, when, basically, an industry was so popular that more than 80% of the shares were held by institutional investors. He said that the shares were overvalued, that was the moment, the momentum for a change in the cycle, and he shorted.
And the third way to optimize across an entire industry is when he saw a change in trend, like the emergence of motorcycles. Hospital development, the growing concern about waste management, a bit of everything, and the fourth point was when the government decided to, for example, the American government realized during the 1973 Egypt-Israel War that they were very behind in embedded electronic systems, and they went all out to catch up.
So one of his recurring phrases, which is kind of his investment thing, is related: the secret to being rich is to manage supply and demand correctly. Neither the communists nor Washington, nor anyone else, managed to go against this principle, and so that's really one of his most important ideas. He dabbled in oil, for example, with drilling companies, etc.
In fact, if you want to know about commodities, he was both long and short in his career, always considering his principle of supply and demand, which he tried to apply. Moreover, when you see several major companies losing money and reducing their capital expenditures, well, that's anticipating a rebound in the entire industry.
So, surprisingly, he declared One of the rules he had learned in English during those years as an investor was to always bet against central banks. He said that if central banks are trying to maintain an artificially low price level, whether it's for a currency, a metal, a grain, anything at all, most of the time with absurd prices, the intelligent investor must go in the opposite direction.
It might take a long time, but in the end, you'll be a winner. So, if we look at the 2010-2020 decade, it might have been quite difficult to go against central banks, but in any case, that's what he had declared. For him, in his foreign investments, the emerging countries that are able to prosper are those that embrace the ideas that made the USA a great country, that is to say, free markets and economies that are not programmed or planned.
So, I found the list given in 1997 of countries for the 21st century, and he had Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Botswana, China, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Canada, Peru, South Korea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Mozambique, and Eritrea—and he wasn't a fan of what he saw in Europe in early 2000. He stated that commodities were poised for a major market crash, while stock indices were better off being shorted.
Well, he was quite perceptive on that point. In any case, in 2000, he also stated that he saw China as the country of the 21st century and that he was rather positive about India because it had the largest middle class in the world, which had a middle-class education, and which had a fairly decent legal framework for investors.
Indeed, respect for shareholder property rights is perhaps less questionable in India than it is in China. So, that's a little bit about the life of Jim Rogers. For this other video, " Legendary Investor," you always comment if... Do you want me to continue this recurring series about legendary stock market investors, or would you prefer something more practical and tactical about your portfolio, etc.? Feel free to tell me in the comments what kind of video you'd prefer.
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