저자: JimRogers · 외국인
요약 보기
짐 로저스가 대부분의 주식시장을 매도하고 미국 달러 현금, 중국 주식 일부, 우즈베키스탄 소액, 금·은을 보유 중이라고 밝힘. 시장이 고점 근처라 낙관이 가격에 반영됐다는 판단. AI는 실재하지만 과거 철도·인터넷 사례처럼 고평가 가능성 언급. 엔캐리 트레이드 청산 위험과 인플레이션 가능성을 경계하며 금·은을 헤지로 보유. 다만 영상은 투자 권유가 아니라고 명시.
다듬은 글
I want to share something with you all that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. I recently had the chance to sit down with someone who co-founded the Quantum Fund alongside George Soros back in 1973. By the time he retired at 37, that fund had returned over 4,000%. The S&P 500 managed about 47% in the same stretch.
He then got on a motorcycle and rode around the world twice, wrote best-selling books about both trips, moved his family to Singapore because he believed the 21st century would belong to Asia, and has been calling commodity super cycles and the decline of the dollar for decades. His name is Jim Rogers.
He just turned 82, and what he told me about what he is doing with his own money right now is going to challenge everything most American investors have been trained to believe. Here is the part I want you to sit with for a moment. Nearly every stock market in the world is at or near an all-time high right now, and Jim Rogers has sold most of them.
Not trimmed, not rebalanced, sold. He is sitting in a massive pile of US dollar cash, a handful of Chinese shares, a small position in Uzbekistan, some gold, and some silver. That is the portfolio of one of the most decorated investors alive. Now, before you dismiss that as the move of a tired old man who has lost his edge, I want you to understand the reasoning behind it because the logic is airtight.
When I asked him what triggered the decision, he did not give me a macro thesis or a Fed funds rate analysis. He said something much simpler. He looked around, and everyone was having a very good time, and in his experience, that is exactly the moment you step back and start asking hard questions. Not because good times are inherently suspicious, but because markets tend to price in optimism before the story ends.
And when everybody is excited and everybody is winning, the margin of safety has already evaporated. That framing hit me hard because it runs directly against the default advice most Americans get their entire investing lives. Buy the index fund, buy good stocks, hold forever, never sell. That advice has worked for a long time, but Rogers is not saying the advice is wrong forever.
He is saying that right now, the setup does not offer him a risk-reward ratio he is comfortable with. And at 82, having survived multiple cycles, multiple crashes, multiple moments of collective hysteria, and collective despair, he trusts what that gut feeling is telling him. Let me put this in context for the typical viewer I talk to on this channel.
You are probably somewhere between 40 and 65. You have a 401k or an IRA. The majority of it is likely sitting in a US equity index fund with some tech exposure sprinkled in. You have been told by every financial advisor and every personal finance book that the market always goes up over the long run and that trying to time it is a fool's game.
Rogers would not fully disagree with any of that. In fact, he told me directly that index funds are a perfectly fine way to invest if you believe things will keep going up in America. Most people he said do not outperform the market anyway. An index fund is simple. It gets you market returns. For a lot of people that is genuinely fine.
But here is where he draws a line that most index fund disciples ignore. Index funds do not protect you from the experience of a 40, 50, or even 78% drawdown. They just mean that when the market eventually recovers, you recover with it. The question is whether you have the psychological constitution and the financial runway to hold through something that bad.
Because those drawdowns happen. They have always happened. And Rogers is emphatic on this point, we will have hard times again. We always do. He brought up Germany to illustrate something most people in this conversation would never think to mention. Germany in 1945 was the definition of disaster. A destroyed nation, a humiliated people, a currency in ruins, and yet if you had bought German assets at that bottom, you would be extraordinarily wealthy today.
He uses that example not to be provocative, but to underscore a principle he has lived by for 60 years. Despair and opportunity are often the same thing wearing different clothes. The question is whether you have the cash, the courage, and the knowledge to act when everyone else is frozen in fear. Now, I asked him directly about AI because that is the big story right now, the thing that has driven so much of the recent excitement in markets.
And I will be honest, I expected him to dismiss it. He did not. He acknowledged that AI is real, that it matters, that it will change things. But he has watched this movie before. Railroads were once the most explosive investment opportunity in history. Electricity caused a frenzy. The internet in 1999 was going to change everything, and it did, but the people who bought at peak enthusiasm still waited years or decades to get back to even.
Rogers is not saying AI is a fraud. He is saying that transformative technology and profitable investments are not the same thing at the same time. The story can be true and the valuation can still be wrong. When I brought up the Japan carry trade, he got more careful in his language, which I took as a signal in itself.
For anyone who does not follow this closely, the carry trade works like this. For years, Japan kept its interest rates essentially at zero. Investors and institutions borrowed enormous sums of yen at almost no cost, converted them to US dollars, and poured that money into American assets. The interest rate differential alone made it a profitable trade.
But, Japan has been slowly raising rates, and when that carry trade unwinds, those borrowed positions have to be repaid. That means selling US assets, converting dollars back to yen, and sending money home. A few weeks before we spoke, the market dropped roughly a trillion dollars in the final 40 minutes of a single trading session on fears that this unwind was accelerating.
The US Fed essentially opened a lending line to Japan in response. Rogers' take on that was characteristically unsentimental. "Bailouts are not good policy," he said. But, he also knows that human beings always want to be bailed out, and they can usually find someone willing to do it. And when a genuine crisis hits and the authorities step in, what looks like a disaster sometimes turns into an opportunity if you are positioned correctly.
He kept coming back to that word, cash. Not because cash is a great long-term investment, he knows better than anyone that inflation eats it, but because cash is optionality. When something breaks and prices collapse and everyone is in despair, the person holding cash is the person who gets to act. He is not sitting in dollars because he thinks the dollar is healthy.
He is sitting in dollars because when fear takes over, the world tends to run toward dollars out of habit, and that creates a window. He told me that directly. "The dollar is not a safe haven," he said, "but people think it is. So, I have my money in dollars." I asked him about gold and silver, and he gave me an answer I think about constantly.
He owns both. He is not buying at current prices because they are near all-time highs. But, he told me that if they come down, he hopes he is smart enough to buy more. And when I asked what his trigger would be, he did not give me a number or percentage. He said something much more honest. He said when he turns on the computer and everybody is dismissing gold, when people are saying it is a relic, it is finished, nobody needs it anymore, that is when he starts paying close attention.
That is when he asks questions. That is when he acts. He was holding a silver cup on camera when he said this, which I thought was entirely intentional. On the question of whether Fort Knox actually holds the gold the government claims it does, he was drily dismissive. He has been around long enough to know that you should not believe governments most of the time.
He was careful to say it is often not that they are lying. It is that they do not know. These officials are paid to make people feel comfortable. That is their job. His response was not conspiracy theory, it was just practice skepticism from someone who has watched institutional narratives fall apart over and over again.
Here is the Uzbekistan piece because I know that one raised eyebrows. Most people cannot find Uzbekistan on a map. Rogers knows this. He also knows that at its peak, this was one of the most prosperous and powerful regions on Earth. Tamerlane the conqueror came from there. The word kamikaze exists because a typhoon destroyed Tamerlane's fleet as he approached Japan.
Rogers is not investing in Uzbekistan because of nostalgia. He is investing there because it has huge natural assets, powerful neighbors whose interests are tied to its stability and almost nobody else is paying attention. He likes cheap things that other people are ignoring. Uzbekistan qualifies on both counts right now.
On inflation, he was unambiguous. He knows inflation is here. He knows the government says it is under control. He also knows that the simple answer for most governments when they are in trouble is to print money. And printing money produces inflation. He expects more inflation in the future. His hedge is the metals.
Keep some gold in the closet, some silver under the bed, he said. That is not a metaphor. That is a literal instruction. There is a personal thread in this conversation that I think matters as much as any of the investing content. Rogers grew up in a town so small his phone number was a single digit.
He wanted to see the world. He made enough money early enough to do it on his own terms, and he did. He rode motorcycles across continents. He moved his family to Singapore specifically so his daughters would grow up speaking Mandarin because he believed and still believes that the Chinese language and the Chinese economy will be defining forces of this century.
He is not a passive observer of history. He is someone who has spent his entire adult life positioning his family and his capital for where he believes the world is going, not where it has been. When I asked him what advice he would give to someone sitting in Ohio, 50 years old, a couple hundred thousand in an IRA, mostly index funds, maybe worried about the AI bubble or the national debt or the wars, he gave an answer that I think is both liberating and slightly unsatisfying if you're hoping for a stock pick.
He said, "Stop listening to other people, including him." He said this several times, and I believe he means it genuinely, not as false modesty. He has learned that the investors who survive are the ones who know their own domain, who stay within what they actually understand, who trust their own judgment, and who do not let other people's excitement or other people's fear override what they know to be true.
Most people who try to chase performance or follow tips or time the market end up worse off. The ones who find a process they believe in and stick to it through fear and through euphoria, those are the ones who tend to make it through. He also said something about mistakes that I have been thinking about ever since.
He has made many of them. He expects to make many more. He hopes he lives long enough for it. The ones that cost him most were the ones where he acted without fully understanding what he was doing. The antidote in his experience is to wait, to learn more, to get more comfortable with not acting, even when the urge to do something is overwhelming.
The market will always offer another entry, and patience is the thing that destroys portfolios. I am not here to tell you to sell everything and buy silver. I am not making any recommendation about what you should do with your money. What I am saying is that when someone with this track record, this many decades of experience, this many cycles behind them, quietly exits most of the world's markets and sits on cash, it is worth taking a beat before you decide that this time is definitely different.
The argument for staying fully invested might still be right. Index funds might keep working. The AI boom might run for another 5 years before it corrects. All of that is possible. But, I found something valuable in this conversation that goes beyond any single call Rogers is making right now. It is been not the underlying framework.
He is not watching the news and reacting. He is watching human emotions. He is watching despair and he is watching hysteria. He is reading history and recognizing patterns. And when he looks out the window right now, what he sees is a world where nearly every asset is priced for a very optimistic outcome.
And where the people who have the most to lose are the ones who have never been through a real downturn. That observation is not a prediction. It is just an observation. What you do with it is entirely up to you.
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