• Street Smarts

  • Adventures on the Road and in the Markets
  • By: Jim Rogers
  • Narrated by: Michael Bybee
  • Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (470 ratings)

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Street Smarts  By  cover art

Street Smarts

By: Jim Rogers
Narrated by: Michael Bybee
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Publisher's summary

Wall Street legend and best-selling author Jim Rogers offers investing insights and economic, political, and social analysis, drawing on lessons and observations from his lifetime in the markets.

Jim Rogers, whose entertaining accounts of his travels around the world - studying the markets from Russia to Singapore from the ground up - has enthralled investors and Wall Street aficionados for two decades in such books as Investment Biker, Adventure Capitalist, Hot Commodities, and A Bull in China. In his engaging memoir Street Smarts, Rogers offers pithy commentary from a lifetime of adventure, from his early years growing up a naïve kid in Demopolis, Alabama, to his fledgling career on Wall Street, to his cofounding the wildly successful Quantum Fund [omit George Soros], Rogers always had a restless curiosity to experience and understand the world around him.

In Street Smarts, he takes us through the highlights of his life in the financial markets, from his school days at Yale and Oxford - where despite the fact that he didn’t have enough money to afford the appropriate pair of shoes, he coaxed the crew and helped to win the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race as well as the Thames Cup, the first of his three Guiness World Records - to his first heady taste of Wall Street in the mid-1960s, and his years helping to run the most successful hedge fund on Wall Street.

As a result of his extraordinary success with the Quantum Fund, Rogers was able to retire at the age of 37. Since then he has taught classes in finance at Columbia University, hosted television programs, and traveled the world seeing firsthand how revolutions in Chile affect coffee prices in Seattle, and how shortages of copper in Africa affect electricity brownouts in Ohio.

In the course of his new book, Rogers offers often surprising observations on how the world works - and what trends he sees in the future. He explains why Asia will be the dominant economic force in the 21st century - and how he and his wife and two daughters moved to Singapore to prepare his family for the coming changes. He discusses why America and the European Union are in decline, and what we need to do to right our economy and society. The age of Wall Street, Rogers claims, when the finance industry drove 25% of America’s growth, is over. Tomorrow’s economy will be driven by those who make things - food, energy, goods, and consumables.

Regarded as one of the most astute investors Wall Street has ever known, Jim Rogers once again is at his acerbic and storytelling best.

©2013 Jim Rogers (P)2013 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"There are almost no investment geniuses. The only ones I know of are Warren E. Buffett and John C. Bogle and Jim Rogers." (Ben Stein, New York Times)
"Jim Rogers makes my head hurt." (Paul Krugman, New York Times)

What listeners say about Street Smarts

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Another Self Indulgent Memoir by Hedge Fund Mgr

Would you ever listen to anything by Jim Rogers again?

No

What three words best describe Michael Bybee’s voice?

Ordinary

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Dissapointment; No substantive investment advice, or anything substantive really. Just another eccentric wealthy hedge fund manager wanting to romanticize his luck and brag about his adventures.

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2 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Jim Rogers tells it like it is

I always enjoy Jim Rogers being interviewed because he is not afraid to tell the truth as he sees it. This is a good book and I enjoyed it. Doing his own narration was a positive thing for the story and the book.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Just what you've come to expect from him

Given Jim's success as an investor, he obviously has great insights into markets and the people, incentives and events that move them. In this offering, he doesn't hold back(!) on any one of these, illustrating his points with examples, many of which were headlines; the value being that Jim lived some of these headlines and provides new insights. He candidly points out where incentives are aligned to create mismanagement and offers rational readers many opportunities to work around these issues for personal and investment gain.

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  • Al
  • 03-12-13

Essential Rogers

Great book on advice in life and investments. Essential book for being successfull in ethics, professional and personal life.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

It's Great - Rogers is living it up in Singapore

Some chapters are hugely important, like the discussion of macro and secular trends. This makes this book worth the invested time to listen.

Some chapters are more people magazine stuff than an intelligent Nassim Taleb book.

He's thoughts are not as well organized as other Money and Investor geniuses like Peter Thiel. But they are more approachable than Theil. Interestingly, they probably believe 95% of the same things.

You get much this book offers in fewer words, in a book called "Invisible Hands"....that Jim Rogers actually contributed too. But this book goes deep into the libertarian arguments that are not in "Invisible Hands". It's good for the listener to understand Singapore. and why the City State fascinates Rogers.

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economics

written well easy-to-understand good look at commodities and why to invest in commodities and also a good look at the Asian market and upcoming profit potentials

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Jim Rogers is Awesome

Jim Rogers is a much better writer than I could have imagined. He has a decent view of economics and obviously a perfect view on investing. A great read

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very nice jim

great insights about investing and life. A grand adventure. jims interviews also a pleasure

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Jim Rodgers Thinking

Listen to this book in its entirety will get you thinking like him. Lost a star for performance because it wasn't read by the author. In reality, Jim would just get bored reading his book into a mic in a studio. He would be like, I could travel around the world with that much time.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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OK, but did not live up to the hype

hyped as amazing and thought provoking, but not really. Decent story though. Maybe it was my own bias, I was expecting a research book

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