On the Money a Biker's Hunt for Bucks

By JOHN ROTHCHILD

A great book about a motorcycle adventure will hit the shelves later this summer. A notorious capitalist, Jim Rogers, and a blond half his age, Tabitha Estabrook, ride around the world on two fancy BMWs, up and down Africa and South America, across Siberia, China, Europe -- six continents, 65,000 miles. I wouldn't have given them a chance in Vegas of surviving the bandits, but they weren't worried about bandits. They were too busy looking for investments along the road.

Investment Biker has almost nothing in common with the last best seller about a motorcycle trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author of that one, Robert Pirsig, drives across the West, searching for his inner self and trying to find the meaning of life while tinkering with his engine parts. He quotes Plato and says things like "to travel is better than to arrive." Never once does he mention a single stock or a bond.

Pirsig's book was a big hit with my generation of suburban flower children who bought motorcycles, learned to play the guitar and fix their own Volkswagens and would do almost anything but think about money. Now that we're older and have come to our senses, we can appreciate Rogers' kind of motorcycle trip. A person can waste his whole life tinkering with engine parts, but if you've made a couple of decent investments, you can afford to hire a qualified mechanic.

While the followers of Pirsig dithered in the 1970s, Rogers headed straight to Wall Street, where he teamed up with George Soros at the Quantum Fund and turned a $600 investment into many millions. It bought him a limestone mansion on Riverside Drive that today is filled with spears, pelts and other tribal relics and resembles the lobby of an explorers' club.

As well it should, because this Indiana Jones of finance made his bundle in exotic foreign stocks. In the 1970s, when our market was going nowhere, Rogers was racking up huge profits in markets that Wall Street didn't know existed. His book is especially timely now that country funds are all the rage, and people who have money tied up in foreign stocks are wondering: What the heck is going on over there? Unlike the rest of us, he actually visits these places before he invests.

Here we find Rogers, in black leather and bow tie, and Estabrook, his sensibly cautious sidekick, hurtling from one country to the next, scouting out the latest opportunities. "Look for cheap, and look for change," is his motto. That means look for beaten-down stocks in places where governments have sworn off big spending and screwing things up for the capitalists.

When Rogers finds such a hospitable environment, he gets very excited, parks his bike at the local exchange and buys a selection of stocks on the spot. These days Rogers is bullish on the darnedest places: Peru, Angola, Cameroon, and especially Botswana -- all seven of that country's stocks. Botswana has a stable currency, prosperous mines, rich natural resources, a 10% growth rate and no tribal conflicts to speak of, and the stock exchange is one desk in a banker's office. He likes New Zealand, which has cheap stocks and is starting to emerge from 10 years of depression. He likes China, with its long tradition of trading and haggling, where the traders and hagglers are finally loosed from their communist yoke. Last week he gave me his latest favorites: Ghana, Zimbabwe and Iran. His No. 1 short these days? A prosperous country with an untrustworthy currency whose government can't control its spending: the good old U.S. of A. "The rest of the world wants to be like what we were a few decades ago," he says. "And we've given it up."