Barton Biggs

Barton Michael Biggs (November 26, 1932 – July 14, 2012) was an American money manager whose attention to emerging markets marked him as one of the world's first and foremost global investment strategists, a position he held—after inventing it in 1985—at Morgan Stanley, where he worked as a partner for over 30 years. Following his retirement in 2003, he founded Traxis Partners, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund, based in Greenwich, Connecticut. He is best known for accurately predicting the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.

Early life and education Biggs was born on November 26, 1932, in New York City, named for his maternal grandmother, whose last name was Barton. He grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in Washington, D.C. His paternal grandfather, Hermann M. Biggs, was the top public-health official in New York and instituted measures that contributed to the eradication of tuberculosis. and was a member of the Elihu secret society. After graduating in 1955, Biggs served in the U.S. Marines for three years, taught English at the Landon School, a prep school in Bethesda, Maryland, played semiprofessional soccer, and tried his hand at creative writing.

At age 18, Biggs was given a portfolio of 15 company shares worth about $150,000, but he showed little interest in finance and investing in his youth. He ended up choosing that career path after feeling left out from conversations between his father and younger brother, Jeremy, who worked at a pension fund. He took his father's advice and read Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, first published in 1934. He graduated from NYU Stern School of Business with distinction. In 1965, Biggs co-founded one of the industry's first hedge funds, Fairfield Partners. During his eight-year tenure there, the fund returned 133 percent; whereas the S&P 500 returned a mere 19 percent.

Biggs joined Morgan Stanley as a managing director and general partner in May 1973. As the firm's first research director, he established Morgan Stanley Investment Management in 1975. He claimed to have left Morgan Stanley partly because his job had evolved into managing people rather than formulating strategy.

After leaving Morgan Stanley in 2003, Biggs founded hedge fund Traxis Partners, where he remained until his death.

However, he correctly called the bottom in U.S. stocks in March 2009, and that year Traxis's flagship fund returned three times the industry average. Biggs was named by Institutional Investor magazine to its "All-America Research Team" ten times, and was voted the top global strategist and first in global asset allocation from 1996 to 2000 by the magazine's "Investor Global Research Team" poll. SmartMoney magazine once called him "the ultimate big-picture man ... the premier prognosticator on the international scene and a mover of markets from Argentina to Hong Kong. It wouldn't be a stretch to say Biggs wrote the book on emerging-market investing".

Author Biggs was the author of Hedgehogging, which came from a journal kept by the former creative writing major at Yale and chronicles some of the indignities of being in the hedge fund business as well as its "very brilliant and often eccentric and obsessive people". He had a gloomy outlook for the economic future, and suggests that investors take survivalist measures, such as looking into "polar cities" as safe refuges for future survivors of global warming. Biggs recommended that his readers should "assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure". He went so far as to recommend planning adaptation strategies now and setting up survival retreats: "Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food", Mr. Biggs wrote. "It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down."

In 2010, Biggs published a novel about the stock market, A Hedge-Fund Tale. In 2012, a final book, "Diary of a Hedgehog" was published posthumously on November 6.