What is the best investing advice you ever received?
"Keep your back straight and don't fidget"-a piece of Russian folk wisdom.

What have been your best and worst investments?
My best was Norilsk Nickel. My team and I took a company in serious decay that hadn't paid salaries for six months and turned it into the world's biggest producer of nickel and other metals. It was like running a small government, with 300,000 people dependent on that company for their livelihoods. I hope my worst investment is yet to come.

What currency do you believe will depreciate the most in the next two years? What currency would you prefer to hold your portfolio in?
Hopefully, the euro. This would give the euro zone the chance to export its way out of slow growth. I keep my cash in U.S. dollars, and I keep shares of Polyus Gold as collateral. For the long term, my preference would be to keep my portfolio in currencies that offer high interest rates or high growth-a basket of emerging-markets currencies from Brazil to China to Russia.

Where are the best opportunities in global fixed income?

I see little value in 2% on U.S. Treasuries. Among developed markets, Canada, Norway or Finland have better debt levels and are less inclined to inflate away debt problems. A combination of Russian corporate bonds, some Brazilian or Turkish local-currency debt, with a sprinkling of less obvious African options would be an interesting combination.

What's the safest investment: a bar of gold, a pile of U.S. Treasuries or a top-tier Picasso?

As a large chunk of my wealth is in Polyus Gold, a bar of gold, of course!

Is there a money manager you would trust with your entire portfolio?

Yes. His name is Mikhail. I sign every check myself.

 

Donald Trump
Primary Assets: Commercial and residential property, golf courses   
Residence: New York
Industry: Real estate
Trump's television shows and flirtations with politics generate the buzz; real estate brings in the bucks. Some two dozen buildings across the U.S. have the Trump name on their facades, as do a handful of luxury hotels and casinos. While the Donald churns out one self-help tome after the next, golf is his passion. Trump, 65, who claims a three handicap, agreed to buy the legendary Doral Golf Resort & Spa in Miami for $170 million in October.

Best investing advice?
My father, Fred C. Trump, told me to know everything you can about what you're doing. He believed in being thorough and was wary of blind spots.

Where to park $1 million in cash?
Equities, corporate bonds and, if you know what you're doing, purchasing foreclosed houses from banks and demanding long-term financing at favorable interest rates.

Should wealthy investors buy shares of privately held tech darlings on secondary markets before IPOs?

Yes, but a very, very small percentage of the overall portfolio.

Margin?
Much of my portfolio is in cash. I don't believe in margining one's portfolio.

Best and worst investments?

Best: buying 40 Wall Street for $1 million. Worst: a yacht.

Eli Broad
Primary Assets:
Investments, art
Residence: Los Angeles
Industries: Banking, real estate
The one-time accountant made his fortune building houses with Donald Kaufman, founding what became KB Home in 1957. Broad bought Sun Life Insurance Co. of America in 1971. He created insurance giant SunAmerica Inc., which he sold to American International Group Inc. for $18 billion in 1999. A voracious modern-art collector, Broad, 78, owns pieces by Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. The Broad Foundations, with assets of $2.1 billion, are big givers to education and medical research. A fixture of Los Angeles society, Broad is spearheading revitalization of the city's downtown.

Influential indicators?

Consumer confidence, unemployment and political gridlock.

Best investing advice?
"Don't bet the farm."

Dividend income or capital growth?
Growth and price appreciation.

Best and worst investments?
Best: SunAmerica and gold. Worst: Financial services stocks.

Currency?
The euro will be the worst. The U.S. dollar is what I hold most of my portfolio in.

Margin in portfolio?
Not in this uncertain world.

Where to park $1 million in cash?
High-quality multinational consumer companies such as Procter & Gamble Co., Coca-Cola Co., Kraft Foods Inc. and Johnson & Johnson.

Best fixed-income opportunities?
Quality high-yield bonds.

Hedge-fund investing?
Individual funds and managers with the best long-term track record, such as Seth Klarman at Baupost Group LLC.

Gold, U.S. Treasuries or a Picasso?
The Picasso.

Alisher Usmanov
Primary Asset:
45% stake in Metalloinvest, Russia's largest iron ore producer
Residence: Moscow
Industries: Metals, mining, telecom, technology
One of Russia's richest citizens, Usmanov runs Gazprominvest-holdings, the investment arm of the state gas monopoly. The bulk of his wealth comes from Russian metals, mining, telecom and tech companies. The top shareholder in Metalloinvest, Usmanov also owns 25.3% of Mail.ru Group Ltd., Russia's largest Internet company, and 31% of No. 3 mobile-phone operator OAO MegaFon.

Usmanov, 58, who has invested in Facebook Inc. and Groupon Inc., seeded his fortune as Russia sold off government-owned metals companies in the 1990s. He's often in London watching the English Premier League's Arsenal, a soccer team in which he and a partner own a 29% stake.

Fixed-income opportunities?
U.S. government bonds and government bonds of strong European countries (primarily Germany, France) and those of China have better prospects.

Currencies?
If EU leaders don't make a clear decision on how to exit the crisis, then it's likely we will see bankruptcies by some member states. The euro will suffer the most. This in itself wouldn't be all bad for the European economy, as pillars such as Germany will get support for exports.

What do you look for in buying stocks?
I first of all trust my own instinct, experience that I gained over years and feeling when the moment is right for buying shares. That is what one calls intuition.

Patrick Soon-Shiong
Primary Asset: Proceeds from combined $6.6 billion sales of American Pharmaceutical Partners and Abraxis BioScience Inc.
Residence: Los Angeles
Industry: Pharmaceuticals
South African-born Soon-Shiong, 59, left the UCLA Medical School faculty in 1991 after performing the first transplant of a whole pancreas in school history. That year, he co-founded VivoRX Pharmaceuticals Inc. and worked on a diabetes treatment. A year later, he co-created Abraxane, a breast cancer treatment, which he went on to co-own through American Pharmaceutical Partners. Today, Soon-Shiong says he has stakes in more than 30 companies. He bought a minority share of the Los Angeles Lakers pro basketball team from Earvin "Magic" Johnson in 2010 and rates Lakers season tickets a safer investment than gold, U.S. Treasuries or a prime Picasso.

Gold: opportunity, bubble or enigma?
Gold is both a bubble and an enigma. It's no longer an opportunity.

Where to park $1 million in cash?

The most important thing is not to lose money right now.

Fixed-income investments?
The time for bonds has passed. I thought munis were an incredible opportunity for a while. But those days are gone.

Hedge-fund investing?

Hedge funds are dangerous. I don't know anyone who can predict volatility, buy across industries, hedge and invest internationally. Assets are too interrelated.

Best advice?
Invest in yourself and the people you believe in.

John Paul DeJoria
Primary Assets: Stakes in John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron Spirits Co.
Residence: Los Angeles
Industry: Retail
Raised near Los Angeles's hardscrabble Echo Park neighborhood, DeJoria, 67, tapped into the entrepreneurial vein early. He went door-to-door selling Christmas cards at age nine and then expanded to encyclopedias. In 1980, he invested $700 in his friend's hair-care company, the eponymously named Paul Mitchell. The company now generates some $1 billion in annual revenue. DeJoria invested his profits from the beauty business into booze, co-founding tequila maker Patron.

Influential indicators?

Beauty salons. Typically, customers will visit every six weeks; in downturns, that drops to every eight weeks. When the frequency starts to go up again, it indicates the economy is improving.

Best investing advice?

How to buy a put, told to me by a woman named Rebecca.

Where to park $1 million in cash?

Twenty-five percent in gold, 25% in silver, 25% in NYSE blue-chip stocks that pay a dividend and 25% between Asian and European blue chips that pay a dividend.

Currencies?
The euro will depreciate most. I recommend having most of a portfolio in U.S. dollars and Swiss francs.

Joe Jamail
Primary Asset: More than $1 billion in cash, stocks and bonds
Residence: Houston
Industry: Law
The so-called King of Torts made his mark in 1985 representing Pennzoil Co. in its lawsuit against Texaco Inc., earning the trial lawyer a then-record $335 million contingency fee. Jamail, 86, has since litigated personal injury and corporate malfeasance cases, securing more than $13 billion in verdicts and settlements. Renowned for his blue language, Jamail was once admonished by the Delaware Supreme Court as being "rude, uncivil and vulgar."

What do you look for when buying stocks?
I usually don't invest much in the market directly. I always look for price returns rather than income, because I make enough f------ money out of this sue shop-my law office. Most of my stuff is in bonds.

Best investing advice?

My dad told me, "Don't buy any g------ stocks, OK?" He had a chain of grocery stores. He liked that cash coming in.

Fixed-income investments?
Tax-free municipal bonds, guaranteed by a public school fund.

Is gold an opportunity, a bubble or an enigma?
I own some gold. I have a bunch of gold bars, and we give them as Christmas presents to the grandchildren-an ounce for each. They don't get to keep it. The parents put it away for them.

Is there a money manager you would trust with your entire portfolio?
No. But if I had to trust somebody, it would be Fayez Sarofim.

Best and worst investments?
Best: A law degree, no question about it. Worst: Airline stocks.

Where to park $1 million in cash?

In my mattress.

Peter Hargreaves
Primary Asset: 32.2% of Hargreaves Lansdown Plc, the U.K.'s biggest retail broker
Residence: Bristol, England
Industry: Financial services
The former accountant co-founded Hargreaves Lansdown in 1981. Today, it operates a fund supermarket with pension, annuity, discount brokerage and wealth management services for 388,000 clients. Shares soared 185% from the May 2007 IPO to November 29; assets under management rose 12% to 22.3 billion pounds ($35.7 billion) in the 12 months through September. Hargreaves, 65, an avid gardener, earned 74 million pounds from dividends before taxes from the start of 2008 through mid-November, according to Bloomberg data.

What do you look for when buying stocks?
Capital growth.

Fixed-income investments?
German bonds for the currency play when the euro implodes.

Where to put $1 million in cash?
$500,000 in Singapore dollars and $500,000 in Norwegian krone.

Is there a money manager you would trust with your entire portfolio?
Me.

Randal J. Kirk
Primary Asset: Investments via Third Security LLC
Residence: Radford, Va.
Industry: Pharmaceuticals
Kirk's Third Security has scored some of the past decade's biggest biotech hits. His greatest: the $2.6 billion sale of New River Pharmaceuticals Inc. to Shire Plc in 2007. He personally netted $1.2 billion. Looking for another big payday the next year, he invested $200 million in synthetic-DNA researcher Intrexon Corp. He followed with the $1.2 billion sale of Clinical Data Inc. to Forest Laboratories Inc. in February 2011, personally reaping more than $600 million. Kirk, 57, splits time among homes in California, Connecticut, Florida and Virginia, where he lays down electronic music tracks in his recording studio.

Dividend income or price returns?
Both are relevant, and we hold stocks that pay dividends and those that do not. We have only a small percentage of our portfolio in public stocks.

Best advice?
"Good deals are like bus stops; there is one on every corner." Told to me by Red Robertson of Grundy, Va., who invested in my first deal. The advice illustrated he was not so interested in the deal as in my dedication to it. One invests in the guy behind the deal, above all else.

Margin in portfolio?

No. Mr. Market thinks things are going to be worth less in the future and therefore borrowing to own more earnings-based or asset-value-based things would be foolish. We invest in technology and expect returns substantially greater than borrowing costs in almost any economy.

Should wealthy investors buy privately held tech darlings on secondary markets?
Only if they would participate as a judge in a Keynesian beauty contest. I am not one of those people.

Rubens Menin Teixeira De Souza
Primary Asset: 32% of MRV Engenharia & Participacoes SA, Brazil's fifth-largest homebuilder by revenue
Residence: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Industry: Real estate
Menin, 55, became a billionaire building homes for Brazil's lowest earners. He founded MRV in 1979, riding out more than a decade of hyperinflation by keeping costs down. An advisor to the government's flagship low-income-housing initiative, he says his work is essential to the growth of Brazil's middle class. MRV has sponsored the Mineiro Athletic Club, one of Minas Gerais state's two main soccer clubs, as well as a local women's volleyball team.

Hedge-fund investing?

Individual funds, with recognized portfolio managers.

Influential economic indicators?

S&P 500, U.S. dollar versus real exchange rate and Bovespa index.

Best investing advice?
Buying Brazilian C bonds when they were trading at 40 cents on the dollar. The securities, issued in the 1990s, traded at par in 2005 when the government bought back the last of them.

Where to park $1 million in cash?

Brazilian investment-grade bonds.

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