22 Facts About Barton Biggs

Barton Biggs is best known for accurately predicting the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.

Barton Biggs grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in Washington, DC 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.

Barton Biggs attended the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and graduated in 1951.

Barton Biggs studied under poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren as an English major and was a member of the Elihu secret society.

At age 18, Barton Biggs was given a portfolio of 15 stocks worth about $150,000, but he showed little interest in finance and investing in his youth.

Barton Biggs 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.

Barton Biggs took his father's advice and read Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, first published in 1934.

Barton Biggs graduated from NYU Stern School of Business with distinction.

In 1965, Barton Biggs co-founded one of the industry's first hedge funds, Fairfield Partners.

Barton Biggs served on the bank's board until 1996 and retired from the company in 2003 at age 70.

Barton Biggs claimed to have left Morgan Stanley partly because his job had evolved into managing people rather than formulating strategy.

Barton Biggs "sealed his fame" as an investor when he correctly identified the dot-com bubble at a time the Dow Jones Industrial Average was posting annual gains that had averaged 25 percent from 1995 to 1999.

Barton Biggs appeared numerous times on CNBC and was a member of the Barron's Roundtable.

At the time of his death, Barton Biggs lived in Connecticut.

Barton Biggs died from complications arising from a bacterial infection.

Barton 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".

Barton Biggs wrote about quirks of hedge fund culture; he noted that golf was very popular, perhaps due to its "measurable" nature similar to investing.

Barton Biggs was author of the 2008 book Wealth, War and Wisdom.

Barton Biggs 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.

Barton Biggs recommended that his readers should "assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure".

Barton Biggs 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.

In 2010, Barton Biggs published a novel about the stock market, A Hedge-Fund Tale.