“Ah, the most important person in the room,” quipped Jim Rogers, looking past me to the Telegraph’s photographer. “It doesn’t matter what I say, as long as you make me look good.”

George Soros’s former investment partner packs a deal of self-confidence into his diminutive frame. And so he might.

Not only did Jim Rogers make enough money to retire at the tender age of 37, he’s had the imagination to do something interesting with his money in the 26 years since he gave up the day job.

Only Mr. Rogers could get away with showing a short what-I-did-on-my-holiday video at the start of a presentation. But who else’s most recent break was a three-year, 116 country, 152,235 mile world tour in a customized canary yellow Mercedes.

Even more impressively, his fiancée Paige sat next to him for the whole trip and he still persuaded her to marry him on their return. One incredulous man he met on his travels told him “My fiancée got out half-way when we drove across America — and I didn’t even slow down!”

No one puts the case for an extended bull market in raw materials better than the man who cleaned up in the 1970s natural resources boom and fully intends to do so again.

Mr. Rogers’s case for commodities is simple. “In all the commodity bull markets I’ve studied, the shortest lasted 15 years and the longest 23 years,” he said in the practiced tones of a man who can afford to make the same point over and over until the rest of the world catches up.

“If supply and demand get back into balance, then the bull market will end, but I don’t see any significant new supply coming into the market for any commodity and I certainly don’t see demand slowing down.”

Mr. Rogers is a conviction investor. He believes the emergence of China has changed the world.

“There’s no doubt China is going to be the great country of the 21st century,” he said.

For him, that is the single most important fact for an investor today. “The last time we had a bull market in the 1970s, Asia was not involved. This time around we’ve got three billion people in Asia who want to live like we do. Whether this bull market lasts 15 years I don’t know, but I know it’s got a long way to go.”

Mr. Rogers walks his Asian talk as well. His three-year-old daughter, about whom he is touchingly goo-ey, is already a fluent Mandarin speaker. He appointed a Chinese nanny under strict instructions to speak only her native language in the nursery.

Having joined the club so late in life, the 64-year-old Mr. Rogers is an enthusiastic advocate of parenthood.

“If you haven’t got your own children, take the rest of the day off and go get started,” he advised delegates to the conference at which we met.

Far from easing back, Mr. Rogers is as keen as ever to be at the heart of things and as soon as his $15 million belle epoque mansion on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is sold he plans to start a new life with his young family in Asia.

Unsurprisingly for someone who buys into the Chinese century with such alacrity, Mr. Rogers is unimpressed by his native America and its beleaguered currency.

“Whether the dollar continues to weaken next year or not, I don’t know. It’s oversold at the moment. But I certainly expect it to continue to decline for years to come. The dollar is losing its status as the world’s reserve currency, whether we like it or not.”

Mr. Rogers set up a bank account for his daughter recently in Switzerland. “She knows what they’re doing to the currency,” he joked. More seriously, he noted that she does not hold any stocks, believing that the current phase for equity markets is like the long-range-bound period between 1966 and 1982 when only talented stock pickers could make money out of shares.

Dubbed the Indiana Jones of investment, Mr. Rogers has led the sort of life many desk-bound wage slaves fantasize about.

Forty years ago, on a post-graduate scholarship at Oxford, Mr. Rogers coxed the rowing eight in the Boat Race. Even then, he was hanging on to the few dollars he had in anticipation of a fall in the value of the pound.

Hehas been making giant bets on the world’s markets ever since. In the 1970s he co-founded the Quantum fund with George Soros, steering the early hedge fund to a 4,000% gain in 10 years while the S&P 500 rose less than 50%.

He was bearish ahead of the 1987 crash and profited from a big short position. More recently, he realized the long commodity bear market of the 1980s and 1990s was over in 1998 when Merrill Lynch finally gave up on the asset class after years of poor returns.

At this point, Mr. Rogers already had one mammoth world tour under his belt and he was preparing to set out on the second.

The first, criss-crossing six continents on a BMW motorbike, resulted in his first book “Investment Biker.” The second he recounted in “Adventure Capitalist” and he has since knocked out another rallying cry for the natural resources supercycle, “Hot Commodities.”