Bill Gross Announces New Book, 'I'm Still Standing: Bond King Bill Gross and the PIMCO Express' All Proceeds from Sales of the Book to Benefit Charity

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif., March 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- "Bond King" Bill Gross is pleased to announce the release today of his new book, "I'm Still Standing: Bond King Bill Gross and the PIMCO Express," a sweeping personal memoir that recounts his humble beginnings, the peak of his success building the PIMCO bond empire and his eventual retirement from Janus Henderson Investors, and the trials and tribulations along the way. Written in the irreverent and highly personalized style made famous in his popular Investment Outlooks, "I'm Still Standing" brings you along for the ride as Gross helps build what was once the world's largest bond fund, and mints multiple millionaires among colleagues and investors.

The Bill Gross story begins in West Middletown, Ohio, where his father worked at a steel company before packing off the Gross family on a train to San Francisco in 1954. Gross thrived academically and earned a scholarship to Duke where he tried out for the basketball team – and was cut within 15 minutes of the tryout. Before graduating, Gross ended up in a serious car accident, which allowed time during his recovery to read Ed Thorp's seminal "Beat the Dealer" about strategies to win at blackjack. With his newfound knowledge, he hopped a freight train with $200 sewed inside his pants and headed to Las Vegas, where he parlayed the $200 into $10,000 to pay for graduate school, and learned a lifetime lesson in the principles of investing.

After surviving a two-year stint in Vietnam as captain of a small PT boat transporting Navy SEALs upriver in the Mekong Delta, he attended the UCLA Anderson graduate school in finance. He credits Ed Thorp's follow-up book, "Beat the Market", with providing him the knowledge of convertible bonds that helped land him a job at Pacific Mutual Life in Los Angeles. While the job started humbly, with Gross clipping bond coupons in the basement vault, he learned to trade bonds, which would lead to the founding of PIMCO. Success and fame would follow, with regular guest appearances beginning in 1982 on the iconic "Wall Street Week" with Louis Rukeyser – until he fired off a rubber band at Rukeyser's ear to illustrate a point about America's burgeoning budget deficit. Gross and his rubber band were disinvited from the show.

But after building PIMCO into a $2 trillion-asset behemoth – and his Total Return Fund into the world's largest bond mutual fund with almost $293 billion in assets – Gross was ignominiously fired in 2014 from the firm he co-founded and built into a raging success. He sued PIMCO, and later successfully settled, but he never lost his passion for investing, family, philanthropy, and golf.

True to form, Gross also includes his thoughts about modern finance and the virus of too much debt, along with "the cult of equity, cryptos, NFTs, and now the metaverse instead of cash-flow sensitive assets that pay out dividends." Gross sees some merit in cryptocurrency, primarily Bitcoin and Ethereum, and even expects Bitcoin, which he owns, to appreciate more than the S&P 500 in future years.

But he cautions against believing double-digit forecasts for broad indices or high-flying stocks, and warns of threats that include future age-related demographics; inflation; historic wealth gaps; the lack of private pensions beyond Social Security; geopolitical risks with Iran and China (and now Russia, again); cyber security, civil unrest in the US; and global warming.

"I'm Still Standing -- Bond King Bill Gross and the PIMCO Express" tells the unique, first-person tale of an American success story in his own words. The digital book is for sale beginning today exclusively on Amazon.com. All proceeds will be donated to charity through the William, Jeff and Jennifer Gross Family Foundation.

For more information about the William, Jeff and Jennifer Gross Family Foundation, please visit https://grossfamilyfoundation.com/. For additional information about Bill Gross, visit https://williamhgross.com/.

SOURCE Bill Gross