(FORTUNE Magazine) – The last time the market was in the doldrums, Jim Rogers made a fortune--and then some. A co-founder of the Quantum fund in 1973 with hedge fund legend George Soros, Rogers helped guide the portfolio to a better than 4,000% return over the rest of the '70s as the S&P 500 rose less than 50%. He recently published Adventure Capitalist, a chronicle of his second around-the-world trip on the hunt for investing themes. --B.O.

Where are the current opportunities for investors?

The American stock market is not really the place to be right now and won't be for a few years. The best place to be for most investors is commodities, which is where the new bull market is. Supply is flat to down, demand continues to grow, and inventories have been worked down. So commodities will be doing well for several more years. And by the way, the bull market has already started. We launched a commodities index fund Aug. 1, 1998. That index fund is up 100%.

After your first trip around the world you invested heavily in Botswana and made a bundle. Any new opportunities like that?

If I'm correct that natural resources are going to do well, then obviously Canada and Australia are going to be better markets than the U.S. If you invest in natural-resource-based economies, you'll do better. I'm very bullish on China. There are other places where there are spectacular opportunities, like Bolivia. Bolivia has a stock exchange, but it's tiny at the moment. Bolivia has been a basket case for hundreds of years, but in the past 18 years it has had relative stability. More important than that, they've discovered gigantic amounts of natural gas in the past five years. That whole part of South America--Peru, western Brazil, northern Chile--is opening up. It will be one of the great frontiers of the 21st century.

Aren't commodities a risky proposition for retail investors?

Anybody can invest in commodities. It's very simple. Commodities get a terrible rap because everybody has a brother-in-law who's lost his shirt in soybeans. That's true. The reason, however, is that they invested on very low margin. They didn't know what they were doing--and they put up 5% or 10% margin and got wiped out just on fluctuation even if they did. You can buy commodities the same way you buy stocks. People buy IBM, and if they buy $100,000 worth they put up $100,000. You can do the same with soybeans. And you don't have to worry about the wild fluctuations of thin margin. Look at Cisco or many other stocks in the past five years, and they've been much more volatile than commodities, for God's sakes. Commodities have been terribly unvolatile compared with the stock market. It's a bad rap.