Douglas R Casey Books in Order

If you want the book that made him famous: Crisis Investing.
If you want his updated crisis view: Crisis Investing → Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s.
If you want the international angle: The International Man → The Expatriate Investor → International Investing.
If you want the ideas in conversation form: Totally Incorrect → Right on the Money.
If you want fiction first: Speculator → Drug Lord → Assassin.

Douglas R Casey was born in Chicago in 1946 and graduated from Georgetown University in 1968. He has spent decades as a writer, speculator, and publisher, building a career around the idea that chaos and mispricing often travel together.

He did not come to writing through a writing program.

After college, Casey was trying to make enough money to chase what he once called fortune and high adventure in the southern hemisphere. In Washington, he worked as a substitute teacher by day and a bartender by night, then moved into selling group insurance to law firms and later worked as a stockbroker. While trying to explain the world to himself, not just react to it, he started putting his ideas on paper. That effort became Crisis Investing.

The timing was almost perfect. Crisis Investing appeared in 1979, hit a nerve during a period of inflation and anxiety, and went on to sit at the top of the bestseller lists for months. It became the best-selling financial book of 1980. Casey followed it with Strategic Investing and, years later, Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s, returning again and again to the same question: where is the opportunity when everyone else is focused on the panic?

He has always liked borders, both geographic and intellectual.

That streak runs through The International Man, The Expatriate Investor, and International Investing. These books treat place as part of the investment thesis. For Casey, where you live, bank, travel, and hold assets matters almost as much as what you buy. Readers who connect with this side of his work usually like the mix of practical offshore thinking and a larger argument about mobility, independence, and not being trapped by one country's rules.

Casey's public voice has long been openly contrarian, skeptical of government power, and drawn to hard assets, commodities, and situations other investors avoid. Later books like Totally Incorrect and Right on the Money present those ideas in interview form. They move between economics, ethics, gold, real estate, speculation, and politics in a way that feels more like a long, opinionated conversation than a textbook. Even people who disagree with him tend to know exactly where he stands.

He also cultivated a life that matched the books. Older profiles describe him traveling widely, researching opportunities on the ground, racing motorcycles, and treating investing as something tied to the real world, not just numbers on a screen. That restless energy helps explain why his work so often returns to mines, currencies, property, borders, and places most readers would never think to look.

In the 2010s, Casey turned to fiction with John Hunt and launched the High Ground novels, beginning with Speculator and continuing with Drug Lord and Assassin. Those books follow Charles Knight through gold speculation, the drug trade, and political violence, using thriller plots to work through many of the same questions that drive Casey's nonfiction. Who really holds power? What counts as justice? How do you stay free when the rules are written by people who benefit from the system?

Travel still seems to be central to his life. Over the years he has lived in multiple countries, and in later interviews and bios he has often described spending much of his time in South America, especially Argentina and Uruguay. That international outlook is not just part of the brand. It is the thread that ties together almost everything he writes.