ABOUT THE COMPANY. Ronin Software publishes useful,
timely, and authoritative business information with a tax, legal
and financial emphasis. We author and publish software programs
with business-oriented content, as well as authoring (by Michael
D. Jenkins) a million-selling series of small business self-help
books for each of the 50 states, which were published as print
versions by Oasis Press until 1998, and republished in 1999 as a
single book with state tax and legal information for all 50 states
and D.C. chapter on CD-ROM, entitled Starting and Operating a
Business in the U.S., through Running 'R' Media Group.
The print versions of the books have long since been out of
print, but we fully updated and revised the entire series in 2005,
in e-book and software formats, published under the Ronin Software
imprint, and updated it for all all 50 states and D.C. each year
until 2013. We also began publishing all of the e-books as
Kindle
books in 2011, and since 2013 we have continued to publish and
update 34 of the state editions. Depending on the state, 33
state editions have been fully updated in 2023 and 20 2024.
The software version of the book series,
Small Business Advisor,
which we temporarily stopped publishing in 2020, has now been revived,
with 2023 or 2024 updated information for 33 state and D.C. editions,
and all of the federal tax and legal information has been updated in
the last 12 months. We constantly update the federal information
throughout the year, one chapter a month, on a rolling basis, so that
the federal information in the software is up-to-date as of the month
each state edition is published.
We also publish the highly sophisticated (and addictive)
stock market and corporate financial simulations called
Wall Street Raider and
Speculator: The Stock Trading Simulation.
We began publishing the Wall Street Raider program (through our
former book publisher, Oasis Press/PSI Research) way back in 1986,
and have continued to develop and enhance it ever since, as a
Windows program in recent years. It has become somewhat of a
"cult favorite" over the years, with registered (paid) users in
120 countries, ranging from Greenland to Paraguay to Angola to the
Sultanate of Brunei to Malta, to Uzbekistan, and even Antarctica.
Version 9.75 of Wall Street Raider was released in 2023.
"Speculator" is a recent spin-off from Wall Street
Raider, and is focused on trading any of up to 1500+ stocks,
or bonds (including convertibles), options, or commodity
futures, as a small or "middle-class" investor with only
$100,000 to start with -- unlike Raider, in which you start
off rich, with up to a billion dollars, and use that wealth
to take over and manage companies (and try to increase their
stock price), building your corporate empire like a Carl
Icahn or Warren Buffett. Speculator 4.11 is the most recent
release (April, 2024).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. The author of the
Small Business Advisor and Wall Street Raider and the Speculator
financial/stock market games, Michael D. Jenkins, is a graduate
of Louisiana State University, who earned a bachelor's (B.A.)
degree in Government, and received his doctorate (J.D.) at
the Harvard Law School. His background includes several years
practicing as an economics and financial consultant in D.C. and
L.A. with Economics Research Associates, a national consulting firm;
then as a CPA and tax manager in Los Angeles and Newport Beach with
Peat, Marwick and Mitchell (now "KPMG") and later as a senior tax
attorney in San Francisco with the large law firm of Cooley, Godward,
Castro, Huddleson and Tatum (now the "Cooley" firm of some 800+ lawyers).
He went on to become a tax partner for several years in the large
regional (San Francisco Bay Area) CPA firm of Kimbell, McKenna and
von Kaschnitz, in Alameda, California, but retired from law and CPA
practices to devote full-time to his writing career in 1986, the
year in which he also published his first software program, Wall
Street Raider, for MS-DOS computers.
Along the way, he wrote and published his first book, Starting and
Operating a Business in California, during a sabbatical in 1980,
initially just as an adjunct to his law practice, but when the California
book edition and similar editions for Texas and Florida became highly
successful, he created a partnership with the global CPA firm of Ernst &
Young to develop similar book editions for each of the 50 states and D.C.,
which in the aggregate sold over 1.2 million copies in the 1980s and 1990s,
as noted above.
Mr. Jenkins has continued to publish the "Starting and Operating a Business"
ebook series, with 34 state and D.C. editions, updating several of the state editions
each year. He temporarily ceased updating the Kindle
ebook series in 2020, but resumed updating the series in 2023, with 33 editions
fully updated more recently, from June 2023 through November 2024.
From 1989 until 2020 he published a sophisticated software program,
Small Business Advisor, as an MS-DOS
program initially, then for Windows. Sales and updating were temporarily
halted in 2020, due to the COVID epidemic, but have resumed in 2024,
after over a year spent updating the federal and state content (laws)
of the program, a rather massive undertaking. The original (MS-DOS)
editions of the Small Business Advisor were licensed to and used by every
U.S. Small Business Administration office and SCORE chapter in the United
States for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, until MS-DOS
programs became obsolete, and publication of the program ceased for
several years. However, in 2005, he re-released Small Business Advisor as
a Windows program, in its current format.
An incorrigible bachelor, Mr. Jenkins now resides in a scenic
area of Southern Utah, near Zion and Bryce Canyons and has engaged
regularly in adrenalin-secreting, slightly insane activities such
as sea kayaking off Kauai in hurricane conditions, a ride in a
2-man deep water submersible down into the depths off Hawaii,
white-knuckle white-water rafting on the Colorado, Rogue, Rio
Grande and other rivers, mountain biking, and the occasional
parachute jump or paragliding misadventure, for relaxation,
terror, and inspiration. However, he has drawn the line and
wishes to reassure readers that he refuses to engage in certain
riskier activities, such as bungee-jumping, alligator wrestling,
or slandering the Koran.
(Oh -- In case you're wondering about our company name,
"Ronin", it's an old Japanese term used to
describe feudal Samurai warriors whose masters had been
killed, and who thus became renegades or mercenaries. We
thought the name aptly described our company, when we began
self-publishing our software as shareware back in 1991. Not
that we are that mercenary, of course....) At 80 years of age,
Jenkins is still going strong and is still the sole owner
and entire workforce of Ronin Software.
Ronin Software relocated from the the Bay Area to the
suburbs of Seattle in the early 'nineties and in 1998 to
the beautiful red rock canyon country of Southern Utah.
("Utah -- It's a great place to hide out.")
Click on the e-mail link below to contact us by e-mail.
Or click here to see the owner (the good guy in the white hat), hard at work....(7/98,
in the Taos Box Canyon of the Rio Grande)
For a few mind-altering pictures of some of our local Utah/Arizona
landscape (plus a dash of a few islands: Tahiti (Moorea), Iceland, the
Faroe Islands, Kauai, and the Shetlands), click on any of the following image
links below:
-
- Are we still in Utah, Dorothy? (Almost...It's Arizona) (3/99)
- Swirly View, at "The Wave" (Arizona) (3/99) (No hallucinogens required)
- This here's mine... all mine....
- Uh, what happened to the horses?
- OK... So I go behind a bush 2 minutes, and my bike's gone...? (Snow Canyon, Ivins, Utah)
- Trail through remote and idyllic Echo Park (Colorado, 2006)
- Steamboat Rock, Green River, in Echo Park (2019)
- Waist deep in the Big Muddy (Moorea, Tahiti, 2001)
- The far north of Iceland (Seydisfjordhur), in summer
- Braving the elements, at the Guilfoss, Iceland
- A church on the bustling (Nordic) Faroe Island of Sandoy
- My Viking boat, on Unst, in the Shetlands (not
really -- I took the ferry from Iceland and the Faroe Islands)
- View from the Princeville (Kauai) condo balcony
- On the trail, with passenger, near Moab
- Is this Mars? (With friend Shelley; notice who's got the heavy backpack) Beam us up, Scotty!
- A quiet, bucolic place... Capitol Reef Park
- The good ol' days....Taking a beer break between volleyball matches (Cancun, Mexico, 1987)
- Cajun-style birthday (Louisiana, 2017) -- a "boudin birthday cake"
- Life below the big red cliffs, in southern Utah
- Watching the 'Mother Ship' land (Devil's Tower, 2023)