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 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 constantly in 2005, in e-book and
software formats, published under the Ronin Software imprint, and
updated all 50 each year until 2013. We began publishing all of the e-books
as Kindle books in 2011, and since 2013
we have continued to publish and update 33 of the state editions.
Depending on the state, all 33 state editions have been fully
updated in one of the years from 2018 through 2023.
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
114 countries, ranging from Greenland to Paraguay to Angola to the
Sultanate of Brunei to Malta. Version 9.75 of Wall Street Raider
was released in January, 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 4.10 was released in
August, 2023.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. The author of the Wall
Street Raider and Speculator financial/stock market games, Michael
Jenkins, is a graduate of Louisiana State University, who earmed a
bachelor's (B.A.) degree in Government, and received his doctorate (J.D.)
at the Harvard Law School in 1969. 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 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
Bay Area CPA firm of Kimbell, McKenna and von Kaschnitz, in Alameda,
California, prior to practicing solo as an attorney/CPA in
his own firm in Oakland, 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 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 and similar
editions for Texas and Florida became highly successful, he worked in
partnership with the 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.
In 2010, Mr. Jenkins retired from formal membership in the California Bar,
after ceasing active CPA practice several years earlier. He has continued to
keep the book series up to date in Kindle ebook format until March, 2020,
when he temporarily ceased updating the ebook series, but resumed updating
the series in 2023, with over a dozen state editions fully updated so far
in 2023.
Jenkins also has developed and publishes two software programs,
Wall Street Raider (a corporate financial game
and stock market simulation), and Speculator:
The Stock Trading Simulation (a stock, bonds, options and futures
trading game). From 1989 to 2020 he published a sophisticated software
program, Small Business Advisor, in MS-DOS and Windows versions. The MS-DOS
editions of the Small Business Advisor were licensed to and used by every
Small Business Administrtion office and SCORE chapter in the United States
for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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, white-water rafting, mountain biking
and the occasional parachute jump or paragliding misadventure,
for relaxation, terror, and inspiration. However, he has drawn
the line and 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....)
Ronin Software relocated 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 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 a ferry across the Atlantic)
- 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