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