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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, all 34 state editions have been fully updated in the years from 2019 through 2024 and more states are being updated every month now.

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 30 states, 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 kept up-to-date.

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 20 editions fully updated more recently, from June 2023 through October 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 work force 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.")

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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:

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