In this sweeping memoir, famed “Bond King” Bill Gross recounts his childhood in Ohio and San Francisco; his experience counting cards in Las Vegas and its influence on his investing techniques; the founding of – and his eventual breakup with -- bond powerhouse PIMCO; retirement and his long-term economic outlook. Written in the irreverent and highly personalized style made famous in his popular Investment Outlooks, “I’m Still Standing” brings you along for the ride as Gross helps build what was once the world’s largest bond fund, and mints multiple millionaires among employees and investors . The Bill Gross story begins with a humble childhood in West Middletown, Ohio, where his father worked at a steel company before packing off the Gross family on a train to San Francisco in 1954. Gross thrived academically and earned a scholarship to Duke where he tried out for the basketball team – and was cut within 15 minutes of the tryout. Before graduating, Gross ended up in a bad car accident, which allowed him time during his recovery to read Ed Thorp’s seminal “Beat the Dealer” about strategies to win at blackjack. With his newfound knowledge, he hopped a freight train with $200 sewed inside his pants and landed in Las Vegas, where he parlayed the $200 into $10,000 to pay for graduate school, and learned a lifetime lesson in the principles of investing. After surviving a two-year stint in Vietnam as captain of a small PT boat transporting Navy SEALs upriver in the Mekong Delta, he went on to the UCLA Anderson graduate school in finance. He credits Ed Thorp’s follow-up book, “Beat the Market”, with providing him the knowledge of convertible bonds that helped land him a job at Pacific Mutual Life in downtown Los Angeles. While the job started humbly, with Gross clipping bond coupons in the basement vault, he learned to trade bonds, which would lead to the founding of PIMCO. Success, fame – and notoriety – would follow, with regular guest appearances beginning in 1982 on the iconic “Wall Street Week” with Louis Rukeyser – until he fired off a rubber band at Rukeyser’s ear to illustrate a point about America’s burgeoning budget deficit. Gross and his rubber band were disinvited from the show. But after building PIMCO into a $2 trillion-asset behemoth – and his renown Total Return Fund into the world’s largest bond mutual fund with almost $293 billion in assets – Gross was ignominiously fired in 2014 from the firm he co-founded and built into a raging success. He sued PIMCO, and later settled, but he never lost his passion for investing, family, philanthropy, and golf. “I’m Still Standing -- Bond King Bill Gross and the PIMCO Express” tells the unique, first-person tale of an American success story in his own words.