Barton Michael Biggs (November 26, 1932 – July 14, 2012) was a money manager whose attention to emerging markets marked him as one of the world's first and foremost global investment strategists, a position he held—after inventing it in 1985—at Morgan Stanley, where he worked as a partner for over 30 years.

He grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in Washington, D.C. His paternal grandfather, Hermann M. Biggs, was the top public-health official in New York and instituted measures that contributed to the eradication of tuberculosis.

He ended up choosing that career path after feeling left out from conversations between his father and younger brother, Jeremy, who worked at a pension fund.

In a July 1999 interview in Bloomberg Television, Biggs called the U.S. stock market "the biggest bubble in the history of the world", a view that was dismissed by the industry until March 2000, when the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 78 percent.

As recently as May, Biggs, 75, said the U.S. economy will grow in the second half of 2008, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index may climb to a record and commodity prices will retreat as much as 30 percent.

[8] However, he correctly called the bottom in U.S. stocks in March 2009, and that year Traxis's flagship fund returned three times the industry average.

[5] SmartMoney magazine once called him "the ultimate big-picture man ... the premier prognosticator on the international scene and a mover of markets from Argentina to Hong Kong.

[1] His niece, Fiona Katharine Biggs, a Barnard College graduate, is married to the billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller.

[10][11] Biggs was the author of Hedgehogging,[12] which came from a journal kept by the former creative writing major at Yale and chronicles some of the indignities of being in the hedge fund business as well as its "very brilliant and often eccentric and obsessive people".

[7] He wrote about quirks of hedge fund culture; he noted that golf was very popular, perhaps due to its "measurable" nature similar to investing.

He went so far as to recommend planning adaptation strategies now and setting up survival retreats: "Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food", Mr. Biggs wrote.