The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

Hedge funds dated to 1949 when a middle-aged ex-communist spy and sociologist, Alfred Winslow Jones, started the first such fund with $100,000. Jones borrowed money to make additional bets, using some of the additional capital to short stocks he thought would underperform.

In his first days at Bridgewater, Comey would find that his new gig came with certain costs, the first of which was his pride. He was told he had been assigned the thirty-one-year-old Bridgewater cohead of research, Matthew Granade, as his “ski partner,” as the hedge fund called it. The idea was to have someone a few feet away at all times to asses

Pershing Square hunted for a small number of quality companies, period, by assessing qualities such as the leadership skills of a given chief executive. At one point in the discussion, seemingly sensing the interview going off the rails and in search of some commonality, Ackman tried another tack. He gave Dalio a layup, the sort of question asked s

Never say anything about a person you wouldn’t say to him directly. If you do, you’re a slimy weasel.

Unlike Pure Alpha, which could bet in virtually any market worldwide, All-Weather was basically a whole lot of bonds. The asset mix was 13 percent equities and 87 percent fixed income. It also used generous leverage. All-Weather juiced its returns on relatively low-yielding fixed income by borrowing money to boost the bets.

Bridgewater typically hired fresh college graduates, almost all of them men, leading some staffers to joke that the cafeteria scene looked like a J.Crew catalog. An inordinate number came from Dartmouth, where Jensen had been president of his fraternity.

In training documents handed out to incoming Bridgewater hires, both men compared working at the firm to serving in the military. Dalio would tell new hires, “Imagine, in the midst of war, that there is a general who seeks the opinions of his lieutenants about the battle ahead, but also has to discuss whether his delivery style is ‘appropriate.’ No

Not all opinions are equally valuable so don’t treat them as such. Almost everyone has an opinion, but they’re not all equally valuable. Many are worthless or even harmful. So it is not logical to treat them as equally valuable. For example, the views of people without any track records or experience are not equal to the views of people with great

Only a tiny group at Bridgewater, no more than about ten people, enjoyed a different view. This band of almost all men were chosen not only on merit, but on loyalty. They almost without exception had never worked anywhere else. Dalio and Jensen plucked the members from the crew of Bridgewater investment associates and offered them entry to the inne