"Dalio would often review the results in his office ... chewing on Scotch tape, as was his habit when he was concentrating..."
This article really buried the lede here
'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
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Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#42There was a NYT article about Bridgewater and Dalio last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/how-does-the-wor... If these articles are right, the picture I'm coming away with is that Dalio had some good strategies that gave him an edge decades ago but now his competitors have caught up and pulled ahead. Apparently Bridgewater no longer has any quantitative edge and it's really just Dalio and a few close…
Same deal with Bill Gross (“the bond king”). Macro tailwind, a few good compounding successes, and riding that draft for the remainder.
They don’t retire, they just graduate to “thought leaders” because what else are you going to do with that much free time and ego. The money no longer matters, all that is left is to chase status.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gross+lucky
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2013/04/03/great-investors-more-l...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-janus-henderson-billgross...
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2016-252 (ETF pricing violations mentioned in the book)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250120854/thebondking
(highly recommend the book "The Bond King" for deep background on Gross' professional career and PIMCO)
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#43Ugh, I had a recruiter approach me a couple of years ago to work for some company that had a "radical openness" culture or something like that. The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation. The way they sold it sounded a bit culty to me, and the potential for abusive behaviour seemed high. Di…
When I was looking for work back in 2016 there was a company who advertised their way of working as "infrared", if I remember correctly. It was all about total openness and autonomy. For example, they asked one employee to decide how many hours everyone should work per day, and they decided on something, which was then applied company-wide. This was apparently "democracy in action". Quite odd. I think they've since dropped that whole thing.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#44I stopped listening to Ray Dalio when he trotted out the meme about out of control crime in big cities at the beginning of one interview or another. I don't know if he's lazy, or out of touch, but I don't like it when people are fast and loose with extremely verifiable information. Like, maybe you have expert intuition the future of inflation, that's great; but if you're going to talk about extremely verifiable infor…
Would you say that believability is very important to you?
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#45Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#46Most of these hedge funds CEOs are psychopaths and completely unfit to be in the society if it wasn’t for the wealth they have, a lot of people used to put up with that but since COVID, a lot have been changed, that’s why they hate the remote work, it doesn’t feed their narcissistic egos.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#47Ugh, I had a recruiter approach me a couple of years ago to work for some company that had a "radical openness" culture or something like that. The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation. The way they sold it sounded a bit culty to me, and the potential for abusive behaviour seemed high. Di…
> The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation.
On the engineering side, ideally this is how things are done anyway.
I've never had a problem digging into the ideas presented by engineers more senior than me, and I've always encouraged junior engineers to question any ideas I present.
Everyone, independent of seniority, is blind to giant gaping flaws in their own ideas. People also don't know what they don't know. If I have a gap in my knowledge, any plans I come up with are not going to take what I don't know into consideration if I don't know that I don't know something.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#48Who is doing the trading? It seems like making money is almost an afterthought and other traders can't seem to find these Bridgewater whale trades. Is it all a front or a Madoff situation?
The SEC investigated them a long time ago and determined that their trades were legitimate but just done in convoluted ways. There is a recent NYT piece that covers it. There's a new book about Bridgewater coming out so that's why there are so many articles about them recently.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#49Wait until you hear about "dot collector". Any Bridgewater veterans care to comment?
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#50It's interesting. I have seen rating systems work – in the military. They're harsh to some, but in some situations, you have to filter out B and C players to keep the A players alive. I do think transparent systems w/360º peer reviews are better than many others. I wonder what else is out there that might work.
The problem is that the majority of people are bad, so trusting the majority is a bad idea.
Bad in what sense? Surely that's not correct otherwise I imagine society would be significantly worse than it is today.