The fund - Rob Copeland

•  The theory posited that employees should be tested and ranked by their overall problem-solving ability - known as stratum - and that managers must always be more capable of complex, broad thinking than their subordinates.
• two people inside bridgewater had higher believability scores than dalio himself
• Dalio: Why doesnt believability cascade from me?
• a new rule build into the software: Dalio himself would be the new baseline for believability in virtually all important categories
• A strong Sharpe ration was 2.0. though a ratio of 2.0 or even higher wasn't out of the question for top investors. ... Dalio's approach produced a Sharpe ration of less than 1.0
• Concepts of alpha and beta. Beta was the return that any investor would expect to get simplay from exposure to the markets. ... Alpha, on the other hand, was the extra juice. ... What a talented investment manager could earn on top of the beta return.
• To people that didnt deliver and respond after two reminders:
• "Those who didnt get them in and didnt communicate with you after being nagged twice are fired." ... People who cant do what they are asked or have a quality communication when asked to do something twice are not the sort of people that you want to rely on... Anyway, they are not the sort of people who I want to work here.
• A reporter: "In the time I spent at the firm I saw senior people criticizing subordinates - but not the reverse."
• The one metric highly correlated with how much a country would grow was the number of hours per week its citizens worked.
• "There is no cycle of history. It's a fantasy"
• "I always feel that when someone uses the f-word, they're losing the argument."
• "You've got 375 principles. Those arent principles. Toyota has fourteen principles. Amazon has fourteen principles. The bible has ten. 375 cant possibly be principles. They are an instruction manual.
• Stefanova described herself as having spend "nine years as a seinor executive and managing comitteee adviser reporting directly to the CEO at Bridgewater Associates and serving in critical investment and management leadershipo roles." In truth, she had been far removed from any invetment leadership role, critical or otherwise, but the pitch worked. She raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors,... [No one is checking facts]
• Though relatively few people present knew anything about how the hedge fund actually invested.
• Those at Bridgewater who had been rated highly... They earned it by being an artificial Ray Dalio. ... Model oneself after the only man who mattered. Bridgewater didnt run on believability. It ran on believers. "Ray, this is a religion", Rubinstein said
• Remarkably few people at briedgewater were involved day-to-day with how the hedge fund made money.
• Only a tiny group at Bridgewater, no more than about ten people, enjoyed a different view. This band of almost allm en were chosen not only on merit, but on loyalty. They almost eiwhtout exception had never woeked anywhere else. ... The lucky few satdown with Dalio and were offered a choise. n excahnge for signing a lifetime contract - and swarting never to work at another trading firm - they would be one of theh andful to see ithe inner secrets of Briedgewater, what Dalio had earlier in his career called the Holy Grail.
• There were two version of how Briedgewater invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the markets. One version Dalio told the public, and clients, over and over. The other version was what happened with the Circle of Trust behind closed doors.
• The transpared discussion.. It was also almost entirely irreleant to what Bridgewater did with its money; as one firmer top investment staffer put it: "It's a facade"
• I could run this firm", Jensen once told a friend over drinks, "on a single spreadsheet".
• The secret... was that there was no secret. Dalio was Bridgewater and Dalio decided Bridgewater's investments.
• There was essentially no grand system, no artificial intelligence of any substance, no Holy Grail. There was just Dalio.
• It also helped explain why Bridgewater seemed not to move the market with its trading.
• Dalio could have skipped the cloudy language and more simply described Pure Alpha as a series of if-then rules. If one thing happened, then another would follow.
• Many of the rules dealt simply with following trends.... Dictated following the momentum in various markets.
• Bridgewater was among the first hedge funds to create its own estimates of economic growth, integrating both public statistics and its own market surveys.
• As the years passed, however, Dalio's advantage softened.
• The study showed that Dalio was wrong as much as he was right. Trading on his ideas lately was often akin to a coin flip.
• Dalio picked up the piece of paper, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it.
• Didnt mention the leib familys help nor his wifes family wealth [to start his company and fund]
• didnt mentino the funds relatively lackluster performance since 2010
• the published principles werent the principles. They were more like Some Principles
• He could apparently accept giving up the practice (radical transparency, the transparency library), but would never give up the story. (he keeps on telling on TV, in his books etc.)
  
• An annual fixed fee of 3.39%, but receiving only an average return of 3.1 %
• By now, the principles were more of a fantasy, or, perhaps more kindly, a collection of fables. ... Though they had nevery had as much impact on the firm's investing as he claimed publicly, they were rapidly cast aside elsewhere across the firm, too.
• It proved though to be a bully when anyone could put him on mute. [covid time all in VC]
• No major company publicly signed up to adopt The Principles
• found out the hard way that intergenerational wealth can be fleeting. Their three sons frittered away the family fortune in usual ways: divorces, the racetrack, poor investments,...
• Bridgewater laid off most of the remaining staff dedicated to building the Principles software. It was 100 mUSD, at least, down the drain.