World’s 123rd Richest Person Says if You Understand the Stanford Experiment, You’ll Become Wealthy.
He once paid a stripper to dance for cattle ranchers and farmers before showing them how to hedge risk with their investments.
Sometimes in life, you need a little luck.
Ray Dalio’s golden ticket was caddying at his local golf course, where he’d carry the golf bags of Wall Street professionals.
He’d listen to the conversations and sometimes even get invited to dinners. It resulted in him making his first-ever investment in Northeast Airlines for $300, which tripled in price after the airline merged with another company.
Adjusted for inflation, $300 was the equivalent in purchasing power to about $2,978.01 today. It was 1961, and he was 12 years old.
From that moment, Dalio became hooked on investing.
He’s now the World’s Best Hedge fund manager, with a reported net worth of $19.1 Billion. He founded a hedge fund from his two-bedroom apartment, which is now the largest hedge fund in the world.
Dalio and his friends created the company that later became Bridgewater Associates, which quickly snowballed, picking up big clients like Mcdonalds, The World Bank and Kodak.
Bridgewater Associates famously avoided the stock market capitulation in 2008, which you might remember ended up being a disastrous year for the entire stock market.
Dalio’s competitors were getting nuked while he managed to grow the company’s value by 9.5% by foreseeing the housing crash in 2008, which very few did.
He anticipated that the Federal Reserve would print more money to revive the economy and negatively impact the dollar. So he shorted the American dollar and invested heavily in Treasury bonds, Gold and other commodities before the crash.
The deleveraging process led to measures that helped the firm anticipate the crisis as early as 2006.
As the subprime mortgage market unravelled the following year, Bridgewater Associates warned readers in their “Daily Observations” newsletter about the “crazy lending and leveraging practices.”
