The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Bridgewater is an elite academic department run by a cult leader
“Bridgewater is like, take MIT and Harvard's economics department and Stanford and Caltech's comp sci department and have them run by a cult leader and shift that all together, and you've got Bridgewater.”
Jensen: Mexican peso and Brazilian real face extremely bullish macro setup
“I think the Mexican peso, the Brazilian real, what you're seeing in those countries and much of the emerging world relative to the developed world is much more traditional monetary policy, traditional fiscal policy. So while you had a big push of fiscal during…”
Jensen: The British pound is in a dangerous and unattractive situation
“The pound is particularly unattractive in our minds about payment situation. The amount of money that's being printed, the long-term growth prospects are all leading to quite dangerous situation there.”
Jensen: Bridgewater's individual trades only have a 55% win rate over 12 months
“Our ideas are generally in the 5545 range, where our positions have something like a 55 45 chance of being right at any given one in, let's say, a given 12 month period.”
Bisserier: Bridgewater's win rate on trades was 55% to 60%
“Bridgewater's success rate with any given trade in a given year was 55 to 60%.”
Granade found Bridgewater's radical transparency and aggressive culture simple and uncontroversial
“It never struck me as that weird or strange or all the headlines that kind of get produced about it or whatever. I mean, the fundamental tenants of set strong, aggressive goals, be transparent, be honest with each other. Like in my mind, they're not particular…”
Drobny: Bridgewater became the largest hedge fund by prioritizing client research
“Bridgewater's perfected this. They have the Bridgewater daily, which is for most institutional investors, a required daily reading. They spend a lot of money, a lot of energy, a lot of people. To do that, and as a result, voila, they have the world's largest h…”
Jensen: Ray Dalio still works 80 to 90 hours a week
“To this day, it's 80 hours, 90 hours focused on what's happening in the world and how to think about it and how to build a great company.”
Jensen: Japanese equities offer superior risk-reward due to policy support
“I particularly like the setup in Japanese equities because more than any other country, the policy response to any downturn will be to buy equities directly. And at the same time, the prices are not nearly as expensive as in other places. So I think while they…”
Gilmore: Bridgewater Sits Between Discretionary Macro and Price-Signal Funds
“Other macro funds are perhaps either more discretionary or they are more reliant on the signals that come from price movements. So Bridgewater is somewhere in between.”
Jensen: Bridgewater's Trade Win Rate Fell to 37% During COVID
“We hadn't had the perfect storm of, we averaged that 55, 45, and it ranges from eighty-twenty, the best years, and forty-sixty, the worst years, and then in COVID, we were probably about 37.”
Jensen: Bridgewater hires botanists, historians, and poker players alongside economists
“If you look at Bridgewater, we hire people with a wide variety, botanists, history majors, to economics majors, to poker players, like a wide range, because looking at the world and understanding it, it's not a pure math puzzle. It's not a pure philosophy puzz…”
Jensen: Bridgewater's Pure Alpha has made money in 80% of years
“If you look at bridge orders, Pure Alpha as an example, you know, we've made money in 80% of years.”
Bisserier: Alex Shahidi was among Bridgewater's most sophisticated institutional clients
“In fact, at Bridgewater, I would say he was one of our most sophisticated investors, including all the sovereign wealth funds and pension plans that we worked with.”
Bisserier: Ray Dalio sought to hire Alex Shahidi after an initial meeting
“Early on, he was meeting with Ray in our office in Westport, and afterwards, Ray grabbed me in the hallway and said, that guy I was talking to, he's got good common sense, we should hire him, which is about the most positive thing I've ever heard from Ray afte…”
Quant hedge fund modeling techniques will spread to diverse industries
“And one of the thoughts we had was that this idea that had been pioneered at Renaissance, and Bridgewater, and D. Shaw, Was really going to probably explode across a much wider range of industries. And if that was going to happen, they were going to need a dif…”
Baumgartner: Bridgewater is primary source for macroeconomic framework
“Obviously Bridgewater is source number one for me and the way the economic machine works and the way we think about things.”
Dunn: Bridgewater provides eight return factors while PE and activists deliver one
“Bridgewater has about eight factors that drive their return. And you know what they are, their country, their currency, their momentum, duration, spread. And they can tell you, they have the sheet. And when we run our returns-based analysis, we get very close …”
Clever asset managers prioritize Australia's highly sophisticated capital pools
“You can always tell which asset managers Are clever by the ones that invest a lot of time in Australia. Bridgewater was a very early player in that space, because I think Ray Dalio understood that these people were very sophisticated, and there's money coming …”
Jensen: Bridgewater adopts 3 to 5 new systematic research projects semiannually
“Every six months, We organize about 10 to 15 projects that we expect are the best ideas out of the things that we've been worrying about to impact our process, and of those, something like three to five come out to be good enough ideas that they become part of…”
Jensen: Bridgewater changes roughly 10% of its investment processes each year
“So I'd say on the average year, kind of 10% change in our processes as a result of what we learn on an, in an average year. And we kind of measure ourselves against that.”
Thome: WARF retained Bridgewater Pure Alpha but phased out All Weather
“I've always enjoyed working with a relationship, as you can guess, with Bridgewater. That was one of the very first products we put in there, and we kept that pure alpha, and the all-weather, we eventually lost the training wheels, and we stopped using pieces …”