Ray Dalio Quotes
140 Ray Dalio Quotes
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[In 2011 on starting his business Bridgewater.] I didn’t really feel any anxiety about starting out on my own. I could pay the rent. I had free time to do what I wanted – I like the independence. And so I thought if it didn’t work out, I’d go get a job. And if it did work out, then I’m home free.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I trade commodities, which became various futures, which evolved into swaps and derivatives. I got evolved. I could separate things in a way that was unique.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011 on McDonalds coming to him for help in hedging chicken prices after they invented the Chicken McNugget.] They came to me and said, ‘Look, we have all of this exposure. How do we protect ourselves so we don’t have to change the menu price of Chicken McNuggets all the time?’ I helped them through that.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] We did it simply for functional reasons, and lo and behold the world calls it a hedge fund.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011 looking back on a painful trading experience on his personal account trading pork bellies in the early 1970’s. And ending up losing] Damn near everything. It was great in that it was terrible. It was a fantastic learning experience.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] We learned that if you had the same positions in a variety of countries, that you could take our relative views in each country and trade those on a duration-neutral spread basis. By doing so they would systematically guarantee the fact that we wouldn’t have correlations to the broader market. So what we did was we discovered essentially how to restructure the balancing of our positions to produce greater diversification. That carried forward into all the markets we traded.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011 on many hedge funds having a lot of systematic risk embedded into their strategies and returns.] Investors investing in hedge funds need to consider the implications of these systematic risks in the hedge funds they are invested in.
[In 2011.] What is the most common mistake of investors? It is believing that things that worked in the past will continue to work and leveraging up to be on it.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011 on how he separates emotions from difficult investing decisions.] I think there were two ways: experience and meditation. I also found it very helpful to make systematic decisions.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] You have to be assertive and open-mined at the same time. This is true in the markets; this is true in almost everything. You have to learn from your mistakes to keep getting better. And it’s through learning from those mistakes that you learn what reality is and how to deal with it, which is called principles. Knowing what’s true, whether you like it or not, is a tremendous asset. There’s no sense in fighting reality.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] In our business we’ve learned that it’s not so easy to have an opinion and be confident that opinion is right. I learned this at a very early age. So you take me at 12, I went after what I wanted to go after, no following instructions. And I also know it’s not so easy to have an opinion that you’re confident in. Be careful of the opinion that you’re overconfident in.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] We are all products of our genes… our environments and approach the world with biases…
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] In order to be motivated, I needed to work for what I wanted, not for what other people wanted me to do. And in order to be successful, I needed to figure out for myself how to get what I wanted, not remember the facts I was being told to remember.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] It didn’t take me long to lose money in the markets and learn about how difficult it is to be right and the costs of being wrong.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] In the markets, you can do a huge amount of work and still be wrong.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] Bad opinions can be very costly.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] The consensus is often wrong, so I have to be an independent thinker. To make any money you have to be right when they’re wrong.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I stress-tested my opinions by having the smartest people I could find challenge them so I could find out where I was wrong.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I want you to work for yourself, to come up with independent opinions, to stress-test them, to be wary about being overconfident, and to reflect on the consequences of your decisions and constantly improve.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] Sometimes when I know that I don’t know which way the coin is going to flip, I try to position myself so that it won’t have an impact on me either way. In other words, I don’t make an inadvertent bet. I try to limit my bets to the limited number of things I am confident in.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I continued to trade markets. Around this time I became interested in trading commodities futures, though virtually nobody traded them back then. I was attracted to trading them just because they had low margin requirements so I figured I could make more money by being right (which I planned to be.).
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I went back to HBS [Harvard Business School.], and in that academic year, 1972-73, trading commodities became a hot thing to do. That is because the monetary system’s breakdown that occurred in 1971 led to an inflationary surge that sent commodity prices higher. As a result of this, the first oil shock occurred in 1973. As inflation started to surge, the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy to fight it, so stocks went down in the worst bear market since the Great Depression. So, commodities futures trading was hot and stock market investing was not. Naturally, brokerage houses that didn’t have commodities trading departments wanted them, and there was a shortage of people who knew anything about it.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] In 1975, after a quick two-year stint on Wall Street after school, I started Bridgewater.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I learned that one of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads – often theories that are critical of others…
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] While most others seem to believe that having answers is better than having questions, I believe that having questions is better than having answers because it leads to more learning.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I believe mistakes are good things because I believe that most learning comes via making mistakes and reflecting on them.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I believe that pain is required to become stronger.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I started Bridgewater from scratch, and now it’s a uniquely successful company and I am on the Forbes 400 list. But these results were never my goals – they were just residual outcomes…
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] The best things in life – meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex and other basic needs and pleasures – are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] Without pursuing dreams, life is mundane.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I have developed a strong belief that, all things being equal, offering equal opportunity is fundamental to being good, while handling out money to capable people that weakens their need to get stronger and contribute to society is bad.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] I believe that evolution, which is the natural movement toward better adaptation, is the greatest single force in the universe, and that it is good.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] The desire to evolve… to get better, is probably humanity’s most pervasive driving force.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] Our lives are not satisfied by obtaining our goals rather than by striving for them…
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] Pursuing self-interest in harmony with the laws of the universe and contributing to evolution is universally rewarded.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] Successful people might not even know if or how their pursuit of self-interest helps evolution, but it typically does.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] What differentiates man from other species is man’s greater ability to learn. Because we can learn, we can evolve more and faster than other species.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] Your ability to see the changing landscape and adapt is more a function of your perceptive and reasoning abilities than your ability to learn and process quickly.
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] The most important quality that differentiates successful people from unsuccessful people is our capacity to learn and adapt…
Ray Dalio
[In 2011.] What is success? I believe that it is nothing more than getting what you want…
Ray Dalio
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