Page 78 - Ray Dalio - Principles

CHAPTER 5

THE ULTIMATE BOON:

1995–2010

By 1995, Bridgewater had grown to forty-two employees and
$4.1 billion under management, which was more than I’d ever
hoped for, especially considering that Bridgewater had been

down to just me only a dozen years before. While things were
much better and more stable, we were still doing basically the
same things I’d been doing from the start—wrestling with the
markets, thinking independently and creatively about how to
make our bets, making mistakes, bringing those mistakes to

the surface, diagnosing them to get at their root causes,
designing new and better ways of doing things, systematically
implementing the changes, making new mistakes, and so on. 4
This iterative, evolutionary approach allowed us to continually
refine the investment systems that I’d begun building in 1982.
Back then, we showed that a few bright guys with computers
could beat the big, well-equipped establishment players. Now
we were becoming the well-equipped establishment ourselves.

As the number of decision rules and the amount of data in
our systems grew more complex, we hired young
programmers who were better than us in converting our
instructions into code and smart new grads right out of college
to help with our investment research. One of these new whiz
kids, Greg Jensen, joined Bridgewater as a college intern in

1996. Because he shined, I grabbed him as my research
assistant. Over the decades that followed, he contributed a lot,
grew into the co-chief investment officer role with Bob Prince
and me, and became a co-CEO. He also became like a godson
to me.

We also invested in more and more powerful computers. 5
Having our systems running through these machines freed us

to get above the daily movements of the markets and consider