Page 97 - Ray Dalio - Principles

Toward the end of the year, we opened “Pure Alpha Major
Markets” and clients invested $15 billion in it. Since then its
returns have been as expected—that is, about the same as Pure

Alpha’s (actually better, but only slightly). Our clients were
delighted. In fact, this new option was so popular that by 2011
we had to close it to new investment too.

GOING FROM BELOW THE RADAR

TO ABOVE IT

Success is a double-edged sword—as I learned after we
anticipated the financial crisis and Bridgewater and I began to
receive unwanted public attention. Our unusual performance,
our unusual way of looking at economics and markets, and our

unusual culture made us a continuing subject of interest. I
wanted to stay under the radar so I avoided interacting with the
press. That didn’t stop the press from writing about me and
Bridgewater, which they typically did in a sensationalistic way
—either painting me as a superhero investor who walked on
water or as a leader of a cult, and sometimes both.

Getting a lot of attention for being successful is a bad

position to be in. Australians call it the “tall poppy syndrome,”
because the tallest poppies in a field are the ones most likely to
have their heads whacked off. I didn’t like the attention and I
especially didn’t like the mischaracterizations of Bridgewater
as a cult, because I felt it was hurting our ability to recruit
great people. At the same time, I realized that because we

didn’t let the media see how we truly operated inside
Bridgewater, those sensational portrayals were unavoidable.

So I decided in late 2010 to make public my Principles—
which explained exactly what we were doing and why. I put it
on our website so it could be read freely and understood by
people outside the company.

Doing that was a hard decision, but it turned out to be a
great one. Most people got it and many beyond Bridgewater

benefited from reading them. More than three million people
have downloaded Principles; some even had it translated into