桥水基金桥水基金瑞·达利欧被Rob Copeland拽下神坛

https://blog.wenxuecity.com/myblog/72696/202408/24243.html?

桥水基金，被拽下神坛？《纽约时报》记者科普兰，断定世界第一对冲基金老板——桥水的瑞·达利欧，被拽下神坛。他写了这个本基金，用大量的事实来证明自己叙述的故事中，有大量的言论过事实和自相矛盾。

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tARntu41Hw

十里梧桐

抖音 v.douyin.com/idF122Mq
www.youtube.com/@shiliwutong

2023年10月5日注册
简介：家有万卷藏书，也去过很多国家；读书，因为想理解世界运行的逻辑；计算机专业，曾任职世界著名软件公司，及非著名投资公司
"I have a home library with thousands of books and have traveled to many countries. I read because I want to understand the logic behind the workings of the world. With a background in computer science, I have worked for a world-renowned software company and a lesser-known investment firm."

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend 

基金：Ray Dalio、Bridgewater Associates 和揭开华尔街传奇 作者：罗布·科普兰（Rob Copeland）（作者）2023 年 11 月 7 日 罗布·科普兰 (Rob Copeland) 是即将出版的纪实惊悚小说《基金：雷·戴利奥 (Ray Dalio)、桥水基金和华尔街传奇的揭秘》的作者。他于 2022 年底加入《纽约时报》，担任财经记者，此前他在《华尔街日报》担任屡获殊荣的调查记者近十年。

未经授权、未经修饰的著名华尔街对冲基金经理雷·达利奥的故事。纽约时报畅销书！

雷·达利奥不希望你读这本书。

当全球最大对冲基金桥水基金的亿万富翁创始人2022 年，达利欧宣布辞去近 50 年前在公寓里创办的公司，这则新闻成为世界各地的头条新闻。达利欧凭借公司令人瞠目的成功，赢得了国际赞誉和名声，再加上他通过频繁出现在媒体上、与名人交往以及他的畅销书《原则》来营造这种神秘感。在《基金》一书中，屡获殊荣的《纽约时报》记者罗布·科普兰 (Rob Copeland) 戳穿了这位仁慈商业巨头精心构建的叙事，揭露了他大肆宣传的“原则”是现代记忆中伟大的傲慢壮举之一——实际上，这些原则鼓励一种充满偏执和背叛的有毒文化。

《基金》是一场引人入胜、比小说更离奇的旅程，带你走进一个稀有的财富和权力世界。它毫不畏惧地审视了达利欧所实行的“彻底透明”政策经常造成的痛苦。被描述为他商业成功和有意义的生活秘诀的核心原则。科普兰通过对公司内部和外部人士的数百次采访，带领读者走进房间，前联邦调查局局长吉姆·科米亲吻达利奥的戒指，最近宾夕法尼亚州参议员候选人大卫麦考密克喝下了酷爱饮料，一群令人难忘的角色轮流扮演，努力克服个人心理和道德上的极限——这一切都在他们魅力十足的领导人的注视下进行。

对于那些相信赚大钱的能力与揭开人性原理有任何关系的人来说，这是一个警示故事。

评论
Rob Copeland 的《基金》

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews /books/1-250-27694-2.html

我第一次知道 Ray Dalio 是当他或他的出版商在旧金山第四大道和 King Caltrain 车站到处张贴《原则》的广告时。如果我没记错的话，那里也经常有广播广告；2017 年，这成了一桩大事。我的大脑很擅长忽略广告，所以当时我唯一的想法是“某个商人写了一本自助书。”我想我隐约以为他是一位首席执行官一些传统企业的负责人，因为这类书的营销力度通常都很大。我没有把他和对冲基金或桥水基金联系起来，我经常把桥水基金和黑水公司混淆。

事实证明，《原则》更像是一本洗白过的邪教手册，而不是一本自助书籍。这里面有一个故事。

罗布·科普兰目前在《纽约时报》任职，但多年来他一直是《华尔街日报》的对冲基金记者。他报道了由雷·达利奥创立的大型对冲基金桥水基金等。该基金是雷·达利奥的传记，也是桥水基金的历史，从桥水基金成立之初，作为达利奥的咨询业务载体，直到 2022 年，达利奥在多次错误的开始和头衔的变动，最终退出了公司的管理。（也许吧。根据这里叙述的历史，如果你读到这篇文章时他已经重掌公司，我也不会感到惊讶。）

这是最疯狂的一次这是我读过的最恐怖、最恶毒的商业史。

值得一提的是，正如科普兰明确指出的那样，雷·达利欧和桥水基金讨厌这本书，并声称这是一派胡言。科普兰在脚注中列举了一些他们的否认（以及许多听起来像确认一样的非否认），我发现这越来越有趣。

达利欧的一名律师表示，他“平等对待所有员工，给予各级人员同样的尊重和给予他们同样的福利。”

嗯。

无论如何，我个人对桥水基金一无所知，除了我在这里学到的东西和马特·莱文的时事通讯中偶尔提到的内容（我就是在那里得到这本书的推荐的）。我没有独立的信息是否科普兰在这里描述的任何内容都是真实的，但科普兰提供了人们在这样的书中期望的典型的大量注释和来源清单，莱文的评论表明它与桥水基金的行业声誉基本一致。我认为这本书是真实的，但由于很明显，世界上最大的对冲基金主要是一个德兰

作为一个邪教，其员工大多互相监视和评价，而不是从事任何真正的投资工作，我也有疑问，科普兰对这些问题的回答并非全部让我满意。但稍后会详细介绍。

本书的核心是原则。这些是不断变化的规则和格言，规定人们在桥水基金内部应如何行事。根据科普兰的说法，尽管达利欧后来出版了一本同名的书，但书中的原则版本经过了净化，并且与公司内部使用的版本相比有显著的缩减。达利欧不断添加新的原则，有时还会更改它们，但共同的主题是激进的、对抗性的“诚实”：从不对问题保持沉默，直接面对人们做错的任何事情，并告诉人们他们所有的缺点，以便他们“更好地了解自己”。

如果这听起来像教科书式的虐待行为，那么你的想法是对的。达利欧公开承认了这一部分，他将桥水基金描述为一家并不适合所有人的公司，但由于这种文化而取得了巨大的成就。但这种令人不安的对抗氛围只是功能障碍的冰山一角。根据科普兰的说法，以下只是其中几种表现方式：

达利欧决定，每个人的意见都应该由他们之前决策的准确性来衡量，以创造一种“精英统治”，因此他雇佣了一些人来建立一个社会信用体系，在这个体系中，人们可以使用一个应用程序不断给所有同事打分。这几乎立刻演变成了高中级别的群体欺凌，员工们会匆忙降低和排斥任何被达利欧降低评级的同事。

当该系统的早期版本发现桥水基金的两名员工比达利欧更有信誉时，达利欧操纵了该系统，以确保他总是拥有最高的评级，不受其他人评级的影响。

达利欧对直面问题的原则如此痴迷，以至于他在桥水基金创建了一个集中的问题日志，要求员工每周发现并报告 10 到 20 个新问题，否则他们的奖金就会被扣除。然后，他会定期从问题日志中挑选出一些问题，无论多么琐碎，并将其视为对问题责任人价值的全民公投。

达利欧最喜欢的处理问题的方式是审判某人。这需要进行广泛的调查，然后召开会议，达利欧会严厉斥责该人并列出他们的缺点，经常让他们流泪或惊恐发作，同时自鸣得意地坚持认为对批评做出情绪反应是一种性格缺陷。这些会议随后被拍摄下来，并添加到桥水所有员工都可以使用的图书馆中，通常会进行编辑以删除达利欧的人身攻击并使目标的情绪反应看起来不成比例。达利欧最喜欢的那些会作为他们学习原则的一部分向所有新员工展示。

在桥水获得机构权力的最佳方法之一是对原则阿谀奉承，并积极参与达利欧的审判。桥水基金的高层经常争夺权力，他们经常试图抓住违反原则的对手，以便对他们进行审判。

华尔街金融和美国功能失调的政府之间有一个常见且令人不安的联系，詹姆斯·科米（没错，就是那个詹姆斯·科米）负责桥水基金的内部安全工作三年，这意味着他从监控摄像头中提取证据，供达利欧在审判期间用来质问员工。

如果这种邪教氛围还不够强烈，桥水基金还开发了自己独特的语言，堪比山达基教。审判被称为“调查”，解雇某人被称为“分类”，评级被称为“点名”，还有许多其他桥水基金特有的术语。不用说，从来没有人调查过达利欧本人。你也会毫不惊讶地得知，科普兰记录了桥水基金的性骚扰和歧视事件，包括达利欧本人的一些行为，尽管这似乎只是整体功能障碍中相对较小的一部分。达利欧乐于公开羞辱任何人，无论性别如何。

如果你和我一样，此时你可能想知道桥水基金是如何在这种环境下继续运营这么久的。（根据科普兰的说法，自达利欧于 2022 年退休以来，桥水基金已大幅减少类似邪教的行为，删除了其调查档案，并淡化了原则。）它实际上并不是一个宗教邪教；它是一个对冲基金，必须为庞大、成熟的客户提供投资服务，而且据说它是一个非常成功的基金。为什么这个奇怪的噩梦般的工作场所没有干扰桥水基金的业务？

我认为这是它最薄弱的部分

在他的书中。科普兰对这个问题做了一些回答，但没有一个令人满意。

首先，从科普兰的叙述中可以清楚地看出，几乎没有一名桥水基金的员工能够控制桥水基金的投资。几乎每个人都在从事其他业务（销售、投资者关系）或与邪教相关的痴迷。投资决策（主要纳入算法）由一小部分核心人员做出，而且往往由达利欧本人做出。与其他一些对冲基金不同，桥水基金似乎也不频繁交易，这意味着它们可能避开了劳动力密集型的高频业务部分。

其次，桥水基金在 20 世纪 90 年代对冲基金繁荣之前作为对冲基金起飞。它于 1990 年从达利欧的个人咨询业务和投资通讯转型为对冲基金（1987 年获得了世界银行的早期投资），20 世纪 90 年代对冲基金来说是非常好的十年。桥水基金成为世界上最大的对冲基金之一，部分归功于达利欧的人脉关系和通过时事通讯进行的有效营销，这给它带来了某种机构动力。即使在桥水基金表现不如竞争对手的那些年，也没有人质疑它向桥水基金注资。

第三，达利欧使用了从金融媒体获得免费宣传的久经考验的方法：不断预测即将到来的经济衰退，并在预测正确时积极地邀功。从职业生涯开始，达利欧就年复一年地预测经济衰退。桥水基金在 2000 年至 2003 年的经济衰退中表现良好，在 2008 年金融危机期间也表现良好。达利欧积极地邀功，因为他预测了这两次经济衰退，并在经济衰退中为桥水基金做好了正确的定位。这是正确的；他避免提及的是，他还预测了每隔一年的经济衰退，但其中大多数都没有发生。

这些观点加在一起构成了一个答案，但它们感觉不像是整个画面，而科普兰也没有将这些部分联系起来。达利欧可能只是擅长投资；他痴迷于阅读，显然喜欢思考市场，而当一个虐待狂的邪教领袖并不会占用他所有的时间。在某种程度上，对冲基金确实是半免费的赚钱机器，一旦你拥有足够数量的资金和政治关系，你就可以接触到很可能赚钱的投资机会和机制，而普通投资者根本无法接触到这些机会和机制。达利欧显然擅长建立人际关系，并投入大量精力与棘手的客户建立密切联系，比如中国资金池。

也许最令人信服的解释并没有直接出现在这本书中，而是来自马特·莱文。桥水基金吹捧其算法交易优于人类进行的个人交易，有理由相信，至少在某些投资领域，始终如一地应用算法而不考虑人类的情感是一种可靠的交易策略。莱文在他的新闻通讯中半开玩笑地问道，这种怪异的邪教行为和持续不断的内斗是否是一种分散所有人注意力的策略，防止他们干扰算法，从而做出错误的决定。

科普兰没有解决这一问题。相反，读完这本书后，读者会清楚地看到我所听说过的最混乱的工作场所，以及一连串比上一个更令人震惊的怪异事件。如果你喜欢看火车失事，这本书适合你。唯一的缺点是，与该类型的其他作品（如《坏血》或《十亿美元失败者》）不同，桥水基金是一家非常成功的公司，因此你不会因为看到纸牌屋倒塌而幸灾乐祸。然而，你确实获得了一个有用的心理模型，可以应用于下一个试图与你谈论“彻底诚实”和“思想精英”的人。

这本书的缺陷在于，像桥水这样的组织的存在表明了我们社会运作方式的系统性缺陷，而科普兰对此基本上不感兴趣。“这怎么可能发生？”是一个相当大的问题，不能不回答。当你看到模式并听到第四种变化时，达利欧行为的纯粹离谱也会在书的结尾让人有点厌倦。但这仍然是一本令人惊叹的书，也是资本主义灾难类型中值得一读的书。

评分：7 分（满分 10 分）评论：2024-02-24

桥水基金，被拽下神坛？《纽约时报》记者科普兰，要把世界第一的对冲基金老板——桥水的瑞·达利欧，拽下神坛。他写了这本The Fund，用大量的事实来证明自己叙述的故事中，有大量的言过其实和自相矛盾。

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tARntu41Hw

十里梧桐

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend 

by Rob Copeland (Author) Nov. 7 2023 

Rob Copeland is the author of the upcoming nonfiction thriller "The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend." He joined the New York Times as a finance reporter in late 2022, after nearly a decade as an award-winning investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal. 

The unauthorized, unvarnished story of famed Wall Street hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio. An instant New York Times bestseller!

Ray Dalio does not want you to read this book.

When the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet, announced in 2022 that he was stepping down from the company he started out of his apartment nearly 50 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio cultivated an aura of international admiration and fame thanks to his company’s eye-popping success, coupled with a mystique he encouraged with frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles. In The Fund, award-winning New York Times journalist Rob Copeland punctures this carefully-constructed narrative of the benevolent business titan, exposing his much-promoted “principles” as one of the great feats of hubris in modern memory—in practice, they encouraged a toxic culture of paranoia and backstabbing.

The Fund is a page-turning, stranger-than-fiction journey into a rarefied world of wealth and power. It offers an unflinching look at the pain so often caused by the “radical transparency” Dalio has described as a core tenet of his recipe for business success and a meaningful life. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with those inside and around the firm, Copeland takes readers into the room as former FBI director Jim Comey kisses Dalio's ring, recent Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick drinks the Kool-Aid, and a rotating cast of memorable characters grapple with their personal psychological and moral limits—all under the watchful eye of their charismatic leader.

This is a cautionary tale for anyone convinced that the ability to make lots of money has anything at all to do with unlocking the principles of human nature.

Reviews 
The Fund by Rob Copeland

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-27694-2.html

I first became aware of Ray Dalio when either he or his publisher plastered advertisements for The Principles all over the San Francisco 4th and King Caltrain station. If I recall correctly, there were also constant radio commercials; it was a whole thing in 2017. My brain is very good at tuning out advertisements, so my only thought at the time was "some business guy wrote a self-help book." I think I vaguely assumed he was a CEO of some traditional business, since that's usually who writes heavily marketed books like this. I did not connect him with hedge funds or Bridgewater, which I have a bad habit of confusing with Blackwater.

The Principles turns out to be more of a laundered cult manual than a self-help book. And therein lies a story.

Rob Copeland is currently with The New York Times, but for many years he was the hedge fund reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He covered, among other things, Bridgewater Associates, the enormous hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio. The Fund is a biography of Ray Dalio and a history of Bridgewater from its founding as a vehicle for Dalio's advising business until 2022 when Dalio, after multiple false starts and title shuffles, finally retired from running the company. (Maybe. Based on the history recounted here, it wouldn't surprise me if he was back at the helm by the time you read this.)

It is one of the wildest, creepiest, and most abusive business histories that I have ever read.

It's probably worth mentioning, as Copeland does explicitly, that Ray Dalio and Bridgewater hate this book and claim it's a pack of lies. Copeland includes some of their denials (and many non-denials that sound as good as confirmations to me) in footnotes that I found increasingly amusing.

A lawyer for Dalio said he "treated all employees equally, giving people at all levels the same respect and extending them the same perks."

Uh-huh.

Anyway, I personally know nothing about Bridgewater other than what I learned here and the occasional mention in Matt Levine's newsletter (which is where I got the recommendation for this book). I have no independent information whether anything Copeland describes here is true, but Copeland provides the typical extensive list of notes and sourcing one expects in a book like this, and Levine's comments indicated it's generally consistent with Bridgewater's industry reputation. I think this book is true, but since the clear implication is that the world's largest hedge fund was primarily a deranged cult whose employees mostly spied on and rated each other rather than doing any real investment work, I also have questions, not all of which Copeland answers to my satisfaction. But more on that later.

The center of this book are the Principles. These were an ever-changing list of rules and maxims for how people should conduct themselves within Bridgewater. Per Copeland, although Dalio later published a book by that name, the version of the Principles that made it into the book was sanitized and significantly edited down from the version used inside the company. Dalio was constantly adding new ones and sometimes changing them, but the common theme was radical, confrontational "honesty": never being silent about problems, confronting people directly about anything that they did wrong, and telling people all of their faults so that they could "know themselves better."

If this sounds like textbook abusive behavior, you have the right idea. This part Dalio admits to openly, describing Bridgewater as a firm that isn't for everyone but that achieves great results because of this culture. But the uncomfortably confrontational vibes are only the tip of the iceberg of dysfunction. Here are just a few of the ways this played out according to Copeland:

Dalio decided that everyone's opinions should be weighted by the accuracy of their previous decisions, to create a "meritocracy," and therefore hired people to build a social credit system in which people could use an app to constantly rate all of their co-workers. This almost immediately devolved into out-group bullying worthy of a high school, with employees hurriedly down-rating and ostracizing any co-worker that Dalio down-rated.

When an early version of the system uncovered two employees at Bridgewater with more credibility than Dalio, Dalio had the system rigged to ensure that he always had the highest ratings and was not affected by other people's ratings.

Dalio became so obsessed with the principle of confronting problems that he created a centralized log of problems at Bridgewater and required employees find and report a quota of ten or twenty new issues every week or have their bonus docked. He would then regularly pick some issue out of the issue log, no matter how petty, and treat it like a referendum on the worth of the person responsible for the issue.

Dalio's favorite way of dealing with a problem was to put someone on trial. This involved extensive investigations followed by a meeting where Dalio would berate the person and harshly catalog their flaws, often reducing them to tears or panic attacks, while smugly insisting that having an emotional reaction to criticism was a personality flaw. These meetings were then filmed and added to a library available to all Bridgewater employees, often edited to remove Dalio's personal abuse and to make the emotional reaction of the target look disproportionate. The ones Dalio liked the best were shown to all new employees as part of their training in the Principles.

One of the best ways to gain institutional power in Bridgewater was to become sycophantically obsessed with the Principles and to be an eager participant in Dalio's trials. The highest levels of Bridgewater featured constant jockeying for power, often by trying to catch rivals in violations of the Principles so that they would be put on trial.

In one of the common and all-too-disturbing connections between Wall Street finance and the United States' dysfunctional government, James Comey (yes, that James Comey) ran internal security for Bridgewater for three years, meaning that he was the one who pulled evidence from surveillance cameras for Dalio to use to confront employees during his trials.

In case the cult vibes weren't strong enough already, Bridgewater developed its own idiosyncratic language worthy of Scientology. The trials were called "probings," firing someone was called "sorting" them, and rating them was called "dotting," among many other Bridgewater-specific terms. Needless to say, no one ever probed Dalio himself. You will also be completely unsurprised to learn that Copeland documents instances of sexual harassment and discrimination at Bridgewater, including some by Dalio himself, although that seems to be a relatively small part of the overall dysfunction. Dalio was happy to publicly humiliate anyone regardless of gender.

If you're like me, at this point you're probably wondering how Bridgewater continued operating for so long in this environment. (Per Copeland, since Dalio's retirement in 2022, Bridgewater has drastically reduced the cult-like behaviors, deleted its archive of probings, and de-emphasized the Principles.) It was not actually a religious cult; it was a hedge fund that has to provide investment services to huge, sophisticated clients, and by all accounts it's a very successful one. Why did this bizarre nightmare of a workplace not interfere with Bridgewater's business?

This, I think, is the weakest part of this book. Copeland makes a few gestures at answering this question, but none of them are very satisfying.

First, it's clear from Copeland's account that almost none of the employees of Bridgewater had any control over Bridgewater's investments. Nearly everyone was working on other parts of the business (sales, investor relations) or on cult-related obsessions. Investment decisions (largely incorporated into algorithms) were made by a tiny core of people and often by Dalio himself. Bridgewater also appears to not trade frequently, unlike some other hedge funds, meaning that they probably stay clear of the more labor-intensive high-frequency parts of the business.

Second, Bridgewater took off as a hedge fund just before the hedge fund boom in the 1990s. It transformed from Dalio's personal consulting business and investment newsletter to a hedge fund in 1990 (with an earlier investment from the World Bank in 1987), and the 1990s were a very good decade for hedge funds. Bridgewater, in part due to Dalio's connections and effective marketing via his newsletter, became one of the largest hedge funds in the world, which gave it a sort of institutional momentum. No one was questioned for putting money into Bridgewater even in years when it did poorly compared to its rivals.

Third, Dalio used the tried and true method of getting free publicity from the financial press: constantly predict an upcoming downturn, and aggressively take credit whenever you were right. From nearly the start of his career, Dalio predicted economic downturns year after year. Bridgewater did very well in the 2000 to 2003 downturn, and again during the 2008 financial crisis. Dalio aggressively takes credit for predicting both of those downturns and positioning Bridgewater correctly going into them. This is correct; what he avoids mentioning is that he also predicted downturns in every other year, the majority of which never happened.

These points together create a bit of an answer, but they don't feel like the whole picture and Copeland doesn't connect the pieces. It seems possible that Dalio may simply be good at investing; he reads obsessively and clearly enjoys thinking about markets, and being an abusive cult leader doesn't take up all of his time. It's also true that to some extent hedge funds are semi-free money machines, in that once you have a sufficient quantity of money and political connections you gain access to investment opportunities and mechanisms that are very likely to make money and that the typical investor simply cannot access. Dalio is clearly good at making personal connections, and invested a lot of effort into forming close ties with tricky clients such as pools of Chinese money.

Perhaps the most compelling explanation isn't mentioned directly in this book but instead comes from Matt Levine. Bridgewater touts its algorithmic trading over humans making individual trades, and there is some reason to believe that consistently applying an algorithm without regard to human emotion is a solid trading strategy in at least some investment areas. Levine has asked in his newsletter, tongue firmly in cheek, whether the bizarre cult-like behavior and constant infighting is a strategy to distract all the humans and keep them from messing with the algorithm and thus making bad decisions.

Copeland leaves this question unsettled. Instead, one comes away from this book with a clear vision of the most dysfunctional workplace I have ever heard of, and an endless litany of bizarre events each more astonishing than the last. If you like watching train wrecks, this is the book for you. The only drawback is that, unlike other entries in this genre such as Bad Blood or Billion Dollar Loser, Bridgewater is a wildly successful company, so you don't get the schadenfreude of seeing a house of cards collapse. You do, however, get a helpful mental model to apply to the next person who tries to talk to you about "radical honesty" and "idea meritocracy."

The flaw in this book is that the existence of an organization like Bridgewater is pointing to systematic flaws in how our society works, which Copeland is largely uninterested in interrogating. "How could this have happened?" is a rather large question to leave unanswered. The sheer outrageousness of Dalio's behavior also gets a bit tiring by the end of the book, when you've seen the patterns and are hearing about the fourth variation. But this is still an astonishing book, and a worthy entry in the genre of capitalism disasters.

Rating: 7 out of 10Reviewed: 2024-02-24