Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio studied finance at Long Island University and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 1975 he founded Bridgewater Associates in his two-bedroom apartment in New York, initially as a corporate advisory service. He built Bridgewater into the world's largest hedge fund, managing approximately $150 billion at peak. Dalio's investment approach is driven by an understanding of macroeconomic cycles — the template machine model that describes how debt cycles, productivity growth, and monetary policy interact over decades. His flagship Pure Alpha strategy seeks to identify and trade macro cycles globally. His most enduring practical contribution to investment management is risk parity — the concept of allocating portfolio risk (rather than capital) equally across asset classes. His All Weather portfolio, designed to perform across all economic environments, allocates equal risk to equities, bonds, gold, and commodities by leveraging lower-volatility assets to match the risk of higher-volatility ones. This approach, which Bridgewater began developing in the 1990s, has been adopted by pension funds and institutional investors managing trillions. Bridgewater's management culture of "radical transparency" and "idea meritocracy" — where all meetings are recorded and employees are expected to challenge each other's thinking regardless of seniority — has been as influential as Dalio's investment approach. His book "Principles" (2017) has sold over 4 million copies. He transitioned out of the CEO role in 2022.