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The Fund

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

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

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.

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    • Library Journal

      June 1, 2023

      From Copeland, a finance reporter for the New York Times, The Fund analyzes Ray Dalio's 50-year success story as the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund (350,000-copy first printing). Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      December 1, 2023
      An unsettling expos� of a leading investment fund. As Copeland writes, during his time at the company's helm, Ray Dalio (b. 1949), founder of Bridgewater Associates, "was said to have prodigious skill at spotting, and making money from, big-picture global economic or political changes, such as when a country would raise its interest rate or cut taxes." The dominant ethos was a near-religious belief in Dalio's brilliance, a sentiment he reinforced by developing a series of edicts called "The Principles" and assorted mantras, such as "Pain + Reflection = Progress." He was not at all shy, reportedly, of using abusive language ("You're a dumb shit!") with employees not sufficiently steeped in these tenets or who otherwise displeased him. Bridgewater became a revolving door for hundreds of would-be brokers and traders who couldn't stand the abuse, while its corporate culture spawned a system of accusation and self-criticism that Mao's Red Guards might have admired: "When employees identified imperfections, they were directed to memorialize the moment in the 'issue log, ' an internal registry visible to all that tracked all complaints large and small." Employees, in the words of one manager, "have been speaking to me directly about being insecure in their jobs and a fear that any day they could be fired." Interestingly, James Comey, later to become director of the FBI, was one of Dalio's chief enforcers (for $7 million per year), even as employees were required to keep iPads containing The Principles with them at all times. In the end, the cultic distractions seem to have overcome the fundamentals, for, Copeland charges, Dalio's chief legacy has been a "long streak of shaky investment performance" and a steady decline in his own prominence--even if he is still worth more than $15 billion. A vivid portrait of soul-killing micromanagement in a ruthless corporate setting.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 11, 2023
      Nutty doctrine and cutthroat office politics prevailed at the world’s largest hedge fund, according to this searing debut exposé. New York Times reporter Copeland follows the career of Ray Dalio, founder of the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund, finding that contrary to the billionaire’s claims to have instituted a strictly rational trading system, decisions were often directed by Dalio’s haphazard guesses. (Dalio’s habit of seeing recessions around every corner often led to losing bets, Copeland argues.) Investigating the fund’s bizarre office politics, Copeland explains that Dalio implemented a “radical transparency” regime under which employees were compelled to rate each other on fuzzy metrics like “believability,” and new hires confessed their weaknesses while facing a totem pole. Surveillance was extensive; meetings were recorded and replayed to find expressions of wrong-think, and in one particularly egregious instance staffers were enlisted to monitor company urinals after Dalio spotted pee on the bathroom floor. Writing with droll aplomb, Copeland takes a torch to Dalio’s reputation as a Wall Street savant, instead finding him an egotistical billionaire with a penchant for cruelty (he once publicly reduced to tears an employee whose work he was dissatisfied with, shouting “You’re a dumb shit!... You don’t even know what you don’t know”). The result is a hugely entertaining depiction of unbridled wealth colliding with unhinged folly.

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