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

by Rob Copeland

The unauthorized, unvarnished story of famed Wall Street hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio.

When Ray Dalio, billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, announced in October 2022 that he was stepping down from the company he founded 47 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio achieved worldwide fame thanks to a mystique of success cultivated in frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles . In The Fund , Rob Copeland draws on hundreds of interviews with those inside and around the firm to reveal what really goes on with Dalio and his cohorts behind closed doors.

Tracing more than fifty years of Dalio’s leadership, The Fund peels back the curtain to reveal a rarified world of wealth and power, where former FBI director Jim Comey kisses Dalio’s ring, recent Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick sells out, and countless Bridgewater acolytes describe what it’s like to work at this fascinating firm.

Dalio has stepped down from Bridgewater before; will the legacy of his Principles continue to chart the course of the firm? The Fund provides unique insight into the story of Dalio and Bridgewater, past, present and future.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Finance, Biography, Economics, Audiobook, History

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 2023

Reviews

[hanney · Rating 4 out of 5]

my jaw was on the floor the entire time oh my god

[Brendan P Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am amazed by the accuracy and breadth of Copeland’s reporting. He managed to get his hands on a ton of source material and found a number of brave people willing to share their stories. Excellent read!

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scorcher of a tale. Orwellian. Let me cut to the chase - everyone is ultimately fired (except Greg Jensen). This is the story of the “revolving ranks of cast-off executives” either unable or unwilling to fulfill the pernicious whims of Ray Dalio. Oh, and no one comes off very well. Everyone in it for the humongous pay packages - at the expense of the pension funds (teachers!) being hosed for huge fees, 2/20 - 2% assets under management, 20% of profits, assuming the “Pure Alpha” or “all weather” funds actually delivered alpha (excess returns) relative to their benchmarks. (They frequently underperformed over time after fees vis their benchmarks).

But of course, “no investment manager gets fired for holding Bridgewater.” At least not before this book.

“Dalio responded, ‘as I always say, the best gift anyone can receive is the knowledge of their own weakness.’”

Given the overwhelming evidence presented in this book, it appears that Dalio was much more interested in taking his top executives down, lots more “red dots on the baseball card,” rather than building them up. Insecure and hewing to outdated investment strategies. And a permabear, chronically betting against the US economy, the US dollar. Well, that didn’t exactly ‘bear’ out over the time period in question.

This is the tale of an highly insecure, sadistic, controlling, hypocritical and over-the-top narcissistic main central character. Ray Dalio. A toxic work environment. It appears as the encapsulation of every bad adjective you would want to associate with the workplace and management thereof.

Dalio tries to create a legacy through his “principles.” And yet his major blind spot appears to be how damaging his process around the “principles” are, and the hypocritical, random application of his principles. Cultish intolerance of constructive feedback at the top of the food chain. You can “turn” anyone in except for the top guy. How convenient.

I have to say that in reading this book it became clear to me, the old adage, “live by the sword, die by the sword” applies. One’s transgressions ultimately catch up with them, one way or another.

[Max Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not worth reading.

The excerpt in The NY Times gives an impression of some of it (fairly inaccurate seeming) being about the investing but it is not, there is almost exactly zero on that topic.

Basically it is 300 pages of : Ray Dalio is a bad person and mean and a hypocrite (because he won’t accept negative feedback himself). With a side dose of: Greg Jensen is slimy.

Obvious who the sources are since they are portrayed very positively. No sense that this is in any way a balanced book. I don’t particularly want to defend Bridgewater or dalio or jensen (in fact I would actively not like to do so and don’t mean for this short book review to do so); I have no idea of the facts. But I also don’t think this book seems like a good place to go to get any facts.

[Harshan Ramadass · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Julian Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

About ten years ago, when I was working as a product manager for a software startup, I had the misfortune of having to take a meeting at Bridgewater Associates' office in Westport, CT. Signs that Bridgewater was different, not in a good way, started with the NDA (nondisclosure agreement): normally NDAs bind firms, but Bridgewater demanded that anyone in attendance at the meeting sign an individual NDA taking personal liability for any violations. Naturally, our lawyers balked, but we wanted Bridgewater's money, so a few of us signed and we went up there. We were also told that every meeting at Bridgewater was recorded and available to any employee to watch, so we had to sign away the rights to that, as well. (I'm sure if Jamie Gorelick hadn't later demanded that most of the Transparency Library be deleted for legal liability reasons, that recording would still be in there.)

The meeting was unmemorable as to its content. The only things I remember was that a) the customer "champion" flamed us and told us we were idiots (not terribly special, actually, if you're a product manager in enterprise software) but more importantly, b) looking around the room at the other employees and their perpetually downcast expressions, one couldn't help but feel like they were inmates being held against their will. They also seemed to be glued to their iPads, which were so locked down with mobile device management (MDM) software from Good Technology to the point where they only had about 5 apps they were permitted to use. One of those, as I later found out in Copeland's book, was probably the Dot Collector program with which they were likely rating each other while the meeting was going on!

On the way out of the facility, there were copies of Principles by Ray Dalio on the receptionist's counter. I took one, resolving to read it and understand more about Bridgewater in the name of learning more about our prospective client, even if I suspected (and heard through the grapevine) that they were essentially a cult. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed later, once I'd read through it, that there was no smoking gun pointing to Bridgewater being a cult. It certainly wasn't actually a set of principles. As another short-lived Bridgewater executive points out in Copeland's book, a list of 10 or 12 items are principles. 278... those are just slogans or aphorisms. I tossed my copy of Principles; I didn't and couldn't draw the line between this anodyne list of mottos and the cult member-like behavior I'd observed in that meeting room. Not until I read Copeland's excellent The Fund.

Bridgewater Associates is best described as cult-ish, in Amanda Montell's definition. There are certainly elements of a cult (chief amongst them, a creation of an alternative vocabulary only used inside Bridgewater), and Ray Dalio is a grade-A sociopath and tyrant who has inflicted severe psychological trauma on his employees and caused some of them to almost commit suicide. As you learn from Copeland's well-reported book, his firm is like an unholy marriage of the worst aspects of Wall Street finance bro culture and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution -- including public "trials", "hangings", humiliations of employees senior and junior in front of hundreds or thousands of their peers, and other massively abusive practices. Fortunately, unlike 1960's China, nobody was actually murdered at Bridgewater (though it could easily have happened), and also, unlike an actual spiritual cult, employees did have complete agency to leave. Which many of them did, including the revolving door of senior executives -- among them, James Culp (ex-CEO of Danaher), Jon Rubenstein (former executive at Apple), and James Comey who were hired on the premise that Bridgewater was a normal firm only to show up on day one and have it dawn on them that I've made a huge mistake. Comey, though, stuck around long enough to spearhead enough virtual trials/executions/investigations to demonstrate that he had no moral compass -- and in effect, that we should have seen his single-handed throwing of the 2016 election to Donald Trump coming.

Despite the onerous NDAs/nondisparagement agreements with former employees and Dalio/Bridgewater's litigiousness, Copeland still managed to assemble an impressive array of sources, on and off the record, possibly because the trauma suffered by these ex-employees and their need to heal outweighed their fear of being sued by Dalio. Copeland's case that Bridgewater was and is a toxic organization and that Dalio is a first-class asshole is airtight. Where the book falls down a bit is in drawing correlations that the more Dalio obsessed over his personality cult and building a system of tyrannical control, the worse the returns in Bridgewater's funds became. Despite being an asshole, Dalio is actually very persuasive and knowledgeable, and his success since 1975 is built not only on those instincts but a considerable dose of luck, too. While he was bootstrapped by rich patrons in the Lieb family, as well as his wife's wealthy family, it takes some skill to grow that fortune into an even larger fortune. Given that Dalio is the linchpin of the company -- no major investment decision gets made without his involvement -- he is also more than deserving of credit for having built up a firm from nothing to billions of dollars under management. And while, in recent years, Dalio has certainly pissed away a lot of that money in the service of his cult-like pursuits (like blowing >$100M on trying to create a Principles OS, or PriOS), Bridgewater is still today one of the world's largest hedge funds. Even if its returns are uneven and don't outperform a basket of 80% stock ETFs/20% bond ETFs, many institutional investors are still reluctant to pull their money, hoping for a return to the glory days of Bridgewater. In essence, many hedge funds are the ultimate confidence game, in that large investors stay invested simply because they have confidence in the fund's leadership, despite strong signals that they shouldn't.

It would be satisfying to think that such a tell-all memoir would result in the collapse of Bridgewater, but that's not how the world works. Were that a moral compass, ethical behavior, and not being an asshole were causal inputs to financial success, and vice-versa! So while we know a lot more about Bridgewater and Ray Dalio in the wake of this book, Bridgewater itself (under the new, but only slightly less assholic leadership of Nir Bar Dea) is likely to survive another day, and many more.

Five stars for the journalism, though.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unnerving and excellent. Absorbing. This may be perceived in some quarters as a kind of attack but the author here is really just holding up a mirror. What is grotesque and troubling (like all personality cults) is just the plain old unadorned reality. The reporting seems faultless and completely fair.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will try to write a full review from Athens tomorrow.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I'd mostly forgotten about Bridgewater (as they've become increasingly irrelevant since 2010), but know a few people who worked there. From reading Principles, the idea of (as professed in that book) gathering lots of management information was interesting, but that book was essentially an autobiography, and many of the "principles" were pretty anodyne/generic and probably didn't reflect any real competitive advantage. I thought maybe they were just hiding the useful secrets, but it turns out the situation was far more dysfunctional.

The author of this book is also a bit suspect -- considering Lee Kuan Yew to be a questionable character? but seems a lot more objective than Dalio.

To the extent you can believe this book -- Bridgewater in the 2000s and 2010s was a dystopian hellscape in a lot of ways, although a hellscape where all the players were being paid 2-10x more than market. There were about 2000 people at peak working at an organization where a tiny core (10?) were actually involved in meaningful revenue generation, and where almost all the drama was artificial personnel drama created and fostered by Dalio. The core competitive advantage of Bridgewater was laundering political connections and other "legal" market information into directional trades, well hidden in the marketplace, so it wasn't a Madoff or Epstein or Bankman-Fried style fraud, but it was still crazy that the organization built up such a massive team doing approximately nothing (or negative value), in parallel with this tiny core hedge operation.

Every stereotype of "radical honesty" (but applied unequally), weird internal Cultural Revolution Red Guards style courts, etc. seemed to be played out. Ironically, the firm/Dalio got fucked by fairly tangential "metoo" HR issues more so than any of the more core dysfunction, but overall...wow.

I hope all the deleted video/etc. recordings (deleted relatively recently because they were massive discovery liability) got archived somewhere for future historians.

[Thomas Kern · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing feat of reportage, one of those efforts that fills you with gratitude for the mettle and ingenuity of the Fifth Estate. Rob Copeland deserves a raft of praise for everything he achieves in these pages.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best exposé I read after Bad Blood. A real cautionary tale on hyenas (Dalio’s own defining example) in a dog eat dog world. His kangaroo courts and recordings for so called radical transparency show how twisted and selective his principles are.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the most insane story I’ve ever read. Even Going Infinite had a more self-aware subject than The Fund. The similarities between Sam Bankman-Fried and Ray Dalio were really interesting though. Both accumulated employees with little apparent sense of why. Both showed a similar overconfidence in their own opinions. Both tended towards gut decisions. Both pursued fame for… what purpose?

Copeland put together a narrative that is factual in tone and gives credit for the accomplishments of Ray Dalio while also presenting the places where he went off the rails or was just straight out gross. Pressure and money make people crazy, it seems.

[Hiccopolit · Rating 5 out of 5]

An instant classic. Well-researched, well-written and gripping to read.

I have read many business/finance books and this sits right up there with the best of them.

[Luciano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, what a pleasure to watch a naked king! Copeland made a huge effort, convincing perhaps tens of people to talk against their non-disclosure agreements, to turn Dalio' "radical transparence" into little more than hypocrisy and kowtowing. It would be a greater book, in my view, if it went deeper into Bridgewater's investment process, market calls, and performance; either it wasn't the focus of the book or the "investment machine" is a black box much more inescrutable than the day-to-day of the company. My favorite part is the visit of Niall Ferguson to the company.

[Daniel Welsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wowza, a must read for anyone who has read or followed Dalio. Megalomanic, egomaniac, tyrant, etc. I mean given Ray Dalio's love for the public eye, it is all quite coherent if you look at his public persona through a different lens. Even if 10% of the stories are factually correct (which based on the thoroughness of the research I would believe the author does a good job doing justice to a much higher percentage) you can categorically sort Ray into the "bad dude" category. From a competency perspective, it looks like his investment strategies have also been traded out of existence and the author paints a storey that their lacklustre performance for the last 10+ years is a function of this + an inability to develop new strategies as they regress to the market mean return before fees.

[Jamele (BookswithJams) · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a riveting and fascinating read. I did not know anything about Ray Dalio or what went on behind Bridgewater Associates, but as shocking as it all was, I was surprised by none of it. Working in this industry I am always fascinated by stories like this, and this reads like a work of fiction. The audio was excellent, I read this in one sitting as it was so crazy that things like this were allowed to continue for so long. If you need a book on how not to be, this is for you. I also recommend this for just pure ‘what in the…’ shock value, it is an incredible read from that standpoint. Props to those that finally stood up to him at a great personal cost.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for the finished copy to review.

[Doug O'laughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a 4/5 but there’s a huge slander campaign by the cult so gotta bump the ratings.

Mostly an entertaining read. There’s so many insane ex BW stories so this tracks lmao.

[Dave B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This exposé was unbelievable…. Jaw on the ground level unbelievable.
After reading this I’m struggling how best to describe it, I’ll try…. The world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, was run, quite literally, as if it was modelled after George Orwells “1984” by a ruthless dictator that used the framework of a cult.
As the ruthless creator and de facto CEO, Ray Dalio created hundreds of hardline “Principles” that were meant to be Bridgewaters commandments. He encouraged “radical transparency” to the point where every employee was rated in live time for the most trivial of matters. One employee, who sought help for severe depression, suicidal thoughts and PTSD, was told by his therapist that his workplace created a “feedback loop of self destruction”. Dalio would personally participate in the “drill downs” of employees. He would gather a boardroom full of their peers, berate them ruthlessly and fire them for the most trivial of matters. He would say it was because they didn’t demonstrate dedication to the Principles.
Not even mentioning how NO ONE knows how they make their money, multiple finance sector professionals suspected a massive Ponzi scheme!
This book was just nuts!

[Sanford Chee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Would be surprised surprised in Bridgewater turned out to be a scam
https://archive.ph/Lrkmv

Long on gossip, innuendoes and speculation; short on insights

FT review
https://www.ft.com/content/2db7ca87-4...

[Mary Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anybody who’s worked for Bridgewater won’t be able to admit publicly if they identified with the book and why. For instance, if they found the anecdotes to feel precariously nostalgic and absurdly validating. While I’m sure this was not the book’s intended purpose, it could possibly help someone to work through their complicated feelings about their time at the company, which they might describe as feeling like they attended a management masterclass fever dream directed by Quentin Tarantino.

They might appreciate how Copeland was able to gain so much access to an incredibly secretive organization and while not perfectly capturing all of the nuances and details of their experience, admiring how much of that culture he was able to absorb and describe to a mostly unfamiliar audience.

A person familiar with the company might suddenly realize why they get especially anxious when they watch that one Black Mirror episode about an individual’s social credit score and the real life implications that can arise when their sense of personal value, self worth and ultimately their financial well-being is being dictated by what others think of them… in real time… visible to all… and how a bad score can be detrimental so they quickly figure out how to work the system as a means of self preservation even if that goes against the entire purpose of the thing.

Someone might theoretically think fondly of a time when they successfully spent weeks preparing for a drill-down to defend processes that were widely considered industry best practices in order to be grilled for four hours straight on why they felt like this was the right approach and if they were “believable” when they were brought on in the first place because they were an expert in their field.

Anyway, I really liked the book.

[Aakash Gandhi · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author seems to have an axe to grind with Dalio. The sole purpose of the book appears to tarnish Bridgewater and Dalio. I have read Principles and the book had a profound impact on my life. Even if Dalio has a massive ego (as shown in the book) , so do all geniuses ! Be that Jobs , Gates , Musk etc. Also , no one is forcing people to work at Bridgewater. They can just leave isn’t it ? Sadly , I rate this book a 1 star. Very one sided.

[Navdeep Pundhir · Rating 1 out of 5]

An absolute garbage! This guy has written a Big Brother version of how the biggest hedge fund on planet is being run like 1984!
Pathetic narration, bad story; sorry, no story! Garbage!

[Michael Underschultz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reads like a long-form gossip column. Little to no insight to the actual business of Bridgewater or investment strategy.

[Alex Clemens · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable read

Rob Copeland’s book is a page-turner. It stands out as an introduction to the business of finance in the USA, a primer on how corporate PR and marketing can be wielded for advantage, and as a history of the world’s largest hedge fund and the people who worked there. But primarily, it’s a book about how to manipulate people - using financial incentives and promises of a magical evolution that’ll be gained by working at this unique business. The stories of how people were treated at Bridgewater are … staggering. And the stories of how people made themselves complicit in their own treatment are shocking. As the old saying goes, if you regularly find yourself saying you’re not in a cult, you’re in a cult. And people who read about and study cult behavior will find Copeland’s book to be very, very familiar territory. I’m glad I picked up The Fund.

[Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A triumph of the "Get a load of this a**hole" genre of biography/organizational expose.

Copeland paints a picture of a young man with hustle who slowly slides into being a ludicrously rich, sociopathic office tyrant on the strength of a few extraordinary "a broken clock is right twice a day" investment calls. The absolutely deranged office behaviour and Orwellian (in the true senses of the word) environment is bizarre and makes for a series of fascinating and interlocking stories. Copeland also does a nice job of balancing and juggling the cast of characters. The structure of the book in general is very well-executed, and I liked his decision to confine the discussion of his own interactions with Bridgewater and Dalio to a postscript.

Excellent narration by the venerable Will Damron.

[MM Suarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It seemed to him that most everyone who bought into Bridgewater’s philosophies ended up worse off except for Dalio himself."

The above statement is always the case with these megalomaniacs, they rake in the millions/billions when they leave while everyone else tries to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

What is most interesting to me is not so much that men like Dalio exist, but how others around him are willing to be degraded and abased in order to be in his good graces and make the big bucks. Perhaps those people who stayed in his "cult" for years, taking his abuse and the huge salaries, need to examine their own "principles" and not Dalio's.

[Szymon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough read. A lot to digest and I don't think I will be able to look at Ray's work without recalling this book's content ever again. That being said, the books that Dalio published are tools for any of us to use in a way we find meaningful. It's just a shame to find out that the author of said tools abused them and made them work largely for his own profit (or fame).

[Jessica Mathews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly reported and thoroughly sourced. An important investigative work.

[Breann Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

quick, easy to read and well documented.

The Fund further cements why you should never meet your heroes, because they’re probably delusional!!

[Emma Geczko · Rating 3 out of 5]

The point is made already in the first 100 pages, after that it’s just a chronological series of boring and repetitive examples.