Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

Approaching the market in this way taught me that one of the keys to being a successful investor is to only take bets you are highly confident in and to diversify them well.

So I made the pitch to the people who ran the World Bank’s pension fund, most importantly Hilda Ochoa, who was its chief investment officer at the time. Despite the fact that we had no assets under management and no track record, she gave us a $5 million U.S. bond account to manage.

Beijing was filled with wonderful and incredibly hospitable people who introduced us to the tradition of drinking shots of Moutai while shouting Ganbei! (Bottoms up!)

While I stepped away from that opportunity, China remained an important part of my own and my family’s lives. We loved it, especially the people. In 1995, my wife, Barbara, our eleven-year-old son, Matt, and I decided together that Matt would spend a year in Beijing, attending an all-Chinese school and living with our friend Madame Gu, who had stayed with us in America during the Tiananmen Square days and whom Matt had visited in China with us when he was three. Standards of living in China were very different from what Matt was accustomed to in Connecticut. For example, the apartment Madame Gu and her husband lived in had hot water for showers only twice a week, and the school Matt attended didn’t have heat until well into the winter, so the students wore their coats in the classrooms. Matt didn’t speak Chinese and none of his classmates spoke English. All of this was not just a huge adventure for Matt; it was completely unprecedented and required special permission from the Chinese government. I was excited for Matt because I knew he would see a different world and broaden his mind. Barbara needed a little convincing and a couple of visits to a child psychologist for reassurance, but she had lived all around the world herself and knew how it had benefited her, so she was ultimately receptive