Billionaire's Principles For A Great Life
Maxim|May/June 2018

His hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, is the biggest in the world. Now, in a best-selling book, Ray Dalio is sharing the lessons in life and work that made him a titan of Wall Street.

Justin Rohrlich
Billionaire's Principles For A Great Life

When Ray Dalio was eight years old, his jazz musician father, Marino Dallolio, moved the family from Jackson Heights, Queens, to Long Island. Like many kids, young Ray had a paper route and did odd jobs around the neighborhood, mowing lawns and shoveling snow for pocket money. When he was 12, he began caddying at a nearby golf club.

The club’s membership included quite a few Wall Streeters, and having become interested in the market from what he’d overheard on the links, Ray bought 60 shares of Northeast Airlines with $300 he had managed to save. When Northeast subsequently became a takeover target, the stock tripled; by the time Ray graduated from high school, he had several thousand dollars invested in the stock market.

Dalio has said he fears boredom and mediocrity far more than he fears failure, and perhaps that’s because he’s rarely failed during his storied career. He founded the world’s largest hedge fund firm, Bridgewater Associates, which manages about $160 billion in assets and has seen almost $50 billion in gains since its inception through 2017, more than any other firm in the category. One of the world’s 100 richest people, Dalio has a personal net worth of nearly $14.6 billion, according to Bloomberg—more than the GDPs of Guyana, Montenegro, and Fiji combined. His 2017 book, Principles: Life & Work, is a New York Times No. 1 best-seller.

Says trader, columnist, and former CNBC host Jeff Macke, “There’s a scoreboard in the hedge fund world, and Ray Dalio is amazing at making money— anyone who says otherwise is just a moron.”

Dalio started Bridgewater out of his apartment in 1975 after he was fired from brokerage firm Shearson Hayden Stone, where he worked on the commodities futures desk, for slugging his boss at a New Year’s Eve party.

This story is from the May/June 2018 edition of Maxim.

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This story is from the May/June 2018 edition of Maxim.

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