Ray Dalio quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

  • There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That's a beautiful deleveraging.

  • He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.

  • For me, the best things in life - meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures - are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money.

  • I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one's strengths and weaknesses are.

  • I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don't know what the future is going to hold.

  • If it didn't happen in your life before, then you're not paying attention you don't think it's possible. But almost all important events never happen in your life before.

  • Do not feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them! Remember that one: they are to be expected; two: they're the first and most essential part of the learning process; and three: feeling bad about them will prevent you from getting better.

  • It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you're doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.

  • There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.

  • In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it's disruptive and it's a problem.

  • I believe that for the most part, achieving success - whatever that is for you - is mostly a matter of personal choice and that, initially, making the right choices can be difficult.

  • Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you.

  • The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That's the question to be worried about.

  • I don't get caught up in the moment.

  • Maintain 'baseball cards' and/or 'believability matrixes' for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

  • There is nothing to fear from truth....Being truthful is essential to being an independent thinker and obtaining greater understanding of what is right.

  • Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.

  • If inflation-adjusted interest rates decline in a given country, its currency is likely to decline.

  • Over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity.

  • Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there's an education level that plays into the mix and so if it's inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.

  • So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work - what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?

  • In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

  • You should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don't know what the future is going to hold.

  • I'm going to give away a lot more than half my money. I'd be happy to give that to the government if the government put together programs that were like I'm giving away to charity, in which I believe the money is effectively used to help people.

  • The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

  • I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.

  • When growth is slower-than-expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up.

  • I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e. a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future.

  • Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it's a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

  • I believe that one of the best ways of getting at truth is reflecting with others who have opposing views and who share your interest in finding the truth rather than being proven right

  • Once you accept that playing the game will be uncomfortable, and you do it for a while, it will become much easier (like it does when getting fit). When you excel at it, you will find your ability to get what you want thrilling.

  • When you're centered, your emotions are not hijacking you.

  • Meditation helps you stay in a calm, clear-headed state so that when challenges come at you, you can deal with them like a ninja - in a calm thoughtful way. When you're centered, your emotions are not hijacking you.

  • Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them - i.e., reflecting - if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.

  • Never say anything about a person you wouldn't say to them directly, and don't try people without accusing them to their face. Badmouthing people behind their backs shows a serious lack of integrity and is counterproductive. It doesn't yield any beneficial change, and it subverts both the people you are badmouthing and the environment as a whole.

  • Ironically, people who suppress the mini-confrontations for fear of conflict tend to have huge conflicts later, which can lead to separation, precisely because they let minor problems fester. On the other hand, people who address the mini-conflicts head-on in order to straighten things out tend to have the great, long-lasting relationships.

  • You'll see that excuses like "That's not easy" are of no value and that it pays to "push through it" at a pace you can handle. Like getting physically fit, the most important thing is that you keep moving forward at whatever pace you choose, recognizing the consequences of your actions.

  • School typically doesn't prepare young people for real life - unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that's why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.

  • What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there's inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.

  • A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic.

  • Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you'll create credit... So you reach a certain point that that you can't do that anymore... There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

  • Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.

  • I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I'll come out of it refreshed and centered and that's how I'll feel and it'll carry through the day.

  • I think so many people are reactive... they see things in a short term way they're right up against it.

  • When there is pain, the animal instinct is 'fight or flight' (i.e., to either strike back or run away) - reflect instead. When you can calm yourself down, thinking about the dilemma that is causing you pain will bring you to a higher level and enlighten you, leading to progress.

  • When people get at each other's throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.

  • I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.

  • There is giant untapped potential in disagreement, especially if the disagreement is between two or more thoughtful people

  • There are two main drivers of asset class returns - inflation and growth.

  • Pull in your belt, spend less, and reduce debt.

  • The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I'm wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets.

  • Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.

  • I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.

  • An economy is not a complicated thing; it just has a lot of moving parts.

  • Almost everything is like a machine.

  • As Harvard developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, who has studied Bridgewater, says, in most work places everyone is working two jobs. The first is whatever their actual job is; the second consists of managing others' impressions of them, especially by hiding weaknesses and inadequacies - which is an enormous waste of energy.

  • Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion. Opinions are easy to produce, so bad ones abound. Knowing that you don't know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don't.

  • Be wary of the arrogant intellectual who comments from the stands without having played on the field.

  • By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn't give a damn what you like. So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things.

  • Distinguish open-minded people from closed-minded people. Open-minded people seek to learn by asking questions; they realize that what they know is little in relation to what there is to know and recognize that they might be wrong. Closed-minded people always tell you what they know, even if they know hardly anything about the subject being discussed. They are typically made uncomfortable by being around those who know a lot more about a subject, unlike open-minded people who are thrilled by such company.

  • Don't be a perfectionist, because perfectionists often spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of other big, important things. Be an effective imperfectionist. Solutions that broadly work well (e.g., how people should contact each other in the event of crises) are generally better than highly specialized solutions (e.g., how each person should contact each other in the event of every conceivable crisis).

  • Don't worry about looking good - worry about achieving your goals.

  • Each person assesses each other person's credibility on different dimensions, because people are strong and weak in different things.

  • Everyone has to decide for themselves what works for them and their organization.

  • For every mistake that you learn from you will save thousands of similar mistakes in the future, so if you treat mistakes as learning opportunities that yield rapid improvements you should be excited by them. But if you treat them as bad things, you will make yourself and others miserable, and you won't grow.

  • Forget about what the technology is. Just understand the motivation behind it.

  • I also believe that everyone needs to think independently and make their own decisions on what makes the most sense.

  • I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don't sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.

  • I believe that our society's "mistake-phobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning.

  • I believe that understanding what is good is obtained by looking at the way the world works and figuring out how to operate in harmony with it to help it evolve.

  • I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature's laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.

  • I believe there are an infinite number of laws of the universe and that all progress or dreams achieved come from operating in a way that's consistent with them. These laws and the principles of how to operate in harmony with them have always existed. We were given these laws by nature. Man didn't and can't make them up. He can only hope to understand them and use them to get what he wants.

  • I do think people need to recognize that a lot of journalists want to write a story a certain way because the story will be better or the portrayal will be better, or at least recognize that whenever you're looking at something, you're seeing it through somebody's eyes who may actually not be the person who is the most insightful.

  • I don't think individual media outlets will regulate. There are such things as self-regulatory organizations that will look at the members of the industry and their behavior and establish standards of behavior.

  • I don't think there is such a thing as the perfect system.

  • I found that whenever I encountered a situation, rather than just reacting to it, it was tremendously useful to think carefully about how I should react to it and other situations like it. Besides providing me with more thoughtful responses in each of these cases, approaching things this way provided me and others with guidance on how to deal with similar situations when they came up in the future.

  • I have been very lucky because I have had the opportunity to see what it's like to have little or no money and what it's like to have a lot of it. I'm lucky because people make such a big deal of it and, if I didn't experience both, I wouldn't be able to know how important it really is for me. I can't comment on what having a lot of money means to others, but I do know that for me, having a lot more money isn't a lot better than having enough to cover the basics.

  • I have found that by looking at what is rewarded and punished, and why, universally - i.e., in nature as well as in humanity - I have been able to learn more about what is "good" and "bad" than by listening to most people's views about good and bad.

  • I notice a difference from the moment I meditate.

  • I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.

  • I think it is in the nature of individuals and individual entities not to self-correct.

  • I think meditation has been the single biggest reason for whatever success Ive had

  • I think the basic problem is that everybody thinks they know what the truth is, and sometimes they're even distorting the truth to make their arguments.

  • I think the greatest tragedy of mankind is that people have ideas and opinions in their heads but don't have a process for properly examining these ideas to find out what's true. That creates a world of distortions.

  • I think the industry can probably self-correct without regulation, but I don't believe an individual outlet can regulate itself.

  • I think the media argues all the time with itself.

  • I think the President of the United States must operate by rules. I think our judicial system must operate by the rules. You have to operate by the rules of the system, and if you don't, if you pull rank, then you lose all your credibility.

  • I'd like to be clear that a number of people find me intolerable, and they don't hesitate to say so - which they and I cherish.

  • If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don't face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.

  • If you don't own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.

  • If you have the power to see things through somebody else's eyes, it's like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

  • I'm just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

  • I'm scared of one man, one vote because it suggests that everybody has an equal ability at making decisions, and I think that's dangerous.

  • I'm scared of people with power making the decision.

  • I'm sure Donald Trump will think that he has the truth, and some journalist is arguing that he has truth, and somebody else is arguing that they have the truth. And in fact it's even worse than that because they're so hell bent on their arguments that they will distort the truth consciously. They'll manipulate the facts to support their arguments because they're so hung up in the fight. That's where the problem is, so we argue all the time.

  • In order to get past disagreements, you just can't have one person with power decide. In other words, so just because I'm a boss, it would be terrible if I then said, "Okay, we're gonna go do this." That's why, after that thoughtful disagreement, there has to be a process of an idea meritocracy. That means okay, now you have to vote, not that the decision resides with power. And then you vote and move beyond it.

  • In the end, what matters most is that the people you work with share your values, so I've wanted people who value the meaningful work and meaningful relationships that always motivated me in building Bridgewater.

  • It is a law of nature that you must do difficult things to gain strength and power. As with working out, after a while you make the connection between doing difficult things and the benefits you get from doing them, and you come to look forward to doing these difficult things.

  • It's more important to do big things well than to do small things perfectly.

  • I've learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective.

  • Life is like a game where you seek to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving your goals. You get better at this game through practice. The game consists of a series of choices that have consequences. You can't stop the problems and choices from coming at you, so it's better to learn how to deal with them.

  • Life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.

  • Like the saying goes, don't believe everything you read.

  • Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.

  • Meditation more than anything in my life was the biggest ingredient of whatever success I've had.

  • Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I've had.

  • More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively

  • Most people have a hard time confronting their weaknesses in a really straightforward, evidence-based way. They also have problems speaking frankly to others. Some people love knowing about their weaknesses and mistakes and those of others because it helps them be so much better, while others can't stand it.

  • One of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads - often theories that are critical of others - that they won't test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people's backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation.

  • Over time, it also became important for me to share my management principles with the people I worked with because we had to agree on how we should be with each other - and that way is unique. Because the logic behind being radically honest and radically transparent with each other wasn't clear, it had to be spelled out in these principles.

  • People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.

  • People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.

  • People who excel at book learning tend to call up from memory what they have learned in order to follow stored instructions. Others who are better at internalized learning use the thoughts that flow from their subconscious. The experienced skier doesn't recite instructions on how to ski and then execute them; rather, he does it well "without thinking," in the same way he breathes without thinking. Understanding these differences is essential.

  • People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don't know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future.

  • People with good work habits have to-do lists that are reasonably prioritized, and they make themselves do what needs to be done. By contrast, people with poor work habits almost randomly react to the stuff that comes at them, or they can't bring themselves to do the things they need to do but don't like to do (or are unable to do).

  • Principles are concepts that can be applied over and over again in similar circumstances as distinct from narrow answers to specific questions. Every game has principles that successful players master to achieve winning results. So does life. Principles are ways of successfully dealing with the laws of nature or the laws of life. Those who understand more of them and understand them well know how to interact with the world more effectively than those who know fewer of them or know them less well.

  • Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles connect your values to your actions.

  • Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.

  • Radical transparency is critical to having an idea meritocracy because it shows what's actually happening without spin and prevents people from maneuvering politically behind each others' backs. It brings problems and weaknesses to the surface and allows people to see how they are dealt with, so it's great for training people on how to deal with real problems.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share