This article is divided into three parts: Dario's life, bridgewater's history and principles.
First, let's take a brief look at Dario's story.
Dario was born in 1949, the same year as New China.
12 years old, worked as a part-time golf caddy at 1962, and started stock trading. The first investment is Northeast Airlines. From the age of 12, I read company reports, read all kinds of financial news, and liked to study buying and selling stocks until 1966 graduated from high school. Thanks to the continued prosperity of the American stock market in the 1960s, he wrote in his book, "That year, the stock market was still prosperous, and I made money and lived a good life."
18 years old, 1967 years old, should be the first year of losing money. In the same year, he entered Long Island University to study finance and began to dabble in commodity futures. From 1967 to 1969, the stock market plummeted.
22-year-old, 197 1 year-old, graduated from university, then was admitted to Harvard Business School, and began to pay attention to gold and exchange rate. In the same year, the Bretton Woods system collapsed and the dollar entered the era of no anchor.
23 years old, 1972 summer vacation, entered the commodity futures department of Merrill Lynch as a summer job.
24-year-old, 1973, graduated from Harvard with an MBA, joined Dominic Securities Company and became the head of commodity business. In the same year, the stock market plummeted and futures soared.
25 years old, 1974, joined Hilsen Company to take charge of futures hedging business. In the past two years, according to him, he won more and lost less, but on the whole, he should earn less. Once, he lost a lot of money on pork chop futures.
26 years old, 1975, I think these two companies have accumulated resources and contacts, so I founded Qiaoshui this year. Then, at the beginning of my hard work, the initial office was in a two-bedroom apartment, and there were three people in the whole company at the beginning.
28 years old, 1977 married and had four children.
68-year-old, 20 17, retired from the management of Qiaoshui, hidden behind the scenes.
69 years old, 20 18, publishing principle.
72 years old, 202 1 year, published Principles: Coping with the Changing World Order.
Part II: The history of bridgewater.
Because I am not a professional in the financial industry, I don't have the data of Bridgewater's annual yield, and I can't find the corresponding detailed information on the Chinese website. The following is mainly arranged according to the story about bridge water in Daglio Principle. Let me talk about it and listen to it.
1975 established the bridge water company "to build a bridge between different waters, so it is called bridge water". The initial business should be mainly composed of providing consulting services to customers and self-operated business. In this book, Dalio does not elaborate on his customer composition and annual business situation. At this stage, Qiaoshui began to build a trading model, and the initial model was very rough. The business focus has expanded to various markets such as commodities, stocks, bonds and foreign exchange. He observed the market, found imbalances, found causal relationships, and wrote down the principles for dealing with these causal relationships, formed a model, and used the model to guide transactions. This should be the initial quantitative model.
In the late 1970s, I began to write Daily Observation, which lasted for more than 40 years.
198 1 year, Dario first predicted the Great Depression. However, misjudgment led to almost liquidation with the rear axle water. That is to say, from 75 to 82, in eight years, Qiaoshui returned to its original point, which was a major blow in Daliao's life. After the transition, Qiaoshui began to set sail again. He described the situation like this: "I ate enough broken glass and learned that the most important thing is not to predict the future, but to know how to respond to the information obtained at each time."
In this big trough, Daglio's summary may be the most important points in the resurrection of Qiaoshui. Although it is inconspicuous in the glory behind the bridge water, I think these pages are the essence of this book. First: overconfidence, influenced by emotions. Second: once again realize the value of learning history. Everything is just a repetition of the past, and we began to try to sum up the history of the past 100 years. Third, it is difficult to grasp the opportunities in the market. This summary allowed him to turn Qiaoshui into a creative organization, that is, to gather the wisdom of everyone. Fourth, we are determined to find the "holy grail of investment" that bears low risks and enjoys high returns.
In fact, this profound blow and subsequent reflection laid the foundation for a series of actions and principles of Qiaoshui, and the corporate culture of Qiaoshui can also be found here. But is there really an investment holy grail? The continuous success of Qiaoshui for decades makes people think that they really have the key to wealth, but what does the mediocre performance in recent years show? In fact, I agree with the first and second points, and the third and fourth points are actually the same thing. I think this world is a multi-game world. You can find out 1000 or 10,000 factors that affect the market and make a model of their weights, but you are so clear that 101 accidents will not happen? Will not cause a fatal blow to the model?
1990: Dario said that he has found the holy grail of investment: having 15-20 a good and irrelevant return stream can greatly reduce the risk without reducing the expected return. On this basis, Qiaoshui established the "Pure Alpha" fund, which should have been running all the time and once created the highest rate of return in the history of hedge funds. But now many hedge funds adopt this strategy, which means that the track is actually very crowded.
From 65438 to 0995, Dario began to think about how to pass on wealth from generation to generation, that is, this kind of asset should perform well in all environments for a long time. So Qiaoshui has constructed four investment strategies, which are balanced enough and will not suffer unacceptable losses. This is the "all-weather fund".
With the development of Qiaoshui, the company gradually expanded and the number of employees began to increase. In order to let people know the company culture and implement the company policies, Daglio began to formulate various principles for his employees to understand and implement. These principles gradually increased and finally summed up into a book, which is now the Principles.
Dario divides life into three stages: study, work and freedom. But he believes that before retiring, he wants to pass on his life experience to young people. In fact, I feel a bit like a scholar-bureaucrat in China, from making contributions to making statements. Dario has reached the stage of making a statement.
Began to enter the third part of the book review of Principles.
First of all, we should have a general idea of this book: 550 pages and 400,000 words, CITIC Publishing House, 98 yuan.
Why should I list this number? Because the normal 400,000 words can be read in 7-8 hours, and it took me at least 12 hours to finish this book. Under normal circumstances, after reading a book, there will always be such a lingering sound, which lasts for several days or hours. But after reading this book, I don't remember anything. If I hadn't written this book review and read it again, I really don't know what I am reading these days.
At first, this book gave me the feeling that it was a bit as obscure as The Prince, but The Prince was interesting to read and Machiavelli's writing level was still very interesting. Then I read it and felt like reading of the analects of confucius, just like reading of the analects of confucius. But in the end, I feel that he still doesn't like The Analects, because The Analects also has something that people can remember. But I can't remember the principle at all At this moment, I suddenly saw the employee handbook issued by the company on my desk. Yes, that's what the employee handbook feels like. Now I have found a book that can be compared with the target.
This book is not a personal biography of Daglio. The first 129 page describes Daglio's personal and bridge water trip, and it is still readable. But after that, it was all the company manuals of Qiaoshui.
In fact, many truths and reasons in the book have been repeatedly said by others, but this book is a master of N truths. It is conceivable that as a new employee of Qiaoshui, how should he do things and how should he understand the company's corporate culture? But he won't do anything wrong according to this book, because this book has norms and guidance for new employees, ordinary employees and company executives.
This book is actually a highly abstract truth and philosophy about Dario's 70-year life and bridgewater's 40-year history. It is more like a notebook, summarizing some truths in a certain period of work, recording them in the notebook and gradually accumulating them.
So the principles applied in life and work must be correct, but it is quite boring to piece these principles together into a book.
As mentioned above, it is really because of the uncertainty of the world that Daglio wants to find out the certainty and the eternal holy grail of investment in this world. Although there is no mathematical formula listed in the book, I can feel that he is an extremely rational person. He repeatedly said that his brain should be extremely open. He wants to make Qiaoshui a company that is always extremely rational. But is this the world?
The applicable crowd of this book is actually more suitable for the executives of enterprises and institutions, and teams that have managed at least 100 people can use the truth in the book. Such people can use this book as a dictionary and look it up at any time when they encounter management problems.
However, I feel that it is of little significance for ordinary people to read this book. Although they can understand these principles, they can't remember 98 yuan's books. Might as well buy a novel to read.