In this month’s New Yorker, John Cassidy profiles Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, said by some to be the strangest hedge fund in the world.

I found the piece interesting, though I did think Cassidy could have done a better job explaining the nuances of Dalio’s behavior, such as evidenced in this paragraph:

Dalio asked for another opinion. From the back of the room, a young man dressed in a black sweatshirt started saying that a Chinese slowdown could have a big effect on global supply and demand. Dalio cut him off: “Are you going to answer me knowledgeably or are you going to give me a guess?” The young man, whom I will call Jack, said he would hazard an educated guess. “Don’t do that,” Dalio said. He went on, “You have a tendency to do this. . . . We’ve talked about this before.” After an awkward silence, Jack tried to defend himself, saying that he thought he had been asked to give his views. Dalio didn’t let up. Eventually, the young employee said that he would go away and do some careful calculations.

Do you believe the world is mechanical? Do parts come together to work as a seamless whole? Ray Dalio thinks so:

Many hedge-fund managers stay pinned to their computer screens day and night monitoring movements in the markets. Dalio is different. He spends most of his time trying to figure out how economic and financial events fit together in a coherent framework. “Almost everything is like a machine,” he told me one day when he was rambling on, as he often does. “Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.” His constant goal, he said, was to understand how the economic machine works. “And then everything else I basically view as just a case at hand. 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?”

So who invests in Bridgewater Associates, exactly? Not wealthy invididuals:

Part of Dalio’s innovation has been to build a hedge fund that caters principally to institutional investors rather than to rich individuals. Of the roughly one hundred billion dollars invested in Bridgewater, only a small proportion comes from wealthy families. Almost a third comes from public pension funds, such as the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System; another third comes from corporate pension funds, such as those at Kodak and General Motors; a quarter comes from government-run sovereign wealth funds, such as the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore.

A surprise about Bridgewater’s investing tendencies (no U.S. markets?):

Is Bridgewater really any different? Although the firm trades in more than a hundred markets, it is widely believed that the great bulk of its profit comes from two areas in which Dalio is an expert: the bond and currency markets of major industrial countries. Unlike some other hedge funds, Bridgewater has never made much money in the U.S. stock market, an area where Dalio has less experience.

While the piece makes it sound like working at Bridgewater is quite the challenge, I appreciated this nugget:

Dalio insists that money has never been his main motivation. He lives well, but avoids the conspicuous consumption that some of his rivals indulge in. He and his wife, Barbara, to whom he has been married for thirty-four years, own two houses, one in Greenwich, Connecticut, and one in Greenwich Village, which he sometimes uses on weekends. (They are currently building a new house on the water in Connecticut.) Apart from hunting and exploring remote areas, Dalio’s main hobby is music: jazz, blues, and rock and roll. Recently, he joined a philanthropic campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, pledging to give away at least half of his money.

Ray Dalio is a man I’d like to meet. We could talk about books and music and photography. And oh yes, the financial markets (I do have a degree in quantitative finance, after all, and work in the financial sector).