Ray Dalio and Bridgewater Associates Continue to Amaze with 25% YTD Gains

by Trader Mark, Fund My Mutual Fund

I'm not sure what sort of witchcraft is going on over at Bridgewater, but the firm is putting together another fantastic year, at 25% year to date gains - this after a spectacular 2010.  This would be impressive for a $2 or $5 Billion hedge fund, but Bridgewater is nearing $125B in assets!  Well, we do know part of the witchcraft - the firm was long gold and Treasuries and nailed it on both, but still - a wicked return.   I am going to go back to that (rare) March interview and rewatch!

A nice story on Bloomberg that discusses more than just the returns:

• Bridgewater Associates LP founder Ray Dalio can rattle off the investing fads he’s witnessed since he began trading as a 12-year-old golf caddie: the Nifty-50 stock craze of the 1970s, the 1980 gold bubble and even the 60- 40 stock-to-bond mix.  “Manias occur when there is group thinking,” Dalio says.
• Dalio, 62, built Bridgewater into the world’s largest macro hedge-fund firm, with $122 billion in total assets, by tacking against consensus. He’s created a distinct workplace culture and a research-driven investing process that spreads risk across scores of markets.
• “Making money is a zero-sum game, so to be successful you have to be willing to stand apart from the crowd,” Dalio says. “And you have to be right.”
• The founder was right often enough during and after the worst financial crisis in decades starting in 2008, helping to cement his reputation as a leader in his industry. Three Bridgewater hedge funds placed among the 100 top-performing large funds in Bloomberg Markets’ annual ranking in February, including its flagship, Pure Alpha II. The No. 3 fund posted a 38 percent return for the 10-month period through October 2010.
• In August 2007, as credit markets were tightening, the newsletter warned, “Hedge funds in general are unlikely to provide much diversification to help protect against poor performance of traditional markets.”  The next year, funds lost an average of 19 percent.
• At its bucolic headquarters in Westport, Connecticut, Bridgewater devotes a great deal of resources to research. The firm’s 1,200 employees -- more than at many midsize investment banks -- help generate the data and analysis that inform bets on macroeconomic trends. In June, researchers tracked the percentage of world gross domestic product generated by Western Europe, the U.S., Africa, China and other markets to the 16th century to show long-term shifts in economic power.
• In July 2007, more than a year before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ), the newsletter cited “pervasive fragility” in the financial system. It noted the 50 percent growth in the notional value of credit derivatives, to $29 trillion, during just the last half of 2006. So Pure Alpha II piled into Treasury bonds, shorted stocks and loaded up on gold. It finished 2008 with a gain of 9.4 percent, investors say.
• By the start of 2010, against a forecast of anemic growth in the U.S. and Europe, Pure Alpha II’s wagers were spread more widely than usual. It made money on developed-market currencies, equities and emerging-market debts and currencies as well as commodities. Investors say the fund generated a 44.8 percent return last year.
• And amid the market turmoil of 2011, the fund is up 25.3 percent through Aug. 31.
• All told, Pure Alpha II has returned 15 percent annualized since its December 1, 1991 start.
• Dalio’s transformational effect on money management dates to the early 1980s. While many investors embraced a simple asset mix of stocks and bonds, Bridgewater spread its bets across myriad markets, eventually to more than 100 of them. The firm wagered on every-thing from Treasury yield curves to Australian dollars to crude. That diversification, including bets not related to the overall direction of the market, helped the hedge fund prosper in good markets and bad -- and lure huge pensions and other big institutions to an industry then dominated by wealthy families and endowments.
• He says the principles complement his firm’s effort to be “radically truthful” and “radically transparent.” Bridgewater employees -- Dalio included -- are required to publicly talk about their and their colleagues’ mistakes and weaknesses as a means to improvement. Conversations are either audio or videotaped so that employees can make their own assessments.
• These days, the view from Bridgewater is dour. He divides the world into two groups: developed debtor nations that are deleveraging and emerging creditor countries that are leveraging up. After years of overspending financed by borrowing, the former are being forced to lower their debt relative to their income levels, constraining spending levels and employment gains.
• Developed debtor countries, including Greece, Spain and Italy, that can’t print money to make it easier to service their debts and to make up for slow credit growth will have decade- long depressions and debt defaults.  “We worry about Europe not being able to solve its problems,” Dalio says.
• Dalio expects emerging creditor nations to be tomorrow’s economic leaders. Countries such as China and India that have currencies and monetary policy linked to those in the U.S. are experiencing inflationary bubbles because their interest rates are too low, he says. They will have to unlink from the U.S. or face intolerable conditions. Emerging economies will account for 70 percent of global GDP in 15 to 20 years versus 47 percent now.
• Dalio views the August market turbulence as consistent with Bridgewater’s expectations. “Emerging creditor countries are trading more like blue chips; the U.S. is trading more like a country in decline,” the Daily Observations read on Aug. 8.