Our Performance

In order to make things clear about Bridgewater’s performance, I am sharing the note that I sent to Bridgewater’s clients just yesterday so that you can know what the real story is. Most investment managers and companies have not yet done that. You should expect that when they do there will be some very big shocking results. 

In brief summary, the performance results, while disappointing, are consistent with prior poor performing periods that we expect to happen about once every 10-15 years under extraordinary circumstances. Additionally the risk control processes that we have put into place are working as expected, which are reducing our losses in comparison to the broader market and many other investment managers. 

Here’s the full letter: Our Performance

Warning To The Average Investor

Ray Dalio was recently on CNBC where he alerted retail investors to not make the mistake of thinking that markets that went up recently are better bargains rather than expensive bargains.

“Don’t make the mistake of buying those things that have gone up thinking they’re better rather than more expensive,” Dalio recently told CNBC’s Leslie Picker at the Greenwich Economic Forum in Connecticut.

Read the complete article here: Billionaire Ray Dalio says retail investors should not make this big mistake

Charlie Munger: The Merits Of Long-Term Investing

Short Bio: Charlie Munger is a 95 years old investor and the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Video duration: 23m51s

Charlie Munger on the merits of long-term investing:

"If you invest the way people gamble in casinos you're not gonna do very well. So ,it's the long-term investment that works best. But if you like the action of investing and sometimes winning, sometimes losing, just like people like the action when they gamble in a casino, those people are not my people. I like the long-term investors who figure out something that's going to work over the long term and buy that."

Charlie Munger highlights a paradox in Chinese behavior when it comes to investing in the markets and the desire to gamble:

"The Chinese do have a long attention span and that is a hugely desirable quality because you you're more likely to get the right answer if you think deeply and hard about a subject for a long time and it's odd there's a group of people who are so good at having a long attention span like to gamble so much which is quite counterproductive."

Interestingly, Munger considers the short-term market players as "gamblers":

"We have a view as to what the intrinsic value is of what is being traded and we only buy it when we think it's worth more than we're paying so we're trying to make a long-term investment by waiting for something to be under priced and then buying it and we don't give a damn about all these gamblers in the market."