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Ray Dalio eclipses George Soros as most successful fund manager

Bridgewater founder with ‘radically transparent’ approach to investing has the last laugh

Almost 40 years ago, a young Harvard graduate called Ray Dalio was trading futures at a brokerage called Shearson Hayden Stone. His boss was one Sandy Weill, who would go on to become famous as chairman and chief executive of Citigroup.

It was a promising start in finance. But the promise did not last long: Wall Street legend has it that after just a year in the job Dalio was sacked for taking a stripper to a client presentation.

Such a debut could have led to the rookie drifting off into obscurity – or just as easily have been the beginning of prolonged fame. Yet neither happened.

Instead, the son of a jazz musician sloped off and founded his own hedge fund, Bridgewater, from a two-bedroom apartment. It took three decades operating out of Westport, Connecticut before people outside the sector started to talk about Dalio once again.

The credit crisis was the trigger that propelled the money manager’s name back into Wall Street conversation, after providing him with the platform to outshine rivals and reap massive rewards.

This week the 62-year-old’s fortune was put at $10bn (£6.3bn) in Forbes’s latest list of billionaires. Last month he was lauded as the most successful hedge fund manager in history, after new rankings compiled by LCH Investments showed the $13.8bn that his Bridgewater Pure Alpha fund made in 2011 had propelled Dalio past the grandaddy of hedge fund investing, George Soros, in terms of returns to investors. (more…)