Ray Dalio

He is the son of a jazz musician, Marino Dallolio (1911–2002), who "played the clarinet and saxophone at Manhattan jazz clubs such as the Copacabana," and Ann, a homemaker.

As a child, Dalio had various odd jobs, including mowing lawns, shovelling snow, and a paper route.

He is of Italian descent.

At age 12, he started caddying at The Links Golf Club, which was within walking distance of his childhood home.

He caddied for many Wall Street professionals during his time there, including Wall Street veteran George Leib.

Leib and his wife Isabelle invited Dalio to their Park Avenue apartment for family dinners and holiday gatherings.

The couple's son, a Wall Street trader, later gave Dalio a summer job at his trading firm.

He began investing at age 12, when he bought shares of Northeast Airlines for $300 and tripled his investment after the airline merged with another company.

By the time he reached Herricks High School, he had built up an investment portfolio of several thousand dollars.

Raymond Thomas Dalio (born August 8, 1949) is an American investor and hedge fund manager, who has served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, since 1985.

These events set in motion the Great Inflation of the 1970s.

The combination of easy money policy and abandonment of fiscal discipline sent prices soaring.

The next summer, after his first year at Harvard, Dalio and his friends created the company that later became Bridgewater Associates.

It started off as a small entity, and its goal was to trade commodities.

But they lacked experience and the venture yielded little fruit.

Although the original Bridgewater failed, Dalio later used the name to start what would become the largest hedge fund in history.

After graduating from Harvard, Dalio married and started a family.

Dalio was born in New York City and attended C.W. Post College of Long Island University before receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1973.

Two years later Dalio launched Bridgewater.

He received a bachelor's degree in finance from Long Island University (C.W. Post College) and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1973.

Dalio had trouble finding a college in which to enroll.

He finally applied and got into C.W. Post College, a campus of Long Island University.

He continued to buy and sell stocks in college, but became attracted to something new: commodity futures.

Commodity futures had low borrowing requirements at the time, and Dalio knew he could profit more handsomely than with simple stocks.

At the same time, he was beginning to enjoy school.

With more freedom given to him, he took up Transcendental Meditation, which he still practices to this day.

After graduating from C.W. Post College, Dalio had a free summer.

He took a job as a clerk on the New York Stock Exchange.

While there, he witnessed Nixon's decision to take the United States off of the gold standard in response to rising inflation.

Stock prices on the exchange rose, on average, 33% the following day.

He founded Bridgewater in 1975 in New York.

In 2013, it was listed as the largest hedge fund in the world.

Dalio is the author of the 2017 book Principles: Life & Work, about corporate management and investment philosophy.

It was featured on The New York Times bestseller list.

Management practices at Ray Dalio's firm Bridgewater have come under new scrutiny.

A veteran hedge fund reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Rob Copeland has published a nonfiction book "The Fund -- Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend" in 2023, detailing many of the psychological tactics used by Ray Dalio while running Bridgewater.

Director of National Committee on United States-China Relations.

Dalio was born in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City's Queens Borough.

When he was 8, the family moved from Jackson Heights to Manhasset in Nassau County, New York.

In 2020 Bloomberg ranked him the world's 79th-wealthiest person.