> A: If you have my book Principles, there’s one about this idea, Prioritize: While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want.

Sounds obvious but if you've ever worked for an organization or with an individual that prioritizes by buckets or labels ('Urgent', 'Extremely Urgent') versus a queue (a Trello column)†, then you've seen how non-obvious and pervasive this can be.

Agreed, a more detailed answer may have been more useful.

†Full disclosure: I have.

You've selectively trimmed down his responses to the most generic-sounding lines.

The general theme in the AMA is to jump in, accept you'll make mistakes, think critically about what succeeds and fails, and leverage technology to automatically apply what you learn.

Or, from another article, "working for what he wants, not what others want him to do, coming up with independent opinions and testing them on intelligent people, being wary about overconfidence, and reflecting on his mistakes."

This is the antithesis of "expect a billionaire hedge fund manager to spoon feed you specific investing strategies on a Reddit AMA."

A: I’d just dive in and place bets know how to learn from my experiences. I wrote about how to do that in my book, which is largely about how to convert mistakes into learned principles that work, and how to save these principles and use them in computers so that your thinking is not constrained by your brain’s capacity to juggle a lot of things at the same time.

There is no better learning than that which comes from experiences and quality reflections on those experiences. It doesn’t matter whether you do it at a hedge fund, or any other place, but I would recommend that you do it around other smart people who help you brainstorm on the best answer.

I'm sorry but this is superb advice, all three. It took me most of my life to learn to prioritize. He might have expanded a bit (focus is always about saying no, not about what you elevate), but he's right in all three cases.

> A: Think about how to rotate your portfolio to buy that which is cheap and sell that which is expensive.

Buy low, sell high. How enlightening this guy is...

It's a little more subtle than that. He's saying that if you have an existing portfolio and you're worried about a market correction you should start selling off your expensive assets that have already appreciated and buy ones that are currently cheap. Obvious? Probably. But still something most people don't do.

Except knowing this is not the hard part - even professional investors sell too early on the upside and hold on to the losers too long. What does "already appreciated" mean? Is it Amazon today? or stock you bought for $60 and sold for $300? Is Walmart "cheap" today because they're well positioned for distribution from digital sales, or expensive because their bricks&mortar stores are dinosaurs?

So, yeah, we can mine his answers for subtle nuance, but it seems we quickly return to the crux, which is "but how?"

A long time ago, I read about a guy who made a lot of money on the market. Someone asked him how. He said, "I always sold too soon."

You aren't going to know if it's too soon to sell Amazon. But if you wait until it's not too soon, it will be too late.

But of course, there's "too soon" - say, when you've made 70% of the possible gains. And there's "really too soon" - when you've made 5% of the gains. How do you know which is which? I don't know.

Sure, I'm not arguing with that. I was just saying that the OP's criticism is a bit misguided. Yours is more reasonable.

Eh, the answer to "but how" needs to be understood before you can "buy low, sell high." I don't think my criticism was misguided at all.

> assets that have already appreciated

There in lies the rub.

dalio’s best advice has nothing to do with financial investment. it’s organizational dynamics