Not a finance guy, but from what I read and listened to, yes: "The fund combined multiple uncorrelated return strategies that are leveraged appropriately to maximize returns, while lowering risk." (from CNBC). I think this was a novel approach at the time, finetuning those gains specifically due to lack of correlation, further to specific assets within each class. Side-note, cool asset coorelation (or lack thereof) map: https://www.guggenheiminvestments.com/mutual-funds/resources...

To be fair, there really is nothing exceptional in this particular optimization model. It's basically just a textual explanation of Markowitz optimization, known since the 50s.

To me it's as interesting as a trader telling you his secret is "to buy low and sell high".

A couple sentence explanation of every trading strategy always seems obvious and trivial. Devil is always in the details.

Isn't coding just ifs and for loops?

Ok, and we don't make a billion dollars doing it.

You're literally on a site founded by a billionaire who coded.

Viaweb was sold for about $50 million worth of Yahoo stock. So more than 95% of the first billion was from something other than coding.

The rate at which finance mints extremely wealthy workers dwarfs the rate at which software does.

Doesn't look like it dwarfs it. According to Forbes, 15% of billionaires are in finance, 12% are in fashion, 9% are in tech.

The comparison would be more accurate with the relative sizes of each industry. Pretty sure there are more software engineers than people working in similarly skilled finance jobs.

I would bet on the opposite, at least since 2008.

I think it's probably pretty pretty similar actually.

I would say tech probably has worse median outcomes but better right tail outcomes than finance.

He is not We.

In Principles, he describes some high-level decision making processes. Bridgewater is split into groups of about 300 people. Within those groups, smaller groups are formed to discuss particular strategies. Everybody has "baseball cards" of their coworkers with stats showing peer-rated talent in various sub-domains. When a decision is made, there are two rounds of voting: a raw vote, and a vote weighted by stats (e.g. somebody whose peers have rated them as knowledgeable about agricultural trades would have more votes in this phase). If the two rounds of voting don't align, they try to keep discussing the issue until they do align (though there are tie-breaker rules if deadlock is reached). I'm not saying this system is perfect, but it's interesting to me as a meta-strategy for evaluating potential strategies.

Absolutely loved Principles so much that I bought copies for my team members and some leadership. I implemented small measures of radical transparency with the teams I managed where it made business sense as well. Wasn't always popular with fellow managers but my people absolutely trusted me (and produced accordingly).

The book is highly recommended even if you don't implement half of what he's suggesting as it's based on hard-won experience. His Principles tweets are largely expounding on what's in the Principles book if you don't want to buy it, with some regurgitation which I felt was kind of marketing driven to promote book sales. Definitely worth the read.

What is Bridgewater’s risk adjusted return compared to SP500 for the last 10 and 20 years?

From mid 2017:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-10/bridgewat...

> Since the beginning of 2012, Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha II has posted an annualized return of 2.5 percent, according to a document reviewed by Bloomberg Markets, a far cry from its historic average of 12 percent. It’s down 2.8 percent this year through July. (A smaller Bridgewater hedge fund, Pure Alpha Major Markets, has fared better, as has the company’s long-only product.)

Not really appropriate to compare a market neutral product's Sharpe with the S&P.

That said, Bridgewater hasn't done that great for awhile.

> Not really appropriate to compare a market neutral product's Sharpe with the S&P

Why?

I tend to find it okay to compare Sharpes so long that the returns exhibit a somewhat close distribution.

I would expect both the S&P and an equity market neutral L/S to have normally distributed returns.