The world’s biggest hedge fund, run like a cult | Hacker News Reader

The world’s biggest hedge fund, run like a cult

nymag.com

126 pointswallflower63 comments

You can discuss the managerial points in this article, but as an aside:

I hate articles like this.

I used to work on wall street, and these sort of articles were rampant up until the burst: they glamorize financial "wizards", hedge funds, trading life etc. They're financial porn. They glamorize what, in my opinion, is a dubious field. All the while attracting all sorts of people into a field that has already proven it's "value" or lack there of to society.

I'm starting to see more and more articles like this, and it frightens me how quickly the world is getting back to where it was just a few years ago.

Reminds me of The Suit Is Back // http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

You're so right. I had the same reaction to this and the New Yorker article covering the same.

I got interested in hedge funds in high school after reading a lot of articles like this. But after learning a lot about economics and finance I learned to pick up the sensationalism in these articles.

I think just about every article about a hedge fund has a line like, "consistently beats the market...which most economists say isn't possible." That's not even true. The free market hypothesis has not been given much stock outside of the University of Chicago (Eugene Fama) since the 90's. Most economists who even study such things focus on under what scenario can an investor outperform the market and what types of securities tend to be undervalued.

I'm even amazed that the article doesn't begin by mentioning Ray Dalio's childhood as a chess prodigy/math olympiad/other thing that only really really smart people can do.

These articles typically have a set format: 1. Intro into the mysterious culture of the hedge fund 2. Background on the precocious child prodigy turned market whiz 3. Description of firm's hiring practices of PhD's etc 4. Questioning value of Hedge Fund's to society 5. In conclusion, this hedge fund makes a lot of money...

I almost want to run some NLP scripts over a corpus of profiles of hedge fund managers and automatically generate a dozen of these, print them, and see if I can get a job at Bloomberg.

I agree that its financial porn. I disagree on the "dubious field" and "no value to society" premise - In the past, I've interviewed with and worked for several s/w startups that were/are much more dubious and useless than finance.

Also, "attracting all sorts of people into the field" is really stretching it. Getting into the field to make a serious non-trivial impact - like running a derivatives desk or managing say a non-ferrous futures portfolio or even something straightforward like a 130-30 long-short equities fund takes a whole lot of expertise, something a whole lot of people simply don't have. For example, the codebase for one of the largest 130-30 fund in the world, run by Blackrock out of the Howard street office in SF, is actively managed by 3 Applied Math PhDs, 5 Java Programmers with CS Masters, and a dozen SQL , QA & misc scutwork CS undergrads. The guys using the codebase ie. the portfolio managers and the junior portfolio mgrs, are another dozen econ grads with CFAs and some 50 years of combined market experience. Its a pretty challenging job, and they've come up with a +ve alpha through most of the crisis, which is a minor miracle in itself.

Your first paragraph contains a deductive error.

Your second paragraph has enough industry lingo and insider info that it strongly suggests you work(ed) for a hedge fund, yourself. So your opinion on whether it's a dubious field or of value to the society is going to be a wee bit biased. :)

I kind of agree.

Every great company with a strong culture has some cult-like aspects.

But this firm does have a rep for being particularly weird. Like, if you don't get into the habit of calling people out for any mistakes or shortcomings sufficiently often, in a sufficiently impersonal brutally honest way, it will limit your career.

Financial porn or not, the article still offers an interesting look at how a company or a group of people could be structured and how a "value driven approach" may (or may not) beget success.

The debate on the social "value" of hedge funds and the like is a horse that has been flogged so hard, one doesn't know if it is dead or a sofa. My take is that speculation and trading have been a part of society since we stopped being hunter gatherers and started living in settlements. The difference is that now, a single speculator, given enough technical and financial means (read - leverage) has the ability to truly disrupt the global market, not just the local village market.

So, please, lets not talk about social value - that is irrelevant. In a capitalist system, if there is profit to be made, people will bend whatever rules there are to make that profit. Let us focus instead on the rules and the framework within which hedge funds operate and see what can or cannot be done. But that is way off topic. Apologies.

But they are approaching it from the standpoint of rules and a framework. The rules are called ethics and the framework is society. Laws and government regulations are a different set of rules, and much newer and more transient. What should be guiding all of us, I hope -- regardless of the current state of legal rules & regulations -- is whether something is ethical and what the impact is on society. By some standards, what hedge funds are doing is unethical or parasitic, and may in fact be a chaotic force which on the net creates more hardship than benefit to most of society. Thus, the details of whether they are currently legal or not is not important, in comparison. We can change laws to better reflect our ethics and what we think is best for society. So talking about social value is precisely and massively relevant: it's one of the main reasons we have laws. And it's quite possible that hedge funds are exploiting a temporary state of affairs where technology and the legal context allow them to do certain activities, and they'll continue to exploit until and unless we make changes to their environment.

Would it be accurate to say that the cult-like atmosphere was intentionally created to dissuade people from unethical behavior in a field that is rife for that sort of behavior? I.e. if you can control people in a field that is overflowing with excess then you can be confident that they'll be loyal employees.

I'm not criticizing people for wanting to get filthy rich, but brainwashing people into conforming to corporate standards for the sake of harmony seems not only insidious but evil. YMMV...

Kind of like how HN is full of startup porn every day?

Internet companies in the Valley make something like $1 million per employee, per year (mean, not median unfortunately). The industry is almost a pantomime of creative destruction (zero to world domination, to the butt of all jokes takes what, 10 years?), so startups are essential. But you don't read that in mainstream news articles (which are meant to be unbiased), just on this little VC-run discussion site.

I interviewed with Bridgewater, it's definitely true about the personality tests, I was given two of them and they asked me questions about my results and what I thought about them. It was really obvious they were looking for a certain type of person... definitely someone who was maleable.

They then asked me about a time where I disagreed with a superior and how I handled the situation. I told them that every situation is different and that to me... there's no one right answer. I don't think they liked that response. Needless to say I didn't get the job, despite the fact that I aced all of their quantitative questions. It really is all about the company culture to them. Either you fit the cult, or you don't. I'm sorta glad I didn't.

Thank you! I was approached by a head hunter a couple of weeks ago about working at bridgewater and decided to pass on it, even though the money was incredible. Ultimately, the culture sounded too extreme and really a bit creepy. So it sounds like I made the right decision.

"They then asked me about a time where I disagreed with a superior and how I handled the situation"

"I told them that every situation is different and that to me... there's no one right answer."

I would have made the same mistake right out of college. The right answer would have been to "tell them about a time where you disagreed with a superior and how you handled the situation."

The question was not designed to produce a report on how you handle disagreements with superiors. It was not even designed to see if you could follow instructions like a lemming.

I suggest you look the real reason you didn't want to give an answer: the fear that it would be the wrong answer. The fear that these people would listen to how you handled a single situation and determine from that single data point whether or not you are suitable for a job. So the answer you gave them was "I don't want to give you an answer because I believe you to be short sighted fools who have no experience of human relationships and will therefore judge me by this one answer".

The question was designed a) to start a discussion on interactions with superiors and b) to determine your level of fear of giving a wrong answer in an interact with superiors.

Instead, you had a disagreement with your superiors-to-be about the quality of their question and demonstrated that in such situations your response is to be defensive and provide no information, instead of getting the ball rolling.

Wow,

This is a good information on a pretty sinister approach....

Essentially, ask someone bad question and see if they squirm. Now I understand...

Yes, I'll keep this is mind...

Isn't that just an example of the widely used STAR[1] question? AFAIK these are very common.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_Task,_Action,_Result

You answered the question wrong. They asked how you did handle a situation. They didn't ask how you would handle it. Asking for actual experiences rather than hypotheticals is the point of behavioral interviewing.

All large organisations work like this, although the culture in this company seems to be more aberrant from the norm than usual.

Beyond a certain size [1] a company can't get by on the personalities of individuals and has to officially define the major elements of its culture in policies and the like.

Hackers tend to dislike these policies because they (hackers) tend to be fiercely individualistic. But large organisations need (the vast majority of) people to follow rigid rules [2].

[1] e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance

But this is why such organizations fail (EDIT: or succeed sub-optimally with a horrible culture that doesn't resemble the fairy tale policy document) . They create a culture of "policies and the like" in which individuals are supposed to be perfect examples. But the reality is that each business unit (of any size) is run as personal fiefdom based on the ego and personality of the person in charge. Such "policies and the like" are guaranteed to fail.

And the reason that they fail is because regardless of whatever they put in print, the people in the organization are still ego machines. They still deal with emotions rather than content. They deal with the meta-message ("this person thinks he is clever than me") instead of the message ("this idea failed to produce dollar value"). Their brain is wired to produce the meta-message and what it means for them and their future, instead of the message, and what it means for the company and the company's future.

So basically you got as far as reading that Company X has a Policy and stopped reading, instead of getting the whole point which is that this company's policy is nothing like any other company's policy.

That was poor, superficial analysis on your part. Go and read Principles and come back with a better analysis. http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

I think you're being a little harsh on me but perhaps it's my own fault for not explaining in more depth.

I certainly don't think that the way large organisations are currently run is the best way for them to be run. In my own very large organisation I actually introduced a (bespoke) system to allow communication that cuts across hierarchical boundaries.

I've taken some serious knocks pushing my agenda and it's taking a long time for the culture to change. Only now are some (20%) of our large number of directors starting to "blog" openly to staff rather than sending messages up and down the hierarchy. I hope to get managers beneath them to start using our internal social tool too.

I know that policies fail. I'm well known as a rule-breaker within my organisation but I'm also known as a person who can "get things done". I don't just mean that in a technical sense, or in a works-very-hard sense, but in a will-ignore-your-rules-to-get-things-done sense. Inevitably this means that I tread on some toes.

However, policies do have their place in large organisations. Very few people actually care about achieving any kind of significant change in such an organisation - many are happy to work 9-to-5 and just do what they're told (and do as little as possible). Policies are designed for exactly these people.

In an ideal world every worker would actually give a damn about their work and innovate in their own little area of responsibility. But it turns out that the way things are structured doesn't encourage this sort of behaviour. It's very hard to pay someone more than a lazy person with the same job title if they have the same job title.

I acknowledge your point about how people in large organisations will often look to better themselves at the expense of the company rather than seek to better the company and then hope for commensurate reward. I could talk about that for some time, but it wasn't really in the scope of my reply above. I do understand that many people act in this way. I could talk all day about why individuals might pursue goals different from those they're actually paid for but I'll skip it for now.

Coming back around to your point (per paragraph 3), I'd have to say that I do understand (as much as an individual can) the nature of large companies. My "company" is the fourth largest employer in the world and figures for how many people work for us tend to vary. However, it's somewhere between 1 and 2 million people. We have a very developed notion of "corporate culture" where I work :-)

My original point was that all companies do have a culture, as do all groups of people. Past a certain size it is always beneficial (to the shareholders) to ensure that the individuals within your company do not act as individuals so much but instead act in a way aligned to your corporate goals.

I did glance at the document you linked to but I don't really see the point of reading it all just to reply to your comment :-)

It will take somewhere between 30 minutes and the rest of your life.

All this talk of culture got me thinking of Zappos and all the great things that Tony Hsieh & his team are doing there. Although Zappos is equally serious about their culture, it's interesting that it seems very different from Bridgewater's - or is it? Both are incredibly successful, quirky companies run by very strong leaders with a lot of charisma, totally dedicated to their principles, companies and corporate culture. Comparing the cultures of these companies would be very interesting - maybe something for a journalist or blogger?

It's almost like comparing countries.

Some are dictatorships, others are free and more democratic.

Heh :) They seem like each other's opposites but both are incredibly successful and liked by their respective employees. Maybe the truth about great corporate cultures is finding people who believe in your principles above anything else no matter how crazy they might seem?

Sometimes it's better to be a cult than a mass organized religion.

Seriously, if you actually read the philosophy, it's extremely logical and sensible. I would expect it to resonate with most engineering-minded people. Basically it's just: be realistic about things, base decisions on logic and not emotion, demand high standards, strive to get better all the time. What's the problem? In most competitive disciplines -- e.g., pro sports -- people value harsh feedback so they can improve. Why isn't this the case in most American businesses?

Personally, I'd rather be a part of an organization like this than a part of a typical large firm, where there's constant politics, gossip, and rampant realization of the Peter Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle).

Dalio responds to a lot of similar criticism in a letter to Dealbreaker when his document was first leaked last year (http://dealbreaker.com/2010/05/ray-dalio-explains-his-princi...).

"radical transparency" is a powerful concept. Weird and uncomfortable at first - but I generally like it. In case anyone want's to see their 100+ page internal company manifesto, it's right here:

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

I was made an offer by BW but could not take it for personal reasons. Here is my take.

a. It did not strike as a cult to me. It is pursuit of excellence. b. I met some of the smartest yet simple minded people there. c. The whole idea is that the focus should be on productivity and pursuing truth. d. People spend inordinate amount of time in proving their conclusions, rather than seeing things objectively. That is what the culture tries to tackle; head on. e. I saw decisions being made with egos put aside. It was like watching a flock of birds move together. They all understood where they were going, implicitly. f. Read ray's principles and see if you can find a hole in them, I would be glad to hear your arguments. g. If I founded a company, it would take inspiration from this culture.

PS: I have currently no vested interest in them.

The fact that similar Bridgewater stories are cropping up out of no where is no coincidence. They are clearly ramping up their PR. I wonder why...

Maybe to attract employees? Or to try to appear likable as waves of austerity crash ashore & more people grow to hate the likes of Goldman Sachs & such?

Going public? (though they explictly said they won't). Hedge funds are notoriously sensitive about privacy. The fact that Bridgewater has been featured in a number of high profile articles in main stream media makes me wonder if they are looking to go public, or to attract further funding (i.e. more clients).

Alternately, it could be as simple as Mr. Dalio wanting to do a bit of self PR before an impending book release?

I think it started with the post about tech talent earlier today [1]. The article specifically mentions Bridgewater. It also isn't the first time Bridgewater has been brought up on HN [2], although this seems to be the first time it has received an appreciable number of upvotes.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812324 [2]: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=bridgewater...

"[While] the rest of the financial sector was busy pumping rocket-grade helium into the credit bubble, a young Bridgewater investment associate named [...] "

Helium is not explosive.

The article is naturally pop-ish. The actual Principles book from the website is quite interesting though. It comes off sounding a bit like a self-help book, but nonetheless it attempts to solve certain significant issues in large organizations. People begin to worry about ego, credit, allies, etc. Values that are relevant to doing a good job - understanding a problem, finding the right solution, being honest - are no longer a priority. These are all values that might be easy to keep in a start-up sized business, but the question is, how do you scale these values to a large 1000+ person organization? Perhaps Bridgewater has this answer.

Hahaha, I briefly dated an HR person for bridgewater. She were very serious about culture first, skill second. They had a very strong bias towards certain Ivy League schools and certain personality traits. She gave me a long lecture when I was staffing up a project, told me looking for specific types of programmers was all wrong, I needed to find what makes great programmers and go out and recruit them even if they had never programmed. Too bad I had 6 months, not 30 years.

Edit: Is that the same Holden Karnofsky who was caught astroturfing MetaFilter for GiveWell.com? If so, he is a pretty well known guy, not some rank and file nobody.

i used to work at bridgewater as a developer. i liked the culture there and wish more companies had cultures like them. why would you want to work at a place full of problems hidden from sight. no one calls you out because they don't like you. they do it so that you can get better and don't make the mistake again and that your peers also do not make that mistake. if you are not confident enough to be able to learn from your mistakes and make sure your cohort are also not making mistakes then you should look else where to work.

also its not cult like there. cults try to remove you from your previous surroundings and indoctrinate you so serve a leader because they promise you salvation. i was not promised salvation and i was given a pay check and could leave if i wanted to. i will say it is some what like a club in that if you don't fit the mold then you will be fired. by the mold i mean from a business perspective you should act according to proper business protocol (which for them more or less means learn from everyone's mistakes, call out bad business decisions so that others can learn from someones mistake, know your understanding of the market decays so it should always be questioned and updated).

as for the siavosh's comments relating to finance being a "dubious field", i would change that to there are many dubious people in finance. also by dubious i'm assuming he is referring to random walk hypothesis or some such logic. If you look at ren techs 45% return since its inception in 1988 i would not call that dubious, so there are players who understand the market and many dubious people who do not.

i think having a binary opinion about the merits of finance (specifically capital allocation) benefiting society are wrong. You can easily point to bernie madoff and say see...useless! or you can think of all the investors who had the courage and means to invest in apple computers or genentech. was correctly picking to allocating capital to apple a waste of societies resources?

I think it is interesting that this thread (at the the time of posting this comment) has 62 comments and 122 points, while 3 posts of the Bridgewater philosophy (which is quite interesting and a more substantial read than this article) have a collective 7 upvotes and 0 comments.

Sounds interesting. Not sure whether I agree with his philosophies or not, but here's a PDF of Principles, the book that the article referred to:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/274/Principles.pdf

Or a direct link to their website:

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

In a certain fashion, it reminds me of the usual comments regarding kernel developers (and other hackers) and their love for truth and accuracy, disregarding feelings.

I think there's something to the idea of emotion minimization when making decisions. Certainly standard stock market advice is "don't make rash decisions".

> The Goldmanite trails off. “What do they do? No, seriously. Do you know?”

So not even Goldman Sachs knows what they do? Goldman is also incredibly secretive, so kind of funny to see one of theirs being surprised by that behavior elsewhere.

One of the key things that Goldman has (as a hedge fund) is the ability to see what all their clients are doing. Because they really are a sell-side shop. Hedge Funds, OTOH, are used to being spokes, rather than hubs, and so don't expect to know what everyone else is doing.

Goldman's prop days are numbered (theoretically) with the new legislation that inhibits banks trading their capital so vigorously.

One of the key things that Goldman has (as a hedge fund) is the ability to see what all their clients are doing.

If you have evidence of this, please notify the SEC so they can permanently shut down Goldman's brokerage operation and file criminal charges against the people involved.

Not sure why you would say that.

If you buy a stock from me, and I talk to 1000 more people just like you, who all buy more shares of the same stock, I will have a view that this stock is getting a lot of interest. Nothing illegal or criminal about that.

If you are in this position, you work in brokerage. You have this view, but since you don't work on the prop desk, you have no ability to act on it [1].

It is highly illegal for you to reveal this information to anyone working the prop desk.

[1] You could trade on your own personal account, but that is highly regulated also.

No. You don't necessarily work in a brokerage. You work as a market maker. You are obligated to constantly show a price at which you will buy and a price at which you will sell. Inherent to being a market maker is using the information the market tells you to take views (which influence the buy/sell prices you show to the market - which of course influences your profitability). Do not confuse this information with "insider trading." This is very, very different. Knowing information about the company fundamentals that is non-public is highly illegal. Knowing that a lot of people want to buy stock from you and using that to influence your trading is not.

I was responding to this: "One of the key things that Goldman has (as a hedge fund) is the ability to see what all their clients are doing...Hedge Funds, OTOH, are used to being spokes, rather than hubs, and so don't expect to know what everyone else is doing."

A market maker is merely a prop desk running a particulra strategy. They have no information on Goldman's clients. They behave exactly like any hedge fund.

Insider trading is a red herring, I don't know why you bring it up. Mdda claims Goldman is breaching their fiduciary duty to their clients.

Actually, Goldman repeatedly claimed in their defense of their actions on the Fab CDO that they had no fiduciary responsibility to their clients.

Also as a market maker, it's difficult to ignore what's going on if all the smart money is selling, and all the dumb money is buying.

FWIW, the vast majority of market-making is taking place outside of the stock exchange : End-users are at a natural disadvantage, since they can't see all the flows.

"A market maker is merely a prop desk running a particulra strategy. They have no information on Goldman's clients. They behave exactly like any hedge fund."

The common understanding is that a market maker is not exactly a prop desk. The clients of a market maker are the counterparties who take the other side of the market maker's markets. (These counterparties are Goldman clients). Market makers are not hedge funds and don't fundamentally behave like hedge funds, though I suppose both during their line of work take views on markets, so there are some similarities.

My point was, market makers, by definition, know what (their) clients are doing and take market views based on this. The major value in being a market maker (which is a huge part of Goldman's capital markets business) is seeing client flow.

First time I've heard of Radical Transparency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency) seems freakin' awesome.

4 == 1 @ http://nymag.com/print/?/news/business/wallstreet/ray-dalio-...

There was a new yorker article about this

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/25/110725fa_fact_...

Transparency is an interesting theme in the New Yorker article. Dalio sees ego as being a major barrier to success. He makes efforts to create an organization where frank discussions can take place without emotions getting involved.

The New Yorker article was really interesting. This other article's title is pretty annoying. The title is way too exaggerated. I'm tired of these "click-bait" calculations on the part of media outlets.

Ego minimization is a hallmark of cults, inflicting torture, and the military. What Dalio is looking for is a reliably top-down-authoritarian company.

Except that it isn't a cult. It is a company, where people are compensated, and free to leave. The comparison isn't serious, so don't take it that way.

Most cults don't imprison people either, they are physically free to leave, they are just brainwashed not to want to.

I didn't say it was a cult any more than I said it was a branch of the (or a) military.

Complaining about ego minimization is a hallmark of egos.

Observations aren't the same thing as complaints.

Using logical fallacies[1] to complain, and then claiming that those remarks were merely "observations" is a hallmark of egos.

  [1] http://www.fallacyfiles.org/guiltbya.html

Are opinions hallmarks of egos as well?

I think one of Dalio's principles answers that.

"Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion."

Saying that things are the hallmark of egos is a hallmark of egos.

But getting emotionally attached to particular positions (ideas/trades/etc) is a hallmark of the kind of money-losing paradoxes that humans get themselves into. Being able to step back and be self-critical is extremely important to trading well.

Simple example : Suppose you bought Apple stock 2 years ago. It has been a home-run. Do you sell it now? (record your answer). Now look at the facts : You didn't actually buy the stock 2 years ago (most likely). If you said 'sell now' would you short Apple stock now? If you said hold, would aren't you really saying that you should buy it now? It's a trivial example (wrong in many small ways, illustrative as far as the first-order argument goes, IHMO).

Of course, if the example is bad : tell me why. The whole point is that not attaching ego to the argument leads to a better discussion : And deeper understanding. And that's what the company is trying to get at.

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