Is Dalio full fledged clown now?

Today he said cash is trash. After well it seems like he missed the up move.

Jan 2018 he was saying the same thing that people would regret not owning equities - after a huge up move and then well the next year in equity markets were ugly.

Late 2018 he was bearish at what looks like generational lows

His performance has been bad to awful lately.

I considered selling every stock I owned today when I saw his comments.

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yeah man, if anything that kraft-heinz deal showed that uncle buffet doesn't know what to do with his dragon-sized mountain of cash.

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Yes he’s a clown that’s out of his prime and is just an investor who lucked out on gambling in the market with other peoples money.

“ OK, first rule of Wall Street. Nobody -- and I don't care if you're Warren Buffet or Jimmy Buffet -- nobody knows if a stock's going up, down or fucking sideways, least of all stock brokers.”

 

Buffett, Einhorn, Howard Marks, Seth Klarman... apply to these charlatans more so than Dalio I would say. At least Dalio is not on CNBC pitching SaaS names and always positioned himself as a macro guy. Never thought I'd see the day Klarman calling market tops and Einhorn pitching gold. You made your billions scavenging distressed cos and spotting accounting frauds, and now you think you are the master of the universe. When Marks and Klarman blame it all on CBs year in and year out, have they ever thought about their clients? But hey, keep writing them letters bro, at least it kept these dumb family offices in so you will give all their alpha back to the market with them low single digit returns and 2/20 off the top.Just like that... you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

 

True dalio atleast stays in his own lane in macro.

But he’s starting to become the new Dennis Gartman. He was massively short end of 2018. And in January 2018 he said nearly the exact same thing as cash is trash like a week before Vix armegeddon.

Haha literally said to be short stocks at like a 13 pe and own them all at a 19.

 

Pure Alpha returned 14.6% in 2018 net of fees - cash was definitely trash at Bridgewater. I don't understand the criticisms here as Dalio told Financial Times that the economy was at an "inflection point moving from hot to mediocre" in October, right ahead of the bear slump. Clearly it isn't just luck that drives his returns. He probably looks at investing from an institutional perspective, not as retail advice for Main Street - which probably explains his comments. What does everyone think?

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2018 is basically the only big win for the pure alpha fund since 2008. Every other year it’s been like a 3% return.

They did something odd in the fall of 2018 and somehow got massively short versus being a low vol strategy for a while. I’d be interested in seeing how they did it whether it was something structural by getting bond like returns but also large tail profits or whether for the first time in years they took a huge unhedged bet and shorted the market.

Obviously they had huge short exposure at the start of this year as their fund was down a bunch for much of the year. Overall they got back to flat on year. So no true alpha. They definitely didn’t cover their short exposure until very deep into 2019.

But Dalio public comments have been terribly. If you traded them you got crushed. And basically now down 4% on stocks since he commented recently and I made my post.

 

According to this article they made 44% net in 2010 and were up 25% through August 2011:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/bridgewaters-dalio-prospers-wit…

The fact that you state they have done nothing since 2008 yet can’t easily find this information is a bit surprising. And looking at volatility in annual terms will be deceiving when trying to evaluate a strategy. Two firms can make 5% a year in many different ways, I think you are lacking information and filling it in with creativity and assumptions.

 

A seasoned PM in London told me that ever since insider trading (and the use of industry experts) has been squashed/clamped down on the returns you see from your favourite rockstar PM have nosedived. He quite literally said, now we rely on the same info as the rest of the populace and so its harder to make massive returns

 
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That might make sense if you are talking about an equity fund. There are so many people on this site that understand so little about hedge funds (different strategies, etc) but continue to make comments, heck I understand, there are people in the industry that know little/nothing. Especially when you talk about funds that keep their strategies close to their chest, but so much of this is misinformation. But like I said I have friends across the industry and when I talk to them about HFs (some of which I know well) they know nothing, and these are smart people, it’s just that information is hard to come by and it’s easier to believe headlines (and shows like billions).

 

Are you saying the original commenter is right or wrong? My impression is that even people work in the industry dont really see the whole picture of how money is made. That becomes clearer once you make it into the inner circle of a fund. Not as some analyst making less than 500k.

 

I can confirm this. I won't go into it, but I know a few people who have been in this industry for 40 years. It was built on insider trading and information that was ginned up by the 'analysts' who maintained relationships with key decision makers in big companies.

 

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