From ZeroHedge:
Some time ago when we looked at the the performance of the world's largest and best returning hedge fund, Ray Dalio's Bridgewater (split roughly evenly between his Pure Alpha and All Weather strategies), it had some $138 billion in assets. This number subsequently rose by $4 billion to $142 billion a week ago, however one thing remained the same: on a dollar for dollar basis, it is still the best performing and largest hedge fund of the past 20 years (assuming of course, JPM's $350 billion AUM Whale office has finally been "beached" and its positions unwound), and one which also has a remarkably low standard deviation of returns to boast. This is known to most people.*See also:
What is less known, however, is that the two funds that comprise the entity known as "Bridgewater" serve two distinct purposes: while the Pure Alpha fund is, as its name implies, a chaser of alpha, or the 'tactical', active return component of an investment, the All Weather fund has a simple "beta isolate and capture" premise, and seeks to generate a modestly better return than the market using a mixture of equity and bonds investments and leverage.
Ironically, as we foretold back in 2009, in the age of ZIRP, virtually every "actively managed" hedge fund would soon become not more than a massively levered beta chaser however charging an "alpha" fund's 2 and 20 fee structure. At least Ray Dalio is honest about where the return comes from without hiding behind meaningless concepts and lugubrious econospeak drollery. Courtesy of "The All Weather Story: How Bridgewater created the All Weather investment strategy, the foundation of the "risk parity" movement" everyone else can learn that answer too.
And while we absolutely agree with Dalio that "there is a way of looking at things that overly complicates things in a desire to be overly precise and easily lose sight of the important basic ingredients that are making those things up" (they need those Econ PhDs for something), we certainly don't agree with Bob Prince's assessment that the entire world is merely a "machine" which can be understood, in terms of its cause-effect linkages....MUCH MORE
Via the NYU Stern School:
Betting Against Beta
And from Yale:
Buffett's Alpha
