Sixty years ago, a young Ray Dalio worked at the golf club on Long Island, New York, working for two men with Wall Street connections, George Leib and Donald Stott. After hearing them talk, Dalio claimed to have taken the $300 he earned and invested it in the cheapest company he found: Northeast Airlines.
“I was very foolish and lucky. Northeast Airlines was the only company I had ever heard of that was selling for less than $5 a share.”, explained Dalio, who points out that what he learned from that conversation between his superiors was not any particular lesson about the market, but that it “got him hooked”, propelling him to learn more about the stock market at a very young age.
The rest, as they say, is history: Dalio tripled that initial investment and, according to the nonprofit Academy of Achievement, built a stock portfolio worth thousands of dollars by the time he graduated from high school. A decade later, in 1975, he founded Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that became the world’s largest for nearly four decades before stepping down as CEO in 2017.
“You think differently before puberty than after it. You learn differently and experiences can have a very big effect. You can learn in a way that you can’t learn after,” said the celebrity investor.
Also, Dalio stressed that going bankrupt was “one of the best things that ever happened to me”, since that episode taught him to reflect after a failure. “A mistake causes pain and the pain tells you “don’t do that again” or “find another way to do it. From that painful experience I learned a principle that has later become a habit: pain plus reflection equals progress”, she sentenced.
Source: Ambito
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