Ray Dalio Audiobooks

Principles: the operating manual behind the world's biggest hedge fund

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

18 listener ratings

Who is Ray Dalio?

Ray Dalio bought his first shares at twelve, with money earned caddying at a Long Island golf club, and by 1975 he was running an investment firm out of a two-bedroom flat in New York. That firm was Bridgewater Associates, which grew into the largest hedge fund in the world.

He is more interesting as a builder of systems than as a picker of stocks. Over four decades he wrote down every rule he found useful, first for himself and then for his staff, until Bridgewater ran on an explicit code: radical transparency, recorded meetings, an idea meritocracy in which the strongest argument was meant to beat the most senior person in the room. Admirers call it liberating. Critics have used considerably harsher words.

Now stepped back from day-to-day management, he devotes himself to macroeconomic history, debt cycles and the rise and fall of great powers, arguing that the same patterns keep repeating because human nature does.

Ray Dalio in audiobooks

Principles is where Dalio’s shelf begins here, and it is really a memoir and a rulebook bolted together: a compact memoir of how Bridgewater was built and nearly destroyed, followed by several hundred numbered rules for life and work.

The memoir half is genuinely gripping, above all the 1982 episode in which he called a debt crisis on television, was catastrophically wrong, lost almost everything and had to let his staff go. The rules half is a reference work rather than a narrative, and it rewards dipping in far more than a single straight run.

Dalio reads it himself, which suits the material: sixteen hours in the voice of the man who paid for every one of these lessons. Listeners have rated it highly. Anyone building a team, or simply curious how a very unusual organisation thinks, should start there. His audiobooks are gathered below.