Bridgewater Associates

Bridgewater Associates is an American investment management firm founded by Ray Dalio in 1975. The firm serves institutional clients including pension funds, endowments, foundations, foreign governments and central banks.

It utilizes a global macro investing style based on economic trends, such as inflation, currency exchange rates, and U.S. gross domestic product. Bridgewater Associates began as an institutional investment advisory service, graduated to institutional investing and pioneered the risk parity investment approach in 1996.

In 1981 the company moved its headquarters from New York City to Westport, Connecticut and currently engages 1,200 employees. It embraces a corporate culture that encourages transparency and the elimination of the decision making hierarchy, and in 2011 was the "world's largest macro hedge fund" company with US$122 billion in assets under management.

History

The firm's history includes the pioneering of industry strategies such as: currency overlay, the separation of alpha and beta strategies, the creation of absolute return products, and risk parity. According to Financial News, the company was the fastest growing asset manager from 2000 until 2005, when it stopped accepting new accounts. Its assets under management have increased by 25% each year during the last decade with employees at eleven times their year 2000 levels. The company’s Daily Observations research is reportedly read by leaders of central banks and managers of pension funds around the world.

Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio (born August 8, 1949) is an American businessman and founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates.

In 2012, Dalio appeared on the annual Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2011 and 2012 he was listed by Bloomberg Markets as one of the 50 Most Influential people. Institutional Investor’s Alpha ranked him No. 2 on their 2012 Rich List. According to Forbes, he was the 30th richest person in America and the 69th richest person in the world with a net worth of $15.2 billion as of October 2014.

Early life

Dalio was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, United States. The son of a jazz musician, Dalio began investing at age 12. At this young age he bought shares of Northeast Airlines for $300 and tripled his investment after the airline merged with another company.

Education

Dalio received his BA from Long Island University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Career

After completing his education, Dalio worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and invested in commodity futures. He later worked as the Director of Commodities at Dominick & Dominick LLC. In 1974, he became a futures trader and broker at Shearson Hayden Stone. In 1975, he founded the Westport, Connecticut based investment management firm, Bridgewater Associates which in 2012 became the largest hedge fund in the world, as it is today with over $160 billion in assets under management, as of October 2014.

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern United States and is the United States' 27th-most extensive, fourth-most populous, and seventh-most densely populated state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border in the Atlantic Ocean with Rhode Island, east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the north and Ontario to the west and north. The state of New York, with an estimated 19.8 million residents in 2015, is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City, the state's most populous city and its economic hub.

With an estimated population of nearly 8.5 million in 2014, New York City is the most populous city in the United States and the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. The New York City Metropolitan Area is one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. New York City is a global city, exerting a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment, its fast pace defining the term New York minute. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York City is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural and financial capital of the world, as well as the world's most economically powerful city. New York City makes up over 40% of the population of New York State. Two-thirds of the state's population lives in the New York City Metropolitan Area, and nearly 40% live on Long Island. Both the state and New York City were named for the 17th century Duke of York, future King James II of England. The next four most populous cities in the state are Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Syracuse, while the state capital is Albany.

Charlie Rose

Charles Peete "Charlie" Rose, Jr. (born January 5, 1942) is an American television talk show host and journalist. Since 1991, he has hosted Charlie Rose, an interview show distributed nationally by PBS since 1993. He has also co-anchored CBS This Morning since 2012. Rose also substitutes for the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley when Pelley is off or on assignment. Rose, along with Lara Logan, has hosted the revived CBS classic Person to Person, a news program during which celebrities are interviewed in their homes, originally hosted from 1953 to 1961 by Edward R. Murrow.

Early life

Rose was born in Henderson, North Carolina, the only child of Margaret (née Frazier) and Charles Peete Rose, Sr., tobacco farmers who owned a country store. As a child, Rose lived above his parents' store in Henderson and helped out with the family business from age seven. Rose admitted in a Fresh Dialogues interview that as a child his insatiable curiosity was constantly getting him in trouble. A high school basketball star, Rose entered Duke University intending to pursue a degree with a pre-med track, but an internship in the office of Democratic North Carolina Senator B. Everett Jordan got him interested in politics. Rose graduated in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in history. At Duke, he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. He earned a Juris Doctor from the Duke University School of Law in 1968. He met his wife, Mary (King), while attending Duke.

The New York Times

The New York Times (sometimes abbreviated to NYT) is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18, 1851, by the New York Times Company. It has won 117 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization.

The paper's print version has the second-largest circulation, behind The Wall Street Journal, and the largest circulation among the metropolitan newspapers in the United States. It is ranked 39th in the world by circulation. Following industry trends, its weekday circulation has fallen to fewer than one million daily since 1990. Nicknamed for years as "The Gray Lady", The New York Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record". It is owned by The New York Times Company. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. – whose family (Ochs-Sulzberger) has controlled the paper for five generations, since 1896 – is both the paper's publisher and the company's chairman. Its international version, formerly the International Herald Tribune, is now called the International New York Times.