Billionaire investor Ray Dalio said the painful investing mistakes he made early in his career ultimately helped build Bridgewater Associates into the world’s largest hedge fund.
Speaking at Long Island University’s commencement ceremony last week, Dalio reflected on how a major wrong market call in the early 1980s became one of the most important turning points of his career.
Dalio said that when he was 34 years old, he believed a debt crisis involving emerging countries would trigger a severe market collapse. Mexico eventually defaulted on its debt in 1982, and Dalio said he correctly anticipated the broader crisis. However, he wrongly expected stocks to plunge further.
Instead, markets rallied sharply.
“I thought the stock market was going to fall a lot, but I was very wrong,” Dalio said.
The mistake devastated his firm financially. Dalio said he lost …
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