At the age of 12, billionaire Ray Dalio bought his first stock for less than $5 a share with money he made while caddying in Queens, New York.
“I got lucky, because the company was about to go broke, but some other company acquired it and it tripled, and I thought the game was easy, and so that’s what I got hooked on,” Dalio says during an episode of the Business Insider podcast, “This is Success” Friday.
His $300 investment into Northeast Airlines turned into $900, which made him a profit of $600 before he headed into the 7th grade in 1962.
Now more than 57 years later, Dalio has a net worth of $16.9 billion. Not to mention, he is one of the most influential figures in the world of finance as founder world’s largest hedge fund — Bridgewater Associates, which has $160 billion in assets under management.
However, it wasn’t a straight shot to success for Dalio.
In 1982, seven years after launching Bridgewater out of his two-bedroom New York City apartment, he made a bad bet that wiped him out financially — and spiritually.
“I was so broke, I had borrow $4,000 from my dad to help pay for family bills,” Dalio says. Dalio, then 33, was certain that the stock market and economy were about to go down (as a result of Mexico defaulting on its debt). Instead the U.S. economy and markets soared. Weeks later, the Fed made rate cuts, propelling the markets even more, causing Dalio to lose everything.
“As a result of being wrong, I lost money for me, I lost money for my clients, I had to let everybody in my company go,” he says.
And while he describes that time as “very painful,” he says the experience was the “best thing” that ever happened to him because it forced him change his mindset.
Read More at https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/01/transcendental-meditation-helped-ray-dalio-recover-from-financial-ruin.html
Comments