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WantedWomen with religious upbringing, high morals, and a strong sense of adventure, willing to marry decent, God-fearing men. Applicants may apply by mail. Must allow at least two months for an answer.

I just bought The Peacemaker from Amazon. I love to read your books. I think this book has a misprint chapter 8 and 9 just alike. It was published by Honeysuckle Rose. Thank you for writing good Christian Romance.

Thank you so much, Mrs. Copeland for all your books! I love them! Especially Brides of the West Series! They were great. Are the other three, Lily, Mary, and Harper, going to come out? If so, I cant wait to read Harper! That will be great!

Lori, I just started your Brides of the West Series and finished both Faith and June which I loved. I started Hope but I had to put the book down. It seems unlikely to me that Hope would encounter so many dangerous situations in such a short time. Although I will not finish this book, I look forward to exploring the other books in the series as well as additional books you have written

I first became aware of Ray Dalio when either he or his publisherplastered advertisements for The Principles all over the SanFrancisco 4th and King Caltrain station. If I recall correctly, therewere also constant radio commercials; it was a whole thing in 2017. Mybrain is very good at tuning out advertisements, so my only thought at thetime was "some business guy wrote a self-help book." I think I vaguelyassumed he was a CEO of some traditional business, since that's usuallywho writes heavily marketed books like this. I did not connect him withhedge funds or Bridgewater, which I have a bad habit of confusing withBlackwater.

Rob Copeland is currently with The New York Times, but for manyyears he was the hedge fund reporter for The Wall Street Journal.He covered, among other things, Bridgewater Associates, the enormous hedgefund founded by Ray Dalio. The Fund is a biography of Ray Dalioand a history of Bridgewater from its founding as a vehicle for Dalio'sadvising business until 2022 when Dalio, after multiple false starts andtitle shuffles, finally retired from running the company. (Maybe. Basedon the history recounted here, it wouldn't surprise me if he was back atthe helm by the time you read this.)

It's probably worth mentioning, as Copeland does explicitly, that RayDalio and Bridgewater hate this book and claim it's a pack of lies.Copeland includes some of their denials (and many non-denials that soundas good as confirmations to me) in footnotes that I found increasinglyamusing.

Anyway, I personally know nothing about Bridgewater other than what Ilearned here and the occasional mention in Matt Levine's newsletter (whichis where I got the recommendation for this book). I have no independentinformation whether anything Copeland describes here is true, but Copelandprovides the typical extensive list of notes and sourcing one expects in abook like this, and Levine's comments indicated it's generally consistentwith Bridgewater's industry reputation. I think this book is true, butsince the clear implication is that the world's largest hedge fund wasprimarily a deranged cult whose employees mostly spied on and rated eachother rather than doing any real investment work, I also have questions,not all of which Copeland answers to my satisfaction. But more on thatlater.

The center of this book are the Principles. These were an ever-changinglist of rules and maxims for how people should conduct themselves withinBridgewater. Per Copeland, although Dalio later published a book by thatname, the version of the Principles that made it into the book wassanitized and significantly edited down from the version used inside thecompany. Dalio was constantly adding new ones and sometimes changingthem, but the common theme was radical, confrontational "honesty": neverbeing silent about problems, confronting people directly about anythingthat they did wrong, and telling people all of their faults so that theycould "know themselves better."

If this sounds like textbook abusive behavior, you have the right idea.This part Dalio admits to openly, describing Bridgewater as a firm thatisn't for everyone but that achieves great results because of thisculture. But the uncomfortably confrontational vibes are only the tip ofthe iceberg of dysfunction. Here are just a few of the ways this playedout according to Copeland:

Dalio decided that everyone's opinions should be weighted by the accuracy of their previous decisions, to create a "meritocracy," and therefore hired people to build a social credit system in which people could use an app to constantly rate all of their co-workers. This almost immediately devolved into out-group bullying worthy of a high school, with employees hurriedly down-rating and ostracizing any co-worker that Dalio down-rated.

When an early version of the system uncovered two employees at Bridgewater with more credibility than Dalio, Dalio had the system rigged to ensure that he always had the highest ratings and was not affected by other people's ratings.

Dalio became so obsessed with the principle of confronting problems that he created a centralized log of problems at Bridgewater and required employees find and report a quota of ten or twenty new issues every week or have their bonus docked. He would then regularly pick some issue out of the issue log, no matter how petty, and treat it like a referendum on the worth of the person responsible for the issue.

Dalio's favorite way of dealing with a problem was to put someone on trial. This involved extensive investigations followed by a meeting where Dalio would berate the person and harshly catalog their flaws, often reducing them to tears or panic attacks, while smugly insisting that having an emotional reaction to criticism was a personality flaw. These meetings were then filmed and added to a library available to all Bridgewater employees, often edited to remove Dalio's personal abuse and to make the emotional reaction of the target look disproportionate. The ones Dalio liked the best were shown to all new employees as part of their training in the Principles.

One of the best ways to gain institutional power in Bridgewater was to become sycophantically obsessed with the Principles and to be an eager participant in Dalio's trials. The highest levels of Bridgewater featured constant jockeying for power, often by trying to catch rivals in violations of the Principles so that they would be put on trial.

In one of the common and all-too-disturbing connections between WallStreet finance and the United States' dysfunctional government, JamesComey (yes, that JamesComey) ran internal security for Bridgewater for three years, meaningthat he was the one who pulled evidence from surveillance cameras forDalio to use to confront employees during his trials.

In case the cult vibes weren't strong enough already, Bridgewaterdeveloped its own idiosyncratic language worthy of Scientology. Thetrials were called "probings," firing someone was called "sorting" them,and rating them was called "dotting," among many otherBridgewater-specific terms. Needless to say, no one ever probed Daliohimself. You will also be completely unsurprised to learn that Copelanddocuments instances of sexual harassment and discrimination atBridgewater, including some by Dalio himself, although that seems to be arelatively small part of the overall dysfunction. Dalio was happy topublicly humiliate anyone regardless of gender.

If you're like me, at this point you're probably wondering how Bridgewatercontinued operating for so long in this environment. (Per Copeland, sinceDalio's retirement in 2022, Bridgewater has drastically reduced thecult-like behaviors, deleted its archive of probings, and de-emphasized thePrinciples.) It was not actually a religious cult; it was a hedge fundthat has to provide investment services to huge, sophisticated clients,and by all accounts it's a very successful one. Why did this bizarrenightmare of a workplace not interfere with Bridgewater's business?

First, it's clear from Copeland's account that almost none of theemployees of Bridgewater had any control over Bridgewater's investments.Nearly everyone was working on other parts of the business (sales,investor relations) or on cult-related obsessions. Investment decisions(largely incorporated into algorithms) were made by a tiny core of peopleand often by Dalio himself. Bridgewater also appears to not tradefrequently, unlike some other hedge funds, meaning that they probably stayclear of the more labor-intensive high-frequency parts of the business.

Second, Bridgewater took off as a hedge fund just before the hedge fundboom in the 1990s. It transformed from Dalio's personal consultingbusiness and investment newsletter to a hedge fund in 1990 (with anearlier investment from the World Bank in 1987), and the 1990s were a verygood decade for hedge funds. Bridgewater, in part due to Dalio'sconnections and effective marketing via his newsletter, became one of thelargest hedge funds in the world, which gave it a sort of institutionalmomentum. No one was questioned for putting money into Bridgewater evenin years when it did poorly compared to its rivals.

Third, Dalio used the tried and true method of getting free publicity fromthe financial press: constantly predict an upcoming downturn, andaggressively take credit whenever you were right. From nearly the startof his career, Dalio predicted economic downturns year after year.Bridgewater did very well in the 2000 to 2003 downturn, and again duringthe 2008 financial crisis. Dalio aggressively takes credit for predictingboth of those downturns and positioning Bridgewater correctly going intothem. This is correct; what he avoids mentioning is that he alsopredicted downturns in every other year, the majority of which neverhappened.

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