from the clouds

Read the profile in New Yorker of Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio this evening. Had a hard time putting it down. Many of the really successful hedge fund guys are just so smart it's just compelling.  Jeremy Grantham, Barton Biggs, Soros, you read much of the stuff they write and say about what they're doing and the analysis is compelling by its sheer breadth and ambition.  They make a lot of money, yes, but that's kind of a pain in the ass actually because then everybody comes round and sucks up to you. But the discipline and insight of it all is engrossing.

Often, when they start philosophizing, they go downhill.  Soros -- far from being the evil puppetmaster Glenn Beck makes him out to be (it's clear the puppetmasters are in fact Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney) -- is warmhearted but pedantic. Dalio sounds overbearing.  Grantham, depressing as he may be, is perhaps the exception. Sad to say, he's pretty much a hard-eyed empiricist.