I stopped reading after that sentence, as I figured any such characterization immediately showed bias - your comment pretty much confirms my suspicions.
It shouldn't; they're very open to being shown to be wrong. That's a key feature in their company culture. They're just not shy about how they phrase their current beliefs.
Then they should really think about how they phrase their intentions.
To me, this read like someone at a congressional hearing asking "Why are you against protecting children from predators?" to a witness opposing something on totally different grounds (ie. being needlessly confrontational from the get-go).
It's more like PG saying at AirBnB's interview: "People actually let strangers stay in their homes? What's wrong with them?"
It's a zinger and a challenge to the person making the claims. Some people will be turned off by that and refuse to engage. In the particular domain that YCombinator and Bridgewater are working in - finding undervalued opportunities that everybody else is overlooking - this is a feature, not a bug. Anyone who's turned off by a simple offhand zinger or personal attack is not going to have the strength of their convictions when everybody is attacking them, which is usually what happens when you sincerely hold very unorthodox beliefs.
Bridgewater doesn't need to convince their audience of their credibility. They're consistently one of the most profitable investment firms in the world. If they were just finding an audience, it might be necessary for them to temper their phrasing, but from their position it may be valuable to be intentionally provocative.
They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it. The company culture is based around radical transparency (within the firm, at least): say anything you want, criticize anyone, don't get mad about the criticism but instead engage with the information content contained in it. It's basically selecting for autists. (Sure enough, I have a college classmate who I'm pretty sure is on the spectrum, and he's thrived at Bridgewater.)
This actually isn't a bad selection filter for an investment firm, since the #1 reason traders fail is investing on emotion.
> * They do this for the selection bias effect: they want to weed out anyone whose emotional reaction to the content will prevent them from engaging with the data and the reasoning in it.*
To me that sounds like the perfect way to create an echo chamber.
In this case they're filtering for readers who are susceptible to a particular type of groupthink: people who've read mostly positive stuff about Bitcoin and are inclined to believe it. It is impossible to argue with a straight face that glibly dismissing one side of an argument as "a few scared souls cowering in a corner" (as opposed to "most people") is a statement embracing heterodoxy.
As pointed out in other subthreads, it's a marketing document targeted at people interested in Bitcoin, not a reflection of Bridgewater's internal culture. And having sucked in people who agree that "most people" seem to want to promote Bitcoin, the actual analysis is a lot more bearish than the Bitcoin-promoting stuff they're likely to have been reading anyway...
I guess we're also cowering in fear from Monat and LulaRoe and anything else where earnings are predicated on more and/or bigger fools entering after you.
This. I mean, it's not even an ad for Bitcoin per se (it includes lines like "Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future that I could put an amount of money in that I wouldn’t mind losing about 80% of"!).
It's "look, you don't understand Bitcoin but you've heard it's doing well. We understand it very well including potential upsides and downsides, but won't make any specific predictions. Trust our quality insights into markets we're actually focused on"
Edit. Nocoiner was removed from the previous comment as it was not intended to be taken this way. My Previous Response( Nocoiner sounds a lot like Antifa or MAGA. Is the goal to lump everyone who doesn't agree with you into a group to ridicule?)
It's possible, but I don't think so. This isn't Bridgewater's style; they're too uncharismatic to meaningfully influence investor sentiment the way Donald Trump or Elon Musk can.
I think this is a starting point to try and solicit countervailing facts. Dalio's putting his reasoning out there because he wants to be proven wrong. Reading between the lines, he's probably doing this because his global macroeconomic thesis is that inflation is coming, his normal response to this would be to buy gold, and he's heard that this Bitcoin thing is the new "digital gold" that could replace physical gold ownership. If this new thesis is right, his impulse to buy gold is wrong, and the money that would've gone into it will go into Bitcoin instead. If it's all just hype, though, he should buy gold. So he puts out a public piece explaining the pros and cons of Bitcoin and then waits for the controversy, while his assistants read the online commentary and take notes of anything that might be relevant to evaluating the investment thesis.
Not quite. This isn't a poll: they'll probably tally up the overall sentiment but that's just one data point among many.
I think they're looking for arguments. They want to get the folks who've been in Bitcoin for the last 5-6 years to come out and say "Here's where you're wrong. Bitcoin can do X, Y, and Z and here are the projects that demonstrate that. People are using it for A, B, and C in countries Alpha, Beta, and Gamma and that shows exactly why Bitcoin is going to take over the world." Then Bridgewater's going to research projects X, Y, and Z and countries Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, and determine if those arguments are actually relevant.
It's intelli-trolling, basically. They're crowdsourcing their research by writing a provocative piece, targeting it at people who might know better than them, widely disseminating it on the Internet, and then seeing who responds.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-01/bridge...