CHAPTER 5
THE ULTIMATE BOON: 终极福利
1995–2010
By 1995, Bridgewater had grown to
forty-two employees and $4.1 billion under management, which was more than I’d
ever hoped for, especially considering that Bridgewater had been down to just
me only a dozen years before. While things were much better and more stable, we
were still doing basically the same things I’d been doing from the
start—wrestling with the markets, thinking independently and creatively about
how to make our bets, making mistakes, bringing those mistakes to the surface,
diagnosing them to get at their root causes, designing new and better ways of
doing things, systematically implementing the changes, making new mistakes, and
so on.4This iterative, evolutionary approach allowed us tocontinually refine the investment systems that I’d begun building in 1982. Backthen, we showed that a few bright guys with computers could beat the big,well-equipped establishment players. Now we were becoming the well-equippedestablishment ourselves.
As the number of decision rulesand the amount of data in our systems grew more complex, we hired youngprogrammers who were better than us in converting our instructions into codeand smart new grads right out of college to help with our investment research.One of these new whiz kids, Greg Jensen, joined Bridgewater as a college internin 1996. Because he shined, I grabbed him as my research assistant. Over thedecades that followed, he contributed a lot, grew into the co-chief investmentofficer role with Bob Prince and me, and became a co-CEO. He also became like agodson to me.
We also invested in more and more
powerful computers.5 Having our systems running through these machines
freed us to get above the daily movements of the markets and consider things
from a higher level, where we could make novel, creative connections that
produced innovations for our clients.
DISCOVERING
INFLATION-INDEXED BONDS 发现通胀关联证券
Around this time, Ihad dinner with David White, the man in charge of the Rockefeller Foundation’smoney. David asked me how I would engineer the foundation’s portfolio toproduce a return that was 5 percent above the U.S. inflation rate. I answeredthat a portfolio of leveraged foreign inflation-indexed bonds with the currencyhedged back to U.S. dollars should deliver exactly that. (The bonds needed tobe foreign because there were no U.S. inflation-indexed bonds at the time, andthey needed to be hedged to the dollar so there would be
Thinking about thislater, I realized that we could create an entirely new and radically differentasset class, so Dan Bernstein and I researched such a portfolio more closely.According to our analysis, this new asset class would perform even better thanwe’d thought. In fact, it would be uniquely effective because we could engineerit to have the same expected return as equities but with less risk and with anegative correlation with bonds and equities over long time frames. We showedthis research to our clients and they loved it. Before long, we became thefirst global inflation-indexed bond manager in the world. In 1996, U.S.Treasury deputy secretary Larry Summers began looking into whether the U.S. shouldissue its own inflation-indexed bonds, and because we were the only managerwith a portfolio of such bonds, he called us in as experts.
Dan and I traveleddown to Washington to meet with Summers, his Treasury colleagues, and a numberof representatives from well-known Wall Street firms. We were late (punctualityisn’t one of my strengths) and the doors to the big meeting room at Treasurywere locked. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, so I knocked until someoneopened it. It was a large room with a table in the middle and a press galleryoff to the side. There was only one seat open at the table and it had Dan’snameplate in front of it—we’d agreed that he’d be our one allowedrepresentative since he’d done a lot of the prep work. I had forgotten that, soI walked over to the press gallery, grabbed a chair, and carried it next toDan’s so I had a seat at the table too. Dan describes that meeting as ananalogy for what it was like for us in the 1990s in general: We had to bargeour way into things. Larry Summers has since said that the advice he got fromus was the most important in shaping this market. When the Treasury did createthe bonds, they followed the structure we recommended.
译文：
1995年，桥水基金已经有52名雇员掌管着41亿美金，远远超过我当初设想的。尤其是紧紧在十几年前桥水一度破落到只剩我一个。当然现在一切都越来越好，业务也更稳固了。我们还作着我当初一样的基本的事情：独立思考、创造性的处理我们的业务、犯错-再把错误摆到桌面，检查问题找到根源，设计新的更好的方法，系统化实施变革，制造新问题，如此循环往复。这种无机的，革命性的应用允许我们持续优化投资系统-1982年我开始建立的。回到那时候，我们就展示了几个聪明的家伙结合计算机能击败很强大，装备精良的对手。现在我们自己成了装备精良的一方。
随着决策规则和系统数据的量级增长愈发复杂，我们雇佣了年轻的程序员来将我们的结构进行编码，刚毕业的聪明的年轻人则借助我们的投资研究得到帮助。这些人中有一个新人很聪明利索，名叫乔治简森-1996年作为一名大学实习生加入桥水。因为表现的很亮眼，所以我把他抓来作为我的研究助手。接下来的十几年间，他贡献了很多，并和鲍勃、我一起成长为投资办公室联合主席，也是联合ceo，他就向我的教子一样。
我们同时也引进了越来越强力的计算机。让我们的系统运行顺畅并从日常活动中解放我们，帮我们从一个更高的维度判断事物，我们本可以写小说，做有趣的链接，给我们的客户创造革命性价值。
这一次，我和戴维怀特共进了晚餐，他负责洛克菲勒基金会。戴维问我怎样才能实现基金会的投资组合比美国的通货率高5%的回报 ？我告诉他试试外国通货索引证券的杠杆投资组合-货币对冲美元刚刚好。（之所以需要国外因为当时美国还没有通货索引证券，这样在他们需要对冲回美元的时候，没有货币风险）。
后来再回想这个问题，我意识到我们可能创造了一个全新的激进的完全不同的资产类型，所以丹伯恩斯坦和我贴身研究这样的一组投资组合。依据我们的分析，这种新的资产种类比我们预想的表现还要好。事实上，这种资产有其独特效果因为我们可以将它和证券和股票一起长期稳定运营，但风险更少并且和证券和股票弱相关。我们将这一结果展示给我们客户，他们都爱死这个投资组合了。没多久，我们成了全球通货挂钩证券第一人。1996年，美国财政部秘书拉里萨玛开始考虑是否美国政府应该发型他自己的通货挂钩证券，因为我们是惟一的通胀经理人，所以他打电话给我们寻求专家建议。
丹和我飞到华盛顿去见萨玛，他的同事和一大批知名的华尔街公司。我们迟到了（严格守时不是我们的优点），而通往财政部的大门锁着。我不会让这些难倒我，所以我一直敲门直到有人开门。那是一件很大的屋子，中间摆着桌子，两边是长长的旁听席。桌上只有一个座位，并且丹的桌签就在前面摆着。我们一致同意他是我们的代表，因为丹为此做了大量的准备工作。我都忘了这些了，所以我直接走过通道，抢过一把椅子，坐在丹的旁边。丹把那次会面描述成一场模拟和我们在1990那年代做过的类似：我们不得不艰难推进。拉里萨玛已经说过他从我们这里得到的建议是塑造这个市场最重要的建议。当财政部发行了证券，他们遵照了我们的指示。
读后感：找到一个聪明，肯吃苦、爱学习的年轻人好难，这也是我们看到的很多高人选择徒弟的标准。所以年轻人别怕吃苦，别拒绝机会，别轻易放弃，年轻的时候没什么可怕的，就是别怕吃苦。
如果计算机取代人类，那么今天的解放是不是就不会高兴了。原来是希望计算机能替代我们做一些辅助工作，但如果计算机取代了我们自己，那没人会高兴的。
007-4478李小军
2018-7-19