Finance
Ray Dalio reveals the surprising ‘single most important reason’ he’s succeeded in investing—and it has nothing to do with finance | Fortune
Ray Dalio built the world’s largest hedge fund on cold market logic and macro trendspotting. But when asked what really powered his rise to the top of global finance, he didn’t cite any model or macro insight at all. Instead, he credited meditation.
“[It’s] maybe the single most important reason for whatever success I’ve had,” he told the renowned Odd Lots podcast this week. “Meaning, it has given me an equanimity to step back, to see the arc, to accept there’s a life cycle.”
Dalio often describes major crises and events in terms of cycles, and he referenced meditation as the thing that lets him step outside himself long enough to see reality clearly, rather than get caught up in headlines. But in the Odd Lots interview, he also made clear what he does with that clarity: He uses it to map out cause-and-effect relationships.
For Dalio, meditation creates the mental distance he needs to see events—markets, politics, human conflict—as linked chains rather than emotional shocks. That lens is so central to his worldview that he referenced it over and over:
“If you understand the cause-effect relationships … you can be ahead of the game. The causes happen before the effects.”
He talks about politics this way, too. Instead of seeing polarization as chaos, he thinks about the “mechanics” that produce it: incentives, cycles, interest groups, constraints. He isn’t judging them morally; he’s trying to understand how each variable begets the others.
Meditation, he says, is what lets him make that shift away from the instinct to react.
“You align the subliminal and the intellectual mind … while still feeling the emotions, but being able to look down on them and ask: How does reality work?”
Dalio’s perspective echoes core Buddhist ideas far more than the conventional Wall Street training. In much of Buddhist thought, the world is a web of causes and conditions: pratītyasamutpāda, or dependent origination. Everything arises from something else, and clinging to how we wish things were is what creates suffering, rather than the event itself. Dalio doesn’t use Buddhist language, but he describes almost the same process: Don’t impose your preferences, don’t treat incidents as isolated, and don’t get trapped in your immediate emotional reaction.
On investors who meditate
Dalio isn’t the only investor who sees meditation as part of the job. Ivan Feinseth, another longtime research analyst, has practiced Transcendental Meditation since 1978, when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—the leader of the movement—visited his New Jersey high school.
The routine Feinseth describes is simple: You sit, breathe, and repeat a mantra until your thoughts stop becoming intrusions and instead flow naturally, to the extent that you can observe them. The effect he describes is almost identical to Dalio’s.
“It does center you and relax you and calm you,” Feinseth told Fortune. “I get answers to questions … Many times I’m thinking about something and, after I meditate, I’ve found a solution.”
Sometimes it’s trivial, like realizing his neighbor could fix a garage door with a side-mounted motor that he remembered seeing years ago (“We do have an incredibly accurate memory”). Other times, it’s the structure of a major research report or the right way into a thorny market call.
“Once you start to relax, things become clearer,” he said. “Sometimes the best way to think about something is not thinking about something.”
Few professions blur emotion and logic like investing, Feinseth argued.
“People act emotionally and then use logic to justify an emotional reaction,” he said. Meditation doesn’t remove that dynamic, but it can help keep you from participating in it, especially during selloffs that are obviously out of step with fundamentals.
Research on mindfulness has shown mixed but meaningful effects on investor decision-making. A 2020 thesis on mindfulness and trading found no reduction in overconfidence and even higher anchoring among more mindful traders. However, a research brief from investment firm Addepar argues that mindfulness can interrupt biased, stress-driven reactions by shifting cognition from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, creating a pause before acting.
In practice, mindfulness means noticing a fear response during a selloff without immediately selling; recognizing when a familiar narrative is shaping an investment thesis; or stepping back from recency-driven overconfidence. Meditation doesn’t eliminate biases, but it provides a structure for identifying and disrupting them, the authors argue.
Dalio, it appears, would agree.
“Whatever success in life I’ve had,” Dalio said, “is more because I know how to deal with what I don’t know, than anything.”
EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — The City of Las Cruces’ finance director has received a national honor recognizing “exceptional contributions to public finance and local government service,” the City said.
Finance Director Lesley Doyle was selected by the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) to receive the organization’s “Recognition for Outstanding Public Service.”
The award recognizes Doyle’s leadership during a critical financial period for the City.
She stepped into the role of finance director as the City’s FY25 audit identified a projected beginning balance shortfall of more than $10 million in a community of nearly 120,000 residents, the City said.
Doyle led a coordinated effort to communicate the financial situation clearly to City departments, executive leadership, and the City Council, while working with the budget team to close the gap without reducing essential services.
Josie Trevino, assistant finance director, credited Doyle with building a culture of trust and collaboration between the Finance Department and other City departments from the beginning of her tenure.
Doyle came to municipal government after a career in public education, transitioning from a school district into City finance leadership.
“In her first year, she met the challenge with confidence, emphasizing open communication, transparency, and proactive problem-solving. Her leadership has helped strengthen relationships across the organization while fostering a positive and supportive workplace culture within the Finance Department,” the City of Las Cruces said.
“The balance of technical skill and genuine care for people is what makes Lesley’s leadership unique,” Trevino said.
The GFOA has published Doyle’s recognition on its website, and her story will also be highlighted during the upcoming GFOA newsletter and highlighted at the annual GFOA conference.
A former senior Treasury adviser to Gordon Brown has warned that HMRC is on the cusp of using artificial intelligence to track people’s and businesses income and expenditure without them knowing.
Dr Chris Wales, who was a member of Mr Brown’s Council of Economic Advisers for more than six years, has sounded the alarm while launching a chilling book on the conduct of the Spanish tax authority, Agencia Tributaria.
He is set to join former Labour Treasury minister Baroness Dawn Primarolo at an event next week flagging up how the Spanish model of dealing with tax evasion is about to arrive in the UK suggesting that the door is opening for a “surveillance state.”
In a preview of the future, Dr Wales has claimed that confidentiality in personal life – not just finances – “will simply go out of the window” and asks whether there are adequate safeguards in the UK to prevent HMRC from emulating its Spanish counterpart.
He said: “From 1 January, every single invoice will go through the tax agency in Spain. The Inspector can already obtain all your utility bills and will soon find out which clinic and pharmacy you use and what you buy there, which restaurants you eat at, where you purchase wine and groceries, what kind of car you have, how far you drive and where you park, what flights you take and which hotels you use. Information security? A thing of the past.”
He went on: “I am far from being a libertarian, but I see great danger in the direction in which tax authority powers are going, particularly because the process doesn’t seem to involve our active consent. There is little parliamentary debate about it. In Spain it is simply out of control. In the UK, let’s see.”
Highlighting the CONNECT AI program already used by HMRC in the UK, Dr Wales claimed that the UK is now close to following Spain’s lead.
He said: “HMRC has been using sophisticated information technology for years including an AI system called CONNECT which, as early as 2023, was said to contain more than 55 billion taxpayer-related data items.
“It will be much bigger today with these billions of pieces of information about taxpayers capable of being sorted quickly by AI.”
Dr Wales, who is now senior research adviser at International Centre for Tax and Development, added that HMRC also declines to say what algorithms it uses, under the pretext that if you publish them people will “game the system”, a claim that he suggests does not stand up to scrutiny.
“The system is understood to be used to target evasion. For tax authorities, everyone is a potential tax evader. This means that they believe they have a legitimate reason to collect data about all of us,” he said.
More than two weeks after a fire broke out inside the Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights, many neighbors have received N95 masks and air purified while mobile health clinics are set up in their area.
But some neighbors said the massive fire that sent toxic fume into the air and created a horrendous stench of rotting food has cost them out of pocket.
Neighbors said they missed days of work while spending extra money on property cleanup. One woman said she spent hundreds of dollars on air purified before they became more widely distributed.
Lineage, the company that operates the burned warehouse, donated $2 million to the California Community Foundation (CCF) so the money can be distributed to the community. The organization said it’s split the money between different organizations.
At least 10 of them are listed as providing financial assistance.
The Boyle Heights Chamber of Commerce said it’s offering small business grants funded, in part, by the group, Inclusive Action for the City.
“We’re hoping that for brick and mortars: it would be up to $3,000. And then for our vendors, it would be up to $1,000,” Miriam Rodriguez with the Boyle Heights Chamber of Commerce said, adding the application is “very straightforward.” “It’s intentionally made that way so that there’s not a lot of requirements. We’re not asking for legal status. We’re not asking for pages of documentation.”
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