Buy Gold Urges Dalio on Linkedin – “Militaristic Leaders Playing Chicken Risks Hellacious War”

– Don’t let “traditional biases” stop you from diversifying into gold – Dalio on Linkedin
– “Risks are now rising and do not appear appropriately priced in” warns founder of world’s largest hedge fund
– Geo-political risk from North Korea & “risk of hellacious war”
– Risk that U.S. debt ceiling not raised; technical US default
– Safe haven gold likely to benefit by more than dollar, treasuries
– Investors should allocate at least 5% to 10% of assets to gold
– “If you don’t have 5-10% of your assets in gold as a hedge, we’d suggest that you relook at this”
– “If you do have an excellent analysis of why you shouldn’t have such an allocation to gold, we’d appreciate you sharing it with us …”

Image courtesy of Quotefancy

by Ray Dalio via Linkedin

There are returns, and there are risks. We think of them individually, and then we combine them into a portfolio.

We think of returns and opportunities as coming from those things we’d bet on, and we think of risks as the adverse market consequences of us being wrong due to our being out of balance. We start with our balanced beta portfolio—i.e., that portfolio that would most certainly fund our intended uses of the money.

Everyone should have their own based on their own projected uses of money, though more generally, it’s our All Weather portfolio.

We then create a balanced portfolio of opportunity/alpha bets based on what we think is likely to happen. We then combine them.

We bet on the events/outcomes that we think we have an edge in understanding. For events/outcomes where we don’t think we have a particular edge—e.g., political events—we aim to construct our portfolio to be relatively neutral or balanced to those risks.

Risk and Volatility

As a rule, periods of lower risk/volatility tend to lead to periods of greater risk/volatility. That is reflected in our aggregate market volatility gauge (see below), and markets are pricing in volatility to remain low next year too.

As a related rule, people adapt to the circumstances they have experienced and are then surprised when the future is different than the past.