I aspire to become a successful hedge fund manager like Ray Dalio. I am thinking of getting a PhD in economics (or finance) so that I can have a very deep and good understanding of how the economy works. Is it a good idea?

If you want to be a hedge fund manager, a Ph.D. in economics is pretty useless.  Your best bet would be to go out and intern in an investment bank or hedge fund.  No one has a deep understanding of the economy, the most you can get is a good understanding of part of the economy, and the way that Ph.D. economists look at the world is not useful for hedge funds.

What I always find to be useful is to just go to the bookstore or library and pick a book at random.  One reason that this is useful is that you end up out of the box thinking.  For example, I'm quite fascinated by the economic and educational policy of Austria-Hungary, because I just randomly found a book on the Habsburgs in a book sale.

You might look at the Wiley Finance books, there are dozens of them.  Just pick one at random.

Picking books at random avoids "herd behavior." 

The other thing that is useful is to read books on sales and marketing.  One other random book that I read was a book on "how do you open up a restaurant" and "how do you run a hotel."  It seems that a lot of running a hedge fund is like running a restaurant or hotel.

Finally, don't spend too much time reading books.  Find a local business, sit down and observe, and try to figure out how the local economy works.

Read other answers by

Joseph Wang on Quora:

• How do you get a job at a hedge fund/PE firm without an MBA?
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• What has changed in financial markets today (Sep2014) that have caused smart hedge fund managers to underperform the benchmark indices by so much in recent years?

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