By Tony Robbins and Christopher Zook
The holy grail seems to be cranking out branded self help material. Fortunately, this was a 2x listen of a library ebook and not a purchase. I found it to be mostly hollow. The holy grail was taken from Ray Dalio: “8-12 non-correlated assets.” The book starts by describing a few, less common asset classes. The book acknowledges that they were not historically available to most investors. But now… they still don’t provide a way in for most investors. The rules for professional sports leagues changed, so now institutional investors with millions of dollars can invest in teams without needing to be multi-billionaires. That doesn’t help me. The book neither provided ways in to the asset classes they described nor did it get anywhere close to 8-12 classes. It ends with interviews of wealthy investors where the interviewer just tells them how cool they are.
There were some interesting points about energy and the misguided policies around green energy. That’s the closest I got to learning something.
Claude notes:
The book’s list doesn’t meet its own goal. It covers seven classes: GP stakes (stakes in the firms that run private funds), pro sports, private credit,
energy, venture capital, real estate and “secondaries” (buying existing stakes in private funds). That’s one short of 8. The bigger problem is that all
seven are private, hard to sell and behave like stocks, so they tend to fall at the same time.
Here’s why that matters. Ten investments that don’t move together cut a portfolio’s swings by about 68%. Ten that move together fairly strongly
(correlation 0.6) cut them by only about 20%. Dalio’s own wording in Principles is “fifteen to twenty good, uncorrelated return streams.” Several of the
best ones are strategies or economic hedges, and those are easy for anyone to buy.
What a regular investor can buy, with no accreditation needed:
- Stocks and Treasury bonds: the base. Treasuries still protect you in recessions, but they failed in 2022, when inflation hurt stocks and bonds together.
- I bonds and TIPS (government bonds that rise with inflation): you can buy them at TreasuryDirect. I bonds are capped at $10k per person per year, and
the rate resets Nov 1. - Gold ETFs.
- Broad commodity ETFs.
- Trend-following funds (DBMF, KMLM, CTA), which bet on prices continuing in their current direction across bonds, currencies and commodities. These are
the best fix for the 2022 problem: the main index for this strategy gained 27% that year while stocks and bonds both fell. The catch is that they can go
years with little to show, like about +2% in 2025. - Catastrophe bond ETF (ILS): pays insurance-style returns that depend on hurricanes and earthquakes, not the economy. It launched in 2025, costs about
1.6% a year, and trailed its institutional peers in its first year. - Dalio’s own retail fund: Bridgewater’s All Weather ETF (ALLW) launched in 2025 at 0.85% a year. It’s the most direct way to do what Dalio describes, and
the book doesn’t mention it.
The book’s private classes in the forms you can actually buy: these mostly come diluted, expensive, or not really uncorrelated.
- Private credit funds: about 2.5% average fees. In 2026, Blackstone and Blue Owl limited how much investors could withdraw.
- Venture capital: DXYZ and Fundrise’s VCX hold stakes in SpaceX and OpenAI, but their prices swung as high as about 20 times the value of what they hold
before crashing. - Sports teams: you can buy listed teams like MSGS, the Braves (BATRA/BATRK) and Manchester United (MANU), or the small GOLS sports ETF. The league rule
changes the book highlights only let accredited-only private equity funds buy minority stakes. - Private equity in a 401(k): the Labor Department proposed rules in March 2026 that would make this easier, but they aren’t final.
Your reaction was common, and partly original:
- Shared by other readers:
- No way in for ordinary investors. This was raised most often. Nick Maggiulli of Of Dollars and Data wrote “these uncorrelated investments are only
found in private markets, which I, as a retail investor, don’t have access to.” Goodreads reviewers said “It sells the vision without providing the
vehicle.” - Flattering, repetitive interviews. Goodreads readers called them “self-congratulatory” and “page fillers.”
- No way in for ordinary investors. This was raised most often. Nick Maggiulli of Of Dollars and Data wrote “these uncorrelated investments are only
- The energy chapter as the best part. Several readers singled it out too.
- Mostly yours alone:
- The 8–12 count. No reviewer I found pointed out that the book never gets there. Maggiulli lists the seven classes without commenting on the number.
- Sports. Some positive reviewers thought sports ownership was “now within reach.” You read it more accurately: the rule changes help funds, not
individuals.
- The main criticism you only hinted at: the conflict of interest. Co-author Christopher Zook founded CAZ Investments, and Robbins owns a minority stake.
Maggiulli calls the book “a 330 page glorified sales pitch for CAZ investments” and notes that its links for each asset class all go to CAZ’s homepage.
That explains your complaints: the book’s actual way in is CAZ’s own fund, which reportedly takes about $25k at minimum with up to a 3% sales charge.
Some of these numbers come from only one secondary source each, which the file points out: trend-following returns for 2025, the catastrophe bond fund
comparisons, and the 2026 withdrawal figures. One Medium review returned an error (HTTP 403), so I only saw its search snippet.