Bridgewater Associates: How It Invests $150 Billion

Bridgewater Associates is an investment firm in Westport, Connecticut. It manages $150.2 billion, according to its Form ADV, the registration form that US investment advisers file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A second filing, the Form 13F, lists $24.4 billion of US-listed holdings.

This guide explains what Bridgewater is and how its two best-known strategies work. It also sets out what radical transparency means in the firm's own words. The filings list assets and holdings, not returns, so the guide gives no performance figures.

Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater in 1975 in his two-bedroom apartment in New York. The firm's own history says it began by advising institutions and managing their exposures in commodity and futures markets. It also sent clients a daily research note.

Dalio handed over roles in steps. He stepped down as chief executive in 2017, left the chief investment officer role in the summer of 2020 and left the chairmanship at the end of 2021.

A note to clients dated 4 October 2022 said control of the firm now sits with its Operating Board of Directors, while Dalio remains a "meaningful owner". Its website now names Nir Bar Dea as chief executive.

Form ADV reports regulatory assets under management, the assets in the portfolios a firm manages on a continuing basis. Bridgewater reports $150.2 billion across 133 client accounts, all managed at its discretion. The firm filed it on 18 August 2026.

The form splits the $150.2 billion by client type. A pooled investment vehicle is a fund that combines money from several investors. The form counts each of the 73 pooled vehicles as one client, so it does not show who invests inside them. Chart 1 gives the split.

Pooled vehicles hold $114.7 billion, or 76.4%. The remaining $35.4 billion, or 23.6%, sits in separately managed accounts, which are accounts run for a single client. The form lists no individual clients. By number of clients, 71% are based outside the US.

Bridgewater's January 2012 history of All Weather gives a simple split. A return equals cash, plus beta, plus alpha. Beta is the return of a market above cash. Alpha is the return from a trading strategy, beyond cash and beta.

Pure Alpha is the actively traded part. According to that account, Bridgewater launched it in 1991 as a tactical strategy built on decision rules across most liquid financial markets. Dalio's page on the firm's site describes the idea as a portfolio of uncorrelated alphas, meaning trading strategies whose results do not move together.

The page adds that the firm turns its principles into algorithms, tests them against historical cases and runs them alongside human decision-making.

AIA Labs, Bridgewater's artificial intelligence research lab, calls Pure Alpha the firm's flagship strategy. It says it is building an "artificial investor" whose tools flow back into Pure Alpha.

All Weather came second, in 1996. The same history says Dalio first created it for his family trust.

The idea starts from two drivers of asset prices, growth and inflation. Each can come in higher or lower than markets expect, which gives four environments. All Weather aims to put equal risk on each of the four, so no single surprise dominates the portfolio.

Equal risk is not equal money.

In Bridgewater's own example, $10 in stocks and $10 in bonds gives a portfolio dominated by stocks. The example says stocks carry more risk per dollar.

Putting $5 in stocks and $15 in bonds balances the two. Adding a little borrowing, which lets you invest more than the money you put in, can lift the return back to the stocks' level.

The history says the approach became known as risk parity, a method that sets each asset's weight by its risk, not by its money. It calls All Weather passive, because it needs no forecast.

Our guide to the conventional stock and bond portfolio covers the mix it differs from.

Bridgewater describes its culture as an idea meritocracy, in which the best ideas win regardless of hierarchy. Dalio's 1990s philosophy statement, which the firm publishes, calls for "radical openness".

Dalio's page names two methods. Radical truthfulness means saying what you honestly think. Radical transparency means letting people see for themselves what is happening, which the page says prevents spin and office politics.

Its idea meritocracy page defines transparency in two parts. The first is putting the best reflection of the truth out there. The second is creating as much surface area as possible for others to make sense of it. It includes exposing the logic of decisions and giving feedback publicly.

Schedule D of the form names 70 private funds, a different count from the 73 pooled vehicles above. Of those names, 17 contain Pure Alpha, 16 contain All Weather and 8 contain AIA Labs.

The form also shows how the separately managed accounts use borrowing and derivatives, which are contracts whose value depends on another asset.

The form defines gross notional exposure as an account's borrowings plus the gross notional value of its derivatives, divided by its assets. The form reports that accounts holding $20.5 billion of the $35.4 billion, or 57.8%, have gross notional exposure of 150% or more.

The 13F covers only US-listed securities, so $24.4 billion is not a share of the $150.2 billion.

A Form 13F is the quarterly holdings report that managers with at least $100 million in covered securities file. The SEC's official list of covered securities mainly holds US exchange-traded stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and closed-end funds, which have a fixed number of shares. Mutual funds are not on it.

Bridgewater's latest 13F, filed on 14 August 2026, lists 997 positions worth $24.4 billion at 30 June 2026. Chart 2 shows the value at every quarter-end since 30 June 2013. Over those 53 quarter-ends, the low was $5.0 billion at 31 March 2020 and the high was $27.4 billion at 31 December 2025.

Over the same period the number of positions rose from 323 to 997. The latest figure, $24.4 billion on 997 positions, is $3.0 billion below the December 2025 peak.

Chart 3 shows the ten largest positions. Together they make up 40.0% of the reported value. The other positions each hold a smaller share.

Three ETFs that track the S&P 500, an index of 500 large US companies, account for $6.5 billion, or 26.8%, of the total. The largest, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, is 16.3% alone.

The filings show size, client types, fund names and one slice of holdings, but not returns or fees. Our guide to whether hedge funds beat the market covers the evidence on returns, while our guide to what a hedge fund is sets out the structure that Bridgewater follows.

Bridgewater is a Connecticut firm that manages $150.2 billion across 133 accounts. It runs Pure Alpha and All Weather as separate strategies. Its 13F shows only the US-listed part of its portfolio.

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Good places to start on the website:

Ray Dalio remains a meaningful owner, but Bridgewater's client note says he spread majority ownership across a broader group of shareholders. The Operating Board of Directors, the firm's governing board, controls the firm, according to a client note dated 4 October 2022.

No, not directly. Its Form ADV, the registration form for US investment advisers, lists no individual clients and no high net worth clients. The 133 accounts are funds, pension plans, government entities, sovereign wealth funds and other institutions. By number of clients, 71% are based outside the US.

Bridgewater runs private funds and separately managed accounts, which is how hedge funds are structured, but it describes itself as a global macro investment firm. It is an SEC-registered investment adviser, meaning it manages money for clients under SEC oversight. Our guide to what a hedge fund is explains the term.

Bridgewater's head office is at One Nyala Farms Road, Westport, Connecticut, the address on its SEC filings. Ray Dalio founded the firm in 1975 in New York. The SEC has registered it as an investment adviser since 12 January 1990.

DISCLAIMER: This article is intended for educational purposes only. Any information or analysis in this note does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. Nothing in this note is intended to be investment advice, nor should it be relied upon to make investment decisions. Any opinions, analyses, or probabilities expressed in this note are those of the author as of the note's date of publication and are subject to change without notice.