Billionaire Ray Dalio said his macro hedge fund firm Bridgewater Associates doesn’t have a net bet that the stock market will fall.
A Wall Street Journal article published earlier Friday is “wrong,” Dalio wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I want to make clear that we don’t have any such net bet that the stock market will fall.”
The Journal reported that Bridgewater had wagered more than $1 billion on put options on the S&P 500 and Euro Stoxx 50 indices expiring in March. The newspaper said it couldn’t determine whether the investment was a directional bet against the market or a hedge for other exposure the firm had to equities.
In his post Friday, Dalio added: “I believe that we are now living in a world in which sensationalistic headlines are what many writers want above all else, even if the facts don’t square with the headlines.”
Earlier Friday, Bridgewater, which manages the world’s biggest hedge fund firm, said in a statement to Bloomberg that its positions are often interrelated, mostly as hedges, and change frequently.
“It would be a mistake to look at any one position at any one time to try to deduce the motivation behind that position,” the firm said. It added that it currently has no positions hedging or betting on political developments in the U.S.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
