Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio said on Friday his hedge fund does not have a net bet that the stock market will fall, taking issue with a story published earlier in the Wall Street Journal.The hedge fund has bet more than $1 billion that stock markets around the world will drop by March, the WSJ said in its report on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The bet, assembled over a span of months and executed by a handful of Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley, would pay off for the world's biggest hedge fund if either the S-P 500 or the Euro Stoxx 50 - or both - declines, the report had said.The bet is made up of put options, contracts that give investors the right to sell stocks at a specific price by a certain date.
The options expire in March and currently represent one of the largest bearish bets against the market, the report added."To convey us having a bearish view of the stock market would be misleading," Dalio said in a statement.Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.