A decade ago Bridgewater Associates didn't really think of itself as a hedge fund firm. The Westport, Connecticut, enterprise—which Raymond Dalio founded in 1975 to advise corporate clients on how to manage currency and interest rate risk—began managing money in 1987 when the World Bank hired it to run a $5 million fixed-income account. Bridgewater launched its Pure Alpha hedge fund during the early 1990s, but the strategy didn't start to take off with investors until that bullish decade came to an ignominious end. So in 2002, when the editors of Institutional Investorwere putting together our first ranking of the world's largest single-manager hedge fund firms by assets under management, it's understandable that we missed Bridgewater, despite the fact that it had some $2 billion in Pure Alpha managed accounts.
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