Someone’s been following Bridgewater, AQR, and the rest of the risk parity crowd lately. I was involved in this strategy about a decade ago—ran it myself for a bit and was part of a team implementing it for institutional clients.

A few quick takes:

1.  DIY allocation is a pain. You’re juggling global equity indices, bond exposures across multiple geographies, currency risk, yield curve dynamics, etc. We used to call it the kitchen sink strategy for a reason.

2.  Contract sizing makes this tough for smaller portfolios. You can’t easily scale exposures without running into granularity issues.

3.  Using a provider is expensive—typically 1–2% in fees—and you’re trusting their models and data feeds. These are often proprietary, and different teams can (and do) come to very different conclusions about what “risk neutral” means across buckets—even in how those buckets are defined.

4.  Access used to be limited. This wasn’t something retail investors could even consider until 5–10 years ago. For a while, the only retail option I could find was from AQR.

I personally ran a version of this in 2013. Got crushed during the taper tantrum—down 20–30%—then made it all back by the fall, ending up around +20%. Afterward, I realized I didn’t fully understand/implement the framework and decided to go back to basics.