Raymond Bridges, Bridges Capital

Raymond Bridges founded Bridges Capital in 2018 after years at Wells Fargo, building his practice around a demographic reality he sees every day in South Florida — retirees who need to draw from their portfolios monthly and cannot afford the 20 to 30% drawdowns the market delivers on a regular basis. He built an active risk management process specifically to reduce the depth of those drawdowns, tested it through COVID, and packaged it into BDGS — the Bridges Capital Tactical ETF, which launched on the Nasdaq in May 2023.

In this episode, Raymond walks through how BDGS actually works — the macro thesis grounded in Austrian business cycle theory that creates the fund's directional bias, the four-category breadth analysis that drives the actual trades, and the tranche-based scaling discipline that keeps the fund from ever going all-in or all-out. He explains why the fund has held as much as 80% cash for long stretches, how the top-ten market-cap-weighted names of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 form the equity core, and why mean reversion is the buying discipline even when a name is a category leader. He makes the case for why the Sortino ratio is a better lens than the Sharpe ratio for evaluating tactical strategies, why he'd replace long-duration bonds with BDGS in most conservative portfolios, and how the ETF wrapper's custom basket redemption feature lets the fund manage risk without dragging tax consequences into every decision.

Raymond also gets into his monetarist read of the current environment, why he's been an advocate for Kevin Warsh at the Fed for more than a year, and how his macro view directly shapes the cautious posture BDGS currently carries.