(Reuters) - Bridgewater Associates' Pure Alpha II Fund, the firm's flagship hedge fund, was down 6.9 percent in August but still up 4.1 percent year-to-date as of Aug. 31, two sources familiar with the fund said on Tuesday.
Pure Alpha is a traditional hedge fund strategy that actively bets on the direction of various types of securities, including stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies, by predicting macroeconomic trends.
Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, manages $162 billion in assets and the firm's Pure Alpha strategies had approximately $70 billion in assets under management.
Last week, Reuters reported that Bridgewater's "All Weather Fund" fell 4.2 percent in August and is down 3.76 percent so far this year, according to three people familiar with the fund's performance.
Equity markets worldwide stumbled in recent weeks, driven lower by concerns about China's growth and worries the U.S. Federal Reserve will soon raise interest rates.
The moves, coupled with weakness in commodities and bonds, wreaked havoc on hedge funds that use risk-parity strategies such as the All Weather Fund, which are supposed to make money for investors if bonds or stocks sell off, though not if both markets fall at the same time.
(Reporting by Lawrence Delevingne and Jennifer Ablan; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Chris Reese)
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