Ray Dalio's bubble gauge puts current equities alongside 2000 and 1929

Ray Dalio says his proprietary bubble gauge is now registering readings comparable to the peaks of 2000 and 1929. That is a pointed contrast to the broadly bullish tone across markets, and Dalio does not soften it: he says equities simply “won’t be a good investment,” though he stops short of pinning a precise timeline, putting the window somewhere between three and ten years.

The bubble gauge is saying it's toward where it was both in 2000 and 1929. Ray Dalio

The warning sits inside a broader argument Dalio has made about how he thinks about risk. He describes a framework built around holding roughly 15 uncorrelated bets, which he says can reduce portfolio risk by around 80% without trimming expected return. That kind of structural thinking, he explains, is at the core of how Bridgewater was built: he converted his investment principles into computer code that could make decisions systematically across markets.

The current equity call, then, is not a headline grabbed in passing. It comes from a system Dalio has spent decades constructing and refining. Whether the pain arrives in three years or ten, he is clear that the gauge is not showing green.