Inside the stock-picking strategy run by one of Ray Dalio's former lieutenants

• Mark Dinner spent more than a decade at Bridgewater as one of Ray Dalio's top researchers.
• He began running his Strategic Equities strategy for a family office.
• He is hoping to launch the strategy as a traditional hedge fund in September with $50 million.

Mark Dinner is bringing Bridgewater's macro research style to the world of stock-picking.

A longtime Ray Dalio lieutenant who spent more than a decade at Bridgewater and helped oversee the massive All-Weather fund, Dinner spent years deeply immersed in the history of the markets and debt cycles. Then, as he started his own firm in 2022, Dinner focused ICW on stocks to best capitalize on what he described as a "digital revolution" the world is undergoing.

It's led to a blend of popular hedge-fund strategies — macro investing and bottom-up stock picking — that has Dinner and his team on the hunt for durable companies that shine across different market conditions.

Now, the firm's flagship offering, the Strategic Equities fund, is set to launch as a commingled fund in September with a target of $50 million and Morgan Stanley as the lead prime broker. Dinner has been running this strategy as a separately managed account for a family office since 2023. ICW — which stands for Invest to Change the World — overall manages close to $150 million across different SMAs.

A tear sheet on the strategy seen by Business Insider states the strategy returned 12% in 2025 and is up 5.2% through June this year. Dinner's investment team includes a pair of longtime quants in Joe Contuzzi and Nicholas Oleng, who joined from Bridgewater and Wellington, respectively, in 2025.

The goal of the strategy is durability across different market and economic cycles.

"Having balance across different economic environments, economic regimes, is really critical, and we don't want to just be guessing which regime comes next," he said in an interview with Business Insider.

The firm's expectations for the next significant macro move will slightly tweak the company's holdings as they tactically adjust. Still, Dinner wants a majority of the strategy's returns to come from the portfolio's overall balance and diversification.

To do this, he created four company archetypes that — when blended appropriately — aim to provide a consistent return stream. Traditionally, asset managers have used different asset classes to diversify their portfolios, but Dinner said classic hedging plays — between, say, stocks and bonds — have lost their value as securities move more in tandem.

The archetypes are:

1. Current winners
2. High-cash-flow companies
3. Beneficiaries of rising interest rates
4. Beneficiaries of rising inflation

To categorize potential stock picks as winners in specific environments, the portfolio is better balanced, he said. High-cash-flow companies, for example, serve as a fill-in for bonds, he said, because they should do well when the overall equity market falters.

The long-biased strategy holds around 80 positions at any time, with 50 to 60 of them being individual stocks and the rest being baskets of stocks or broader ETFs, Dinner said.

Like most big funds, Bridgewater has had plenty of investors leave to start their own funds. Bob Elliott now runs Unlimited, which packages hedge-fund-like strategies in ETFs. Paul Podolsky is an author and the founder of macro fund Kate Capital. Zachary Squire's Tekmerion Capital is independent again after spinning out of Brevan Howard.

ICW stands out for the ex-Bridgewater crowd thanks to its equities focus, though the fund is still very much keyed into the macro environment, a mix Dinner believes sets them apart.

"The feedback we've gotten from investors is that the way we approach things is pretty unique, and that's something I appreciate," he said.

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