The risk-parity fire sale that didn’t happen

Have fears of a co-ordinated sell-off by risk-parity funds been proven wrong?

Financial blog Zero Hedge has called it a “mass quant puke” – the type of leverage unwind from systematic funds that many feared would accompany interest rate spikes.

It’s a concern that first took hold in 2013 at the time of the US taper tantrum. And for nearly three years, the pre-puke nausea churned away.

Risk parity was one of the strategies thought to be susceptible – the popular alternative to traditional 60/40 weighted equity/fixed-income portfolios, pioneered by Bridgewater with its Al