Raymond Bridges didn’t set out to build just another ETF, instead creating one for people who can’t afford market drama. He digs into the reasoning behind the launch of the Bridges Capital Tactical ETF (BDGS), the mechanisms that have led to an up to 80% position in cash by the fund, and where it fits into portfolios on this episode of Behind the Ticker with host Brad Roth.
As a CPA based in Florida, Bridges spent 26 years watching a very specific kind of investor: retirees pulling money out every month, not younger folks piling it in. That distinction is everything to him, because volatility that helps an accumulator wrecks a distributor. After years at Wells Fargo, he launched Bridges Capital in 2018 and rolled out BDGS, the Bridges Capital Tactical ETF, in 2023 to put that philosophy into practice.
The fund itself is a mixture of big-picture macro thinking and disciplined technical trading. On the macro side, Bridges leans on Austrian business cycle theory, arguing that COVID-era money printing is still distorting asset prices and that we’re in the late innings of that cycle. It’s the reason the fund has held as much as 80% cash and never gone above 60% equities since launch. On the tactical side, the team tracks market breadth across four indexes and buys into weakness in small tranches, hunting for top-market-cap names trading below their averages rather than chasing momentum. It’s a deliberately counter-trend approach, with the fund holding cash through June’s strength and only starting to scale in as breadth firmed up under softening prices.
Bridges also offered insights on how the fund should be judged and where it fits. He pushes the Sortino ratio over the more common Sharpe ratio, since Sortino only penalizes downside risk, the metric retirees actually care about. He’s not shy about pitching BDGS as a replacement for the bond sleeve in a 60/40 portfolio either, arguing long bonds are illiquid and structurally weak at today’s yields. And zooming out, he sees the falling cost of launching an ETF as a genuine industry shift, opening the door for smaller firms with real, tested processes to compete with giants like Vanguard and BlackRock.
To learn more about the Bridges Capital ETF, go here.
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