Why does this Risk Parity fund in Fidelity FAPSX, show a big negative number?

I am no expert, but I think a negative allocation means leverage.

Thanks to you both for your thoughts! I know this isn't the perfectly optimized fund, but it's only 2% of my investible assets - I'm just playing around a little. I was just curious about what these designations (long, short, net) mean in the Asset Allocation analysis on Fidelity. It only appeared here a couple weeks ago.

Risk Parity portfolio is very broad terminology and ones like this are not anywhere near what Uncle Frank and Tyler from Portfolio Charts talk about. The other commmentor gave you some details.

this is a good lesson to all on not purchasing an ETF or Mutual fund based on name. it’s a necessity to check the portfolio details of what’s actually inside it. Morningstar is great for this.

Are you looking to hold a full risk parity portfolio? Or just for intermediate duration??

FAPSX looks like a quant-fund, that is, its strategy is based on computer models, and it likely has many derivatives contracts (the short holdings). I'm by no means an investing expert -- so I may be wrong -- but it looks like when the fund's long assets are doing well, it incurs losses (premiums/fees) on the short positions. However, if the overall fund performance is positive, then the strategy may be working, and it looks like that's the case: the fund appears to be up 17% in the past year. If the long assets were doing poorly, the short positions would likely have positive earnings.