Investment Associate Intern

For 50 years, Bridgewater has pursued one idea: the world can be understood. Markets and economies follow cause-and-effect relationships—and by understanding them, we think we can beat the markets and generate true uncorrelated returns ("alpha") at significant scale. Our clients include some of the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors who turn to us to use our unique insights to solve their biggest problems.

Generating alpha at scale is an exceptionally difficult task. It requires predicting the future and doing so better than the millions of other extremely smart, highly motivated people who are trying to do the same. Our investment strategies seek to understand and navigate macroeconomic shifts that drive the world’s most liquid markets (bonds, currencies, equities, commodities, credit). These shifts have a very limited sample size (some of them haven’t yet happened in our lifetimes).

Our approach is to start by digging deep to develop a fundamental cause-effect understanding of the economic and financial relationships that drive markets. We represent this understanding in a model of the world that we call our System—code and algorithms that generate views automatically, by ingesting vast amounts of significantly cleaned data and reflecting the relationships we’ve learned over decades of intense study and experience. Being systematic allows us to stress-test the quality of our ideas through time, and also helps ensure that at any given point, our positions reflect everything we’ve ever learned, so that our people can spend all their time focused on compounding on our understanding at a faster rate than markets are learning.

This approach requires us to be at the forefront of human-machine collaboration. Since 2012, Bridgewater has aggressively pursued the vision of the artificial investor that can do everything a human can, with computers not just representing the insights but also generating the insights themselves.In 2023, we introduced AIA (Artificial Investment Associate), our fully machine-powered investing strategy. Our learnings in building AIA are now transforming even our human investors’ jobs, accelerating our transformation toward a fully integrated system that combines the best of human and machine intelligence.

Every day we obsessively interrogate our systems against our independent investor insights, and work to evolve our systems to reflect how the world is changing. Beating the markets with this approach requires intense collaboration in an idea meritocracy—brilliant people constantly pushing themselves and each other to improve every week, to arrive at the best ideas without ego or politics. We rapidly elevate the best thinkers to greater responsibility.

We are looking to hire great talent for our Investment Associate roles. Does this sound like you? 

Our investment associates are the core team responsible for generating our macro and market insights, building our investment systems, and overseeing our portfolios. They are:

• Relentlessly, obsessively—curious. To beat markets, you must have unique insight—but markets are always learning. We need individuals fiercely driven to understand how the world works, uncovering new logical relationships, testing and exploring new data sources, and consistently trying to expand their understanding and constantly improve.

• Deeply independent—bordering on iconoclastic—thinkers. For decades, Bridgewater has been studying markets and economies and reflecting our best understanding in our investment systems. We need independent-minded individuals who will come in and tell us why what we’re doing and thinking is wrong—and be right about it.

• Conceptual and analytical. We need people who are excited by both the challenge of understanding abstract concepts and the challenge of translating insights into quantifiable measures in a systematic investment process. They can solve the individual problems they face, but can also abstract up a level, in order to develop repeatable logic that can be put into an investment system, or direct agents to solve similar problems at a much greater scale and faster pace. 

• Able to draw insights from a wide variety of backgrounds. Our investment approach draws from multiple disciplines—most obviously economics and finance—but also computer science, mathematics, statistics, political science, history, natural science, and more. To that end, our Investment Associates also come from a wide variety of backgrounds and are also unusually flexible thinkers.

• People who love collaborating, have a ton of grit, and are determined to grow rapidly. How we interact with each other is crucial to our success. The problems we must solve are so hard and multifaceted that they require continuous, intense collaboration and exploration of ideas. Grit is also essential—many of the problems we try to solve don’t have immediate or clear answers and wrestling through to the truth alongside others takes enormous perseverance. We need people who strive to constantly push themselves and each other to be their best and improve every week, to arrive at truth without ego or politics. If you prefer to work as an individual, this is not for you. If the pain of being pushed to evolve each day doesn’t excite you, this is not for you.

What do Investment Associates at Bridgewater do?

Investment Associates at Bridgewater cover a wide range of functions, and most tend to specialize in one or two areas. We need a wide range of people and capabilities to power our investment engine and take on the different responsibilities involved:

• Research the drivers of economies and markets. Build the insights that underly our investment edge and stay on top of a constantly evolving world. Recent top research priorities have included understanding the implications of the shift to the new economic and geopolitical paradigm we call modern mercantilism and the macro implications of transformational advances in artificial intelligence.

• Develop systematic indicators for trading markets. For every insight we learn, we codify it in algorithms that run every day to process vast data on economic conditions and form views on markets. These algorithms represent one of the world’s most advanced and profitable expert system. It is critical that this system not just efficiently model the significant complexity of our understanding but also be exceptionally intelligible so that we can continually combine the best of human and machine intelligence.

• Oversee our portfolios and live and breathe the markets. Reflecting human intuition into investment systems is an exceptionally difficult task, and some of our most impactful investment system improvements come from investors who are watching markets every day, independently forming views, and reconciling their views with the outputs of our investment systems. In many cases, our systems will also be reflecting a factor they are underweighing or forgot about (that’s the power of systemization), but in an important set of cases, our investors will be identifying dynamics that our systems are not currently able to capture, which then drives further evolution.

• Drive the future of human and machine investor collaboration. Getting the most out of the collaboration between humans and machines has always been at the core of our systematic learning process, and we’ve continued to evolve our approach with the launch of AIA. We need investors who are exceptionally creative users of technology who will drive our transformation toward a fully integrated, bionic system that combines the best of human and machine intelligence. This includes a radical inflection in how rapidly we can learn about the world and systemize those ideas.

• Partnering with the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors. At Bridgewater our clients are some of the biggest pools of capital on the planet. Many of the dynamics we wrestle with in our own investment strategies are the same concerns our clients are wrestling with. Building a relationship that goes beyond just the money we manage for our clients has been foundational to our business model since our origins. This includes writing the Bridgewater Daily Observations, which provides an over-the-shoulder look into how we’re seeing the world, as well as conducting a number of custom research projects and building tailored portfolio solutions for our largest clients.

What can I expect in an Investment Associate summer internship?

Our goal is to provide interns with real and meaningful exposure to a fundamental and systematic investment process. As Investment Associates, we live and breathe markets and want our interns to have the chance to do the same. We hate the concept of “busy work” and try to make the internship as real of a window as possible. Most central to that effort are the projects you’ll work on, which are real, live questions our investors are wrestling with, and designed to give you exposure to what it’s like to build compounded understanding. Projects can take many forms, examples include: answering a macroeconomic research question, developing a new concept for trading rates, building niche expertise on a particular policy driving markets, designing a new way of using LLMs to turn qualitative logical linkage into quantitative systematic indicators, or building an AI productivity tool that automates part of the investment research process.

From the first weekof the internship, you’ll be expected to form your own macroeconomic and market views—including the opportunity to bet with your intern compensation and enter “positions” in actual markets Bridgewater trades, where Bridgewater will take the other side, using our in-house Investor Track Record tool.

Throughout the internship, you’ll also receive world-class markets and macroeconomic training via an abridged version of our first year Investment Associate class. This will cover the foundational frameworks, introduction to analytical methods we use in our research, and exposure to our technology stack. Our training ecosystem is designed so that anyone willing to put in the work can get the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the internship and get a taste of what it’s like to be a real macro investor. 

Compensation

Total compensation for this position is $71,000 for the 8-week internship (less applicable deductions and withholdings), including a sign on bonus. In addition, our compensation package includes housing.

Previously, we used to post separate job applications for Investment Associates and Investment Engineers. As we plan for a future where we’ll need both incredible independent investor insight and deep human-machine collaboration, we are consolidating those roles into a single Investment Associate position. As described above, the IA role will still require a wide variety of people from a range of different backgrounds, and there will be many different areas of potential focus that our IAs can specialize in.

This job description is not a contract and confers no contractual rights, privileges, or benefits on any applicant or potential applicant. Bridgewater has the right to change any and all terms of this job description, including, but not limited to, job responsibilities, qualifications and benefits. Nothing in this job description constitutes an offer or guarantee of employment. 

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer.