2027 Investment Associate Intern

Overview

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, allowing us to rapidly discover and systemize new insights, and 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 between brilliant people who constantly push 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.

Investment Associate Roles

We are looking to hire great talent for our Investment Associate roles. Do you align with the following qualities?

• 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. Bridgewater has been studying markets and economies for decades and reflecting our best understanding in our investment systems. We need independent-minded individuals who will challenge what we’re doing and be right about it.
• Conceptual and analytical. We seek people excited by both abstract concepts and translating insights into quantifiable measures in a systematic investment process. We look for exceptionally bright, high-horsepower thinkers.
• Able to draw insights from diverse backgrounds. Our approach draws from economics, finance, computer science, mathematics, statistics, political science, history, natural science, and more. Our Investment Associates come from a wide variety of backgrounds and are unusually flexible thinkers.
• Collaborative, grit-driven, and growth-focused. Collaboration and perseverance are essential. The problems are hard and multifaceted; success requires continuous exploration of ideas and a willingness to evolve each week. Those who prefer working solo should not apply.

What Investment Associates Do

Investment Associates cover a wide range of functions and typically specialize in one or two areas. We need a broad set of capabilities to power our investment engine and undertake the following responsibilities:

• Research the drivers of economies and markets. Build the insights that underlie our investment edge and stay on top of a constantly evolving world. Recent priorities include understanding the implications of the shift to the modern mercantilism paradigm and the macro implications of advances in artificial intelligence.
• Develop systematic indicators for trading markets. Codify insights into algorithms that run daily to process vast data on economic conditions and form views on markets. The system should be intelligible to continually combine human and machine intelligence.
• Oversee portfolios and live markets. Reflect human intuition into investment systems. Investor-driven views can reveal dynamics that systems may not yet capture, driving further evolution.
• Drive the future of human and machine investor collaboration. Be exceptionally creative in using technology to advance the integration of human and machine intelligence, accelerating learning and systemization of ideas.
• Partner with the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors. Bridgewater serves major pools of capital. We build enduring client relationships, produce the Bridgewater Daily Observations, conduct custom research projects, and develop tailored portfolio solutions for our largest clients.

Internship Overview

What to 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. Interns form macroeconomic and market views from the first week, with opportunities to simulate positions in actual markets Bridgewater trades. Interns will also be paired with our in-house Investor Track Record tool.

The internship mirrors Bridgewater’s research and investment process. You will observe the world, identify key dynamics for investors related to a specific economy and market, synthesize your views, and gain exposure to systemization by translating your point-in-time views into data and mathematical expressions that can be stress-tested over time.

Throughout the internship, you will receive world-class markets and macroeconomic training via an abridged version of our first-year Investment Associate class. This includes foundational frameworks, analytical methods used in our research, and exposure to our technology stack. Our training ecosystem is designed so that anyone willing to put in the work can gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed and experience what it’s like to be a macro investor.

Compensation

Total compensation for this position is $51,000 for the 8-week internship (less applicable deductions and withholdings), including a sign-on bonus. The package also includes housing.

Previously, we posted separate job applications for Investment Associates and Investment Engineers. As we plan for a future where we’ll need both independent investor insight and deep human-machine collaboration, we are consolidating these roles into a single Investment Associate position. The IA role will still require a wide variety of backgrounds, and there will be many potential areas of focus for IAs.

This job description is not a contract and confers no contractual rights. Bridgewater reserves the right to change any terms of this job description, including responsibilities, qualifications, and benefits. Nothing in this job description constitutes an offer or guarantee of employment.

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer.