Trading Associate

Bridgewater Associates is a premier asset management firm focused on delivering unique insight and partnership for the most sophisticated global institutional investors.

Our investment process is driven by a tireless pursuit to understand how the world’s markets and economies work — using cutting edge technology to validate and execute on timeless and universal investment principles.

Founded in 1975, we are a community of independent thinkers who share a commitment for excellence. By fostering a culture of openness, transparency, and inclusion, we strive to unlock the most complex questions in investment strategy, management, and corporate culture.

Explore more information about Bridgewater on our website here.

Our culture is anchored in excellence, meaning constant improvement, and it is deeply tied to our mission. Because markets are objective, competitive, and getting smarter everyday, we need to keep rapidly improving to have any chance of beating them. Truth is our most essential tool for engaging with the markets and constantly improving because once you know what's true about your problems and opportunities, you can determine how to get better.

Valuing truth means being transparent about your decision-making and mistakes, giving and receiving feedback with humility, and fighting for the best answers over hierarchy, ego, or self-interest. Operating this way is hard – it's only possible because we build meaning in our work and relationships. This meaning comes from the audacity of the mission, and the joy of working alongside people who make you a better version of yourself.

The culture, like Bridgewater itself, is always evolving. In 1997 our founder Ray Dalio wrote down his lessons, starting with a Philosophy Statement which remains our foundation. This later evolved into a set of 300+ Principles. In 2022, when Ray transitioned the company, we re-underwrote several of those principles and evolved others, with a specific focus on Meritocracy. Today the culture sits, alongside our people, as our most important edge.

When we get it right, it’s the engine that powers everything else.

The Investment Implementation teams are responsible for accuracy, reliability, and efficiency across signal generation, portfolio construction, and trading execution. The Signals team is responsible for deeply understanding the data that flows from the outside world into Bridgewater's trading systems. Portfolio Generation is responsible for translating our market view into optimal portfolios, while focusing on risk and diversification. Trading Execution is responsible for implementing BW's views of the world, while minimizing transaction costs and information leakage.

Collectively, these teams are responsible for the day-to-day of Bridgewater's front office.

We are responsible for implementing the investment views of the world’s largest hedge fund while minimizing transaction costs and information leakage. We do this by constantly deepening our understanding of liquidity and market dynamics to develop systematic, non-discretionary trade execution strategies.

As a Trading Associate, you will execute trades, generate and evaluate ideas for how to make better trading decisions, and collaborate with strategists and technologists to constantly improve our processes, focusing on improving the implementation of our logic or increasing efficiency.

• Through extensive on-desk formal training and on-the-job informal instruction, TAs become well-versed in Bridgewater’s trade execution strategies, the logic used to implement our strategies, and the production systems used to facilitate our logic.
• Once trained, our TAs carry out the core responsibilities of our department, including implementing our desired exposures, developing a distinct view of the outside world through close interaction with the markets, and driving the evolution of our execution strategy.
• Traders at BW do not have discretion in their trading and do not “manage a book” – instead, traders execute our desired exposures using a systematic set of rules developed…