Currently in the interview process with a Hedge Fund, Asset Management, and Family Office.
Family Office opportunity is with a large family well-known office ( Think Cascade, Walton Enterprises, MSD Partners, Soros). The opportunity would be an investment analyst on a team describing themselves as " being an admiral of a fleet of ships". The role is for a 2 - 3 year commitment and seems like a stepping stone to being a CIO of FO or endowment.
Asset Management role would be for research associate role on the credit team at a large asset manager ( Vanguard, Blackrock, Pimco, T Rowe).
The hedge fund role would be for an Associate opportunity at a well-known hedge fund ( Point72, Bridgewater Associates, Tiger Global).
I am sure all the opportunities will help advance my career, just trying to get better clarity of the pros and cons of each role at a high level.
Thank you in advance
Hedge fund should set you up best. Although, you listed three very different hedge funds (different strategies)
The examples you gave are not helpful at all because they are all extremely different in type. For example, PIMCO credit would be amazing, I am not sure if Vanguard even does active credit. Each HF you listed is not comparable to the others. Point72 is multimanager, Bridegwater is macro, Tiger is single manager. the investing styles are just not comparable
PIMCO also doesn't also doesn't have undergraduate research roles either.
HF would be Bridgewater for the Investment Associate Role
AM would be IG Credit Research at Vanguard ( they are building out their active management business)
FO would be for a large family office.
BW all else equal
Bridgewater might be at the bottom honestly - you are a cog in their black box investment machine with zero understanding of analyzing investments from a fundamental perspective, working on random statistical/econ/financial problems. The skills you would learn there are not transferable to any organization.
What does the OP want to do in their career and what do they enjoy doing. These roles are so incredibly different it makes me wonder why they applied to them.
Why does Bridgewater operate with that infamous black box model? Would it possibly be an output of their fundamental top-down macro allocation process, meaning that asset allocation is already predetermined by the CIO and their institutional needs, so it wouldn't make sense for the junior analysts to have a say in that top-down process, nor to shuffle the policy allocations due to some analyst's output every now and then?
Is this characteristic for the other macro funds?
Not sure what you are saying/asking. I'm not an expert on bridgewater by any means and this is all I know from reading about them a long time ago/ talking to 1-2 former employees, but most global macro (esp. discretionary global macro) operate much differently.
"Black box" here simply refers to situations where there is an output but you don't get insight behind the logic or reasoning that led to the output. I'm sure Dalio could actually explain how/why it works, but for a junior, you don't get the chance to learn about building a global macro thesis as much as you would elsewhere. First off, bridgewater has a few different strategies - all weather is based on risk parity (can read more on that from google), and then they have more "alpha" focused models/funds that try to make more directional bets, probably somewhat informed by everything else they do. Dalio built his theory of how the global economy/ individual economies work, and also came up with a few processes to try and value different risks / asset classes based on where we are in cycles and other macro indicators.
The leaders understand that they need to solve "xyz" problem set in order to inform this "economic machine" model. So juniors spend their time scrubbing data, running regressions, and building theories/models to explain an individual econ problem set- something like "why does this currency respond to this move in interest rates when rates have been in the 3%-5% range for 5 years but historically rates were zero for a long time, but also when employment has been like this, etc." Ultimately the juniors don't really know why the fund may be overweight a specific asset class or index at any given moment; they can probably come up with their own theories, but they just contribute to individual problem sets that help to make Dalio's economic machine model better. The upside is that the real secret sauce, basically knowing what their model tracks and prioritizes the most, is only known by a few leaders. It makes it that much harder for anyone to ever try and replicate their business.
Other global macro firms are either more traditional quant based (ask a quant, because I can pretend to know how they work, but I really don't), or is the more classic discretionary global macro - think Soros, drunkenmiller, tudor, etc. Those guys are just PMs with a few analysts coming up with macro theories. Throw 8 PMs with 2 analysts each together and you got yourself a global macro fund. The issue is that global macro is becoming so quant heavy anyways these days, and that the old breed discretionary part is practically dying off.
Family office. Not even close. Forget Vanguard ever existed. Bridgewater is a tough place and very culty. If you consider yourself a pretty normal personality, won’t thrive there.
With this detail, I'd choose the Family Office.
Not an undergraduate, did 1 year of credit trading at a bulge bracket.
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