There are some roles in banking where the immediate compensation isn’t necessarily as important as the learning opportunity. And, one way or another, the Global Macro Investment Associate post that’s recently opened up at the Dalio Family Office is going to be a learning experience for somebody.
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Family offices are often tricky work environments to negotiate – people don’t get rich enough to have one without being strong personalities unaccustomed to hearing the word “no”. Even by those standards, Ray Dalio, the former CIO and founder of Bridgewater Capital, had an unusually strong reputation as an irascible and demanding boss. There’s even a book about his management style, and the principles of “radical transparency” he used to demand from his employees.
Not only that, but Dalio isn’t just the principal at his family office. He has now taken over the CIO role too, after the departure of Mark Baumgartner. The brisk turnover in that CIO role is also quite notable – Baumgartner only joined in 2023, and he replaced Bruce Zimmerman, who was there for four years. It is, we might speculate, difficult to manage money for someone who considers himself to be one of the GOATs and isn’t shy about saying so.
Of course, the job that’s being advertised is not at a level where anyone would expect to be allowed to disagree with their boss. It’s paying $200k, and targeted at someone “at least two years” into a career” The successful applicant needs to have “proficiency in Python programming and automation tools”, but only a bachelor’s degree is required. Hybrid working is available, and among the benefits are “back up childcare services”, which you might need as you’re also expected to have the “ability to travel up to 50% of the time internationally”.
And, you get to work with Ray! This might not be a bad thing. By no means all former Bridgewater employees recognise the picture of an oppressive or cult-like environment that was painted in the Dalio-era media reports. Many of them remember it as one of the most intellectually stimulating periods of their life. A lot of that foreign travel might be to some of the most interesting places in the world, and the successful candidate could find themselves in the room with some very high-profile people. Albeit that it might be quite a big room, and you’d be at the other end of it.
This feels like an appointment that would attract someone for a good time rather than a long time. Ray Dalio’s reputation as an investor is still strong enough to be an ornament to any resume, and many of the industry’s biggest stars got their first big break by carrying bags for the legends of yesteryear. If nothing else, the person who does this job is likely to come away with enough anecdotes to last them most of the rest of their career.
Elsewhere, for whatever reason and despite a very strong domestic market, applications by US citizens for British permanent residence are up 50% on last year, with plenty of bankers among those looking for a new life and complaining about the food. At the same time, there’s a constant drip feed of British finance people heading for the UAE – most recently, ExodusPoint seems to have shifted half a dozen macro and commodities portfolio managers and traders to Dubai.
Why don’t the Americans just go straight to the Gulf? Some of them do, of course, and many of the rest might reason that if they want to work in an authoritarian state with a hostile climate, they might as well go to Texas. But it also seems to be the case that a lot of Americans looking for British (and European) citizenship want to keep their US jobs and do them remotely. That’s much more difficult to do from the UAE time zone, and the cost-of-living arbitrage isn’t remotely as attractive.
Meanwhile …
Previously, Jon Fouts was Global Head of the Power and Utilities investment banking team at Morgan Stanley, while Michael O’Dwyer was Global Head of Energy. Now they’re both going to be Global Co-Heads of Power and Energy. Why? Why were they separate groups in the first place? Isn’t power just the same thing as energy, per unit of time? Morgan Stanley has declined to comment. (Reuters)
Why are banks tightening their non-compete agreements when hiring rates have collapsed? It’s partly because of the sharp decline in natural turnover; the only people resigning are exactly the ones that the employers want to hang on to. (FT Alphaville)
Chenyue Mao, the Wells Fargo MD who went to China and was refused permission to leave back in July, is home again, apparently after some intergovernmental talks which nobody wants to say too much about. (Reuters)
As the funds get bigger and harder to manage, and the partners get older and less hungry, you tend to find private equity firms talking about “institutionalisation”, and “process” and other euphemisms to let the investors know that they’re passing it on to the next generation. It’s much more unusual to see a partnership like venture capitalists 83North, who have just decided that their most recent fundraising will be the last one, and that they’ll gradually wind it down and walk away. (Institutional Investor)
Just as everyone else is saying that artificial intelligence will take all the jobs, DE Shaw is launching its first fund that will be run entirely by humans. They have had discretionary traders for a while, but the Cogence multistrat is the first Shaw product which will have no algorithmic content at all. (Bloomberg)
Would less frequent corporate reporting mean less work for analysts, lawyers and investor relations people? Probably not. (Business Insider)
A low-cost, no-frills, business-class-only airline sounds like a contradiction in terms, but that’s what La Compagnie is offering between Nice and Newark. You get flat seats and there’s champagne, but the snacks are mediocre and there aren’t so many attendants. (WSJ)
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