Name: Kate
Role: Investment Associate, Investment Engine
Background: Kate Dunbar joined Bridgewater in 2017 and serves as an Investment Associate on the Analytics Macro Research Team. In this role, she is focused on understanding what is going on across economies and articulating that understanding in a clear way across the Research department.
Why did you choose to grow your career at Bridgewater?
Over the last four years there are two main things that keep me motivated — first is the people. I think that people I've met at Bridgewater are some of the most interesting people that I know. Everyone is passionate about something in their own ways — whether it's investment, or vintage cars, or quantum physics. The second thing is that I think that I've developed and learnt more quickly than anyone I know because of being here. Much of my development is due to the opportunities to grow into a manager, run projects, work independently, and the ability to pursue a career path that is appropriate for you. I've learned a lot about myself and about things I knew nothing about when I started at Bridgewater.
What is your favorite part of your job?
The process of tracking what's going on in economies is an exercise I really enjoy, as it is not straightforward, and requires a little bit of digging, reading between the lines and drawing conclusions from an imperfect set of information. It's a complicated world where you must draw conclusions based on limited information and try to figure out what the truth is, which is exciting.
What are some examples of meaningful relationships you've been able to build here?
I've formed a lot of very meaningful relationships in my time at Bridgewater. My roommates still to this day are current and former Bridgewater employees. Throughout my career I've found that across the Research department and Analytics more broadly, people are more than willing to reach out and provide career advice and make themselves available even when they're incredibly busy.
What meaningful impact have you been able to make here?
Overall, the Macro Team is a great seat for impact, because as a macro firm we trade on our understanding of macroeconomics. One example that was really rewarding was working through the COVID period. When COVID hit and economies shut down in April 2020, we had to look at our understanding of growth, and rethink how we needed our systems to operate in this environment. We invested in a process of trying to build new indicators that would help us deal with that environment, and that was a period of really intense research in the department during which we made a lot of big changes to how our systems work.