One month after a major shake up at Bridgewater, which saw Ray Dalio step down as co-CEO, as well as the departure of the recently hired former Apple executive Jon Rubenstein, the world's largest hedge fund has lost its head of trading, Jose Marques, who according to Business Insider is in the process of leaving the firm. Additionally, the head of front office transformation, Jeff Wecker, has already departed the firm.
Prior to Bridgewater in 2015, Marques was the head of electronic trading at Deutsche Bank.
Wecker was previously CEO of Lime Brokerage, a major player in the HFT space, according to his LinkedIn page.
In a a statement last month, Bridgewater - which manages over $150 billion firmwide and has been one of the world's most successful hedge funds in history - disclosed that Osman Nalbantoglu continues to oversee the firm's portfolio implementation and trading and execution.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that Bridegwater's Pure Alpha II returned 2% percent this year through March, after rising 2.4% last year and holds the majority of the assets in the firm’s hedge fund strategy. A version of the strategy that targets lower volatility gained about 1.6% this year. At the same time, the company's risk-parity All Weather fund, rose 3.6% YTD after gaining 11.6% last year.
It was not clear if the ongoing shake-ups at the top levels of Bridgewater's organizational structure are the result of the company's notoriously opaque, and difficult according to various press reports, culture, or if they are an indication of more acute, and recent, problems affecting the hedge fund - something which its attractive P&L would not suggest - where James Comey was famously employed prior to becoming head of the FBI.