Raoul Pal is a British-born investor, writer, and digital influencer who is best known as one of the co-founders of the newsletter Global Macro Investor.
Raoul Pal is renowned in his field of investing for his market-driven bets on various commodities like stocks, currencies, crypto coins, and other digital assets.
He is one of the newer age investors who make their bets based on the general direction of the wider economic and political policies that relate to that particular asset.
In this article, we will look at a few details regarding his earlier life, his investment career, the ventures that he helped to set up, and his recent activities in the field of investment.
Early life and career
Raoul was born to a Punjabi father and a Dutch mother in 1968. He hails from his hometown of Burnham in the United Kingdom.
He earned his degree in Economics and law from the University of Plymouth in the U.K.
Pal started his career working as a bond trader at Goldman Sachs in London, where he gained useful experience with trading and investing.
While working at Goldman Sachs, he became a co-manager of their hedge fund sales business in equities and was appointed as the head of the sales segment of a few of Europe’s biggest mutual fund groups.
Pal later went on to work with prominent mutual funds agency GLG Partners as a manager before venturing into the world of entrepreneurship.
It was in 2005 Pal founded the newsletter Global Macro Investors. The newsletter provided information targeted mainly at the needs of large hedge funds.
According to its website, the company presents itself as a highly original, thought-provoking, and completely independent research publication, with a very exclusive paid membership plan for its limited customers.
The Global Macro Investors (GMI) provided unique insights into issues faced by the macro investment industry and provided consultancy advice on strategy, investment implementation, risk analysis, and wealth management.
In 2013, Raoul Pal co-founded another venture called Real Vision along with Grant Williams.
Real Vision began as a financial media organization, offering up-to-date, in-depth analysis and insights on the evolving global finance and investment industry.
The website was aimed at providing unbiased information from the brightest minds in the field of finance and emphasized the importance of letting their guests talk without any pressure on what they can and cannot say.
The company was built to be an allrounder amongst other financial publishers. They produced documentaries, did interviews, and covered a variety of topics ranging from geopolitics, macroeconomics, cryptocurrencies, and commodity trading.
Pal also founded a few other businesses namely “Exponential Age Asset Management”, which functioned as an investment management company focused on blockchain technology and digital asset space, and “Science Magic Studios” which specialized in holding tokens and digital assets for various music artists, brands, and other organizations.
Now let us look at Raoul Pal’s venture into the world of cryptocurrency and digital assets in the next section.
Involvement in cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin
Raoul Pal has been known to be involved with various cryptocurrencies mainly Bitcoin since 2013. He was a known enthusiast who believed in the potential bullish future of Bitcoin.
He saw Bitcoins as a great way to store value and as a useful mechanism to fight against inflation.
Raoul Pal was also a major advocate for the institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies by institutional investors and had predicted that this trend would be a major driving force behind the growth of the cryptocurrency market.
From the data that is available about his trade and investment history we see that in 2021, Pal sold most of his holdings that he held in other investments to put it all exclusively in cryptocurrencies.
This decision did however cause him to lose a lot of money when the value of cryptocurrencies took a downward trend in 2022.
Recent activities
The world of the crypto market in the last 24 hours went through what is been referred to as a real “Bloodbath” as we saw the total index fall by 3.25 which constituted a loss of $72 billion in value.
The fall resulted in many major investors liquidating their assets combined to more than $160 million in fears that the trend to continue further.
It was amid this chaos that we saw Raoul Pal reveal his strategy to bank on one of the oldest philosophies in the market of buying when others sell and selling when others buy.
His personal philosophy also followed along these paths where he bought assets “When there’s blood in the streets.”
Raoul Pal seems to have used his Ethereum reserves to buy copies of XCOPY and Beeple NFTs at what he called “crazy cheap prices”
Pal recently shared the same on ‘X’ to predict his bet on the comeback of the NFTs boom by the fourth quarter of this election year.
He termed this resurgence in the popularity of NFTs as the “banana zone”.
Now that we have talked about the basic details regarding the careers and activities of Raoul Pal we will next look at what we can take away from him to show his personal investment philosophy and further make concluding thoughts about him as a person of multiple descriptions that he has accumulated over the years.
Personal Investment Philosophy
Looking at his investment portfolio and his impacts on the financial world Raoul Pal seems like someone who focuses a lot on having essential skills like risk management, long-term vision, and investment discipline while working with any kind of financial activity.
He also seems to have adopted the lessons involved with incorporating broader thinking styles and the chain-effect mechanism that seems to tie the investment world to the other aspects of the current geopolitical landscape.
Final Thoughts
Raoul Pal seems to be the kind of person whose investment philosophy and teaching seem to follow well with the idiomatic expression of a person who zig when others zag.
His more or less unconventional style of investment has earned him a name and a good reputation in the crypto world as one of its prominent voices.
His example could be used by many to make themselves as interesting as an investor and as a person, as he currently is.