Raoul Pal

Pal attended Plymouth Polytechnic and graduated into the 1990 recession, receiving more than a hundred rejection letters, many of them from firms he later worked for.⁠[1][1]

At Goldman Sachs, Pal co-managed the hedge fund sales business in Equities and Equity Derivatives in Europe, trading for and talking macro with investors such as Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, and Julian Robertson; he then moved to the hedge fund GLG Partners, where he co-managed the GLG Global Macro Fund in London.⁠[1][1][1]

He recalls that the trip notes he wrote after Morgan StanleyMorgan StanleyMorgan Stanley is an American global financial services firm that grew from an investment banking partnership into a publicly traded financial group spanning investment banking, securities trading, wealth management, and investment management.Open the full entry invited him on a trip to China in 2003, titled “There’s Something Wrong in Paradise,” circulated widely in the industry and made him realize that he could write and that he was a deeply independent thinker.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In October 2004, Pal decided to leave GLG. By his own account, the market in 2004 lacked any trend and his last year at GLG went badly; more importantly, the hedge fund industry had shifted toward low volatility and monthly returns, compressing the time horizons of macro investing, and he believed the glory days of traditional macro investing were over. He retired from managing client money at 36.⁠[2][2][2][1]

Pal moved to the Mediterranean coast of Spain and in January 2005 began writing the macro research report Global Macro Investor (GMI), with GLG founder Noam Gottesman and Goldman Sachs both among its early subscribers. The first report was thirty pages long and was initially sent out for free; in March 2005, after three months, he began charging an annual fee of €30,000, and the earliest subscribers were all hedge funds and bank proprietary trading desks.⁠[2][3][2][2][2][2][2][2]

By Pal’s own account, in 2007 he began positioning for the recession he had been forecasting all year, and in 2008 he built his reputation by forecasting the recession and the financial crisis; in 2009 he was far too bearish and had the worst year of his career.⁠[2][2][2]

Real Vision, the financial knowledge and education platform Pal co-founded with Remi Tetot, has operated since 2014. The idea for the platform came from conversations among four people in a small fishing village in Spain not long after the 2008 financial crisis: they felt that people’s financial future deserved more than a “3-minute soundbite” of information and wanted to give ordinary traders, entrepreneurs, and professional investors knowledge, tools, and a network.⁠[4][5][4][4][4][4]

That same year, he began focusing in GMI on longer-term themes such as bitcoin; by his own account, he has been involved in crypto since 2012 and wrote a macro valuation piece on bitcoin in 2013.⁠[2][1]

By Pal’s own account, in 2023 he used his framework The Everything Code to switch the vast majority of the ETH in the GMI portfolio into SOL. In September 2023, he announced the launch of Real Vision’s new platform.⁠[2][2][4]

On June 20, 2024, Pal appeared for the first time on When Shift Happens, the crypto interview podcast hosted by Kevin Follonier, discussing the backlash he faced in early 2023 and his experience of publicly going all in on SOL; he later returned to the show on November 13, 2024, May 8, 2025, December 18, 2025, and May 29, 2026, discussing memecoins, how to make money in crypto markets, and how the AI race will affect crypto holders.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

In 2026, Pal rebuilt GMI, long published as a monthly PDF report, into an online platform: the monthly report can be read or listened to in his voice, alongside a monthly audio essay series called “Universal Code,” tools such as a daily-updated Everything Code dashboard and Exponential Age data, and “GMI Brain,” a question-and-answer tool that holds twenty-one years of GMI content.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

Pal’s research is built around four frameworks: The Everything Code, The Exponential Age, The Economic Singularity, and The Universal Code, focusing on long-term themes in macro, technology, and crypto assets; The Everything Code has been published as a book by Harriman House. As of October 2026, he is also co-founder and CEO of Exponential Age Asset Management, which invests in digital assets through a fund of hedge funds.⁠[1][1][1]

Global Macro Investor: Official website: https://www.globalmacroinvestor.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

Real Vision: Official website: https://www.realvision.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

X: Public account: https://x.com/RaoulGMI (opens in a new window)⁠[1]