079: Raoul Pal – The Biggest Financial Experiment the World has Ever Seen, Explained by a Global Macro Investor

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What's up traders? Hope you will. I'm Aaron Firefield and you're listening to episode 79, which I speak with Raul Powell. Raul has a history rooted in the hedge fund industry and carries with him more than 25 years of experience in financial markets. For a number of years he worked at Goldman Sachs, where he co-managed the hedge fund sales business in equities and equity derivatives, and formed relationships with some very well-known names and funds, which you'll hear about in just a moment.

He later moved on to GLG, which is one of the largest hedge fund groups in the world, where he launched their Global Macro Fund in London. Today, Rule no longer manages client money, but continues to invest his own. He also writes a premium research newsletter, which is called the Global Macroinvestor, and is the co-founder of RealVision TV. In this episode, we navigate through some uncharted waters which have not been explored previously on this podcast.

So in addition to macro investing, technical analysis and hedge funds, we discuss the issues with theoretical economic models, business cycles, negative interest rates, and why the world is economically in a frightening position. Also, I have something for you which I'd like you to check out. Just recently I released a second edition of The One Thing.

So this is a free guide where I asked more than twenty traders to share the one thing they wish they would have known before they started trading. Like I said, it's free to download and you can get a copy right now at chatwithraders.com forward slash ebook. It's very easy reading and there's a lot of wisdom packed into it. So again, that's chatwithstraders.com forward slash ebook. Okay, you're listening to the Chatwithstraders podcast. Here is my guest from the Cayman Islands, Raul Powell.

How you doing, all right? I'm good, how are you? Where are you? I'm in Brisbane, Brisbane, Australia. What time is it for you? It is eight AM on a Tuesday morning. So it must be what? Monday evening for you? Five o'clock Monday evening. Yeah. Okay, nice. And you're in the Cayman Islands, is that right? Yeah. It's even nicer than Brisbane. Yeah, no, I imagine it would be very nice out there. How long have you been there for?

I've been here for a couple of years now. I was uh I lived in Spain for ten years before that. Right, right. Okay. So you were were you ever living in the States or? Always London, um, you know, for most of my career, then moved to Spain, lived in Spain for ten years and then moved to the Cayman Islands a couple of years ago. Good stuff. Good stuff. Just to come back and en enjoy life, eh? Exact well, keeping busy with this Real Vision T V and then uh my writing global macro investor, so

I I had the idea of not being very busy, but I seem to be extremely busy now for some reason. It sounds good in theory. Yeah, exactly. Cool, cool. Well anyway man, it's awesome to be speaking with you. I've obviously got a whole bunch of notes here. So yeah, there's definitely a lot I want to talk to you about. We'll talk about how you came up, your various roles that you've had in the industry. We'll talk about your approach using macro investing.

And also some general chat uh just about economics. How does that sound? Sure. Yeah, perfect. I could talk about pretty much anything. Excellent, excellent. Well I think this will be very different to most of the interviews. I've recorded to date, so it should be very interesting also, not only for myself, but everyone who's listening to this right now. So it's gonna be good.

So one of the first questions I'd like to ask you is, you know, where did you first enter financial markets? I mean, tell us a little bit about how you got started. Yeah, by luck, I think. It was I got a summer job working for a company called Dow Jones Tellerate. So they were like the predecessors of Bloomberg.

So I learned about technical analysis and that got me really interested in markets and I realised that markets is what I wanted to do and I managed to then get a job at one of the brokerage firms in the UK in equity derivatives. And that's where I started. And before he knew it, it was the start of the hedge fund business back in the early nineties when hedge funds just started um appearing on the scene in bigger numbers. And that got my interest peaked.

And suddenly I realised that that was where the opportunity for me lay was both in in understanding the world of how these guys operated and what they did and which led me to macro as well. So it all came from that. Excellent, excellent. And did you have any financial education before going into this?

Yeah, I had a a degree in economics and law when I wrote my dissertation at university on about junk bonds. So I was very interested'cause I was at university in the late eighties when finance was everything. You know, everybody wanted to be Gordon Gecko. Um, and so yeah, uh finance was the thing that I was really interested in. So it was ideal for me at the time, I guess. Got it. Okay. And were you doing any sort of investing or trading uh just on your own during this period in time?

Yeah, I mean I had a dabble as everybody did in the late eighties in uh punting stocks and losing money. Um and then um And then obviously I started investing myself once I've moved into the financial world. I mean technical analysis made it really easy for me as a place to start investing because you didn't need to know anything except about how to read charts.

Um it then, you know, a after a while I realized that not only reading a chart but understanding why gave you a much bigger edge. But yes, that's where I started investing. Excellent. Okay. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, you said that your interest in sort of the hedge fund world had had been peaked. What was kind of the next move from you, uh for you? What was the next step from there?

Um well it was interesting, I moved banks at the time and um our team moved across to this other UK firm and about a hundred and twenty people joined from Morgan Stanley. um at the same time, which we didn't know about. And then so my role changed and somebody said to me, Well, what do you want to do, Raoul, then?'Cause you know, we're going to change things around and I said, You know what, I quite fancied getting to know the US hedge funds.

So he said, Well who do you want to know? And I gave him a list of naively of Paul Tudor, Jones, Stan Drucker Miller. you know, all of these m the most famous guys in the industry. And he said, Yeah, well I know them all. They're all friends of mine and I'll set you up and that was it. So off I went to New York and met Paul Tudor Jones and met all these guys and it seemed that I kind of understood how they thought, which was great.

It really was a perfect fit for me. And then I suddenly started really understanding the world of macro and I became completely focused on that. And then built our big hedge fund business there. You know, I was involved in long term capital, I was involved with, you know, all of the kind of famous hedge funds of the time, Tiger, Soros, um, Tudor, all of these guys, more capital.

Um and then eventually moved to Goldman Sachs where I built the hedge fund business there in both equities and equity derivatives. Wow, wow, okay. So I've gotta ask you, what was it like meeting Paul Trudor Jones and like sort of what what was that whole experience like? Were you with him sort of for a day or was it a working relationship? Like how did that go?

Well, it was interesting'cause the the the the big guy at the at um at Matt West where I was working at the time took me over there to meet Paul and um And Paul was walking around with a Nikkei chart. And um he he was talking to the to my boss at the time about stuff and he said, So Ral, what do you think about this? And luckily Paul Tio Jones is a big chartist and so was I.

So I looked at the charts and well this you know, I gave him my views, he said, That's exactly what I think, brilliant and that was it. You know, after that I was we were chatting away and then before he knew it I'd speak to him every day. Wow, wow. And do you guys still keep in touch to this day? No, I have not spoken to him for a while now. I guess since I left the hedge fund business myself back in the early 2000s or mid 2000s.

Um I I haven't spoken to him for a long time actually. I I must I've been meaning to get hold of him again to speak to him, but I've not done so for a while. Very cool, very cool. I noticed um or I I think he was on uh Real Vision T V, is that right?

Um no, Paul's not been on yet, but I will get him, trust me. We've had a few of the other legends on there, but not him. Yeah, yeah. So you said in your response um just a a little while ago that you were involved uh with a lot of these really big hedge funds, um including like George Soros. hedge fund, uh long term capital. What was your sort of involvement uh with these guys?

Well I was running um hedge fund sales at Goldman Sachs, so we had a team of people. In fact I started from scratch, it was just me doing it. Um and then we had a whole huge team of people where We were selling equity derivative products, but basically my job was to talk macro or to talk markets with them or with long term capital and people like that, we were looking at risk arbitrage opportunities. um using derivative structures or or other structures in in how to

you know, take advantage of var various discrepancies. But, you know, with the macro guys it was just talking about what was going on in the world. You know, I see this going on in Japan and we think the economy's weakening here. Maybe there's a good opportunity to, you know, short this market, belong that market, or this sector versus that sector.

So that's kind of that's kind of what I was doing on a daily basis. And I dovetail in with the foreign exchange guys the fixed income guys, the commodity guys, because when you find that global macro is the connection between all of those asset classes plus economics, you kind of need to know all of those component parts.

and understand how these hedge funds operate between various asset classes because they might be short in copper. Well then you have an opportunity that there might be opportunities within shorting copper equities as well because they may not be have priced the same as the commodity was. So it was kind of like that. Got it. Okay. And that's actually something I wanna ask you about is your time there at Goldman Sachs. So like you said, you were hedge fund sales. Um

Uh y I think you may have sort of described it there a little bit, but what actually is hedge fund sales? Maybe if you could just really dumb it down for us sort of on the outside. Yeah, I mean at the time hedge funds were the new growing client base and they operated in a different way to anybody else because what they do is is they And there's different types of hedge funds as well, but in essence they can short things as well as

Buy things and speculate on them rising. So that's the real difference with hedge funds, is they can bet on something falling in price by selling it at one price and buying it back at a lower price. But also the hedge fund world tends to also have different strategies. It can be with different asset classes like commodities or credit, or it can be with

different investing styles like global macro, which I mentioned before, is kind of looking at the global economic cycle and and looking how that interacts with with uh prices of assets. Or there may be arbitrage where For example, there may be a company that has a share listed in both Holland and England. Those shares are the same shares, but they trade at different prices for some reasons.

And to try and trade those discrepancies is known as arbitrage. Or there might be merger arbitrage as well, where a Um a company is being bid for and they're bidding a price of let's say a hundred and it's currently trading at a price of eighty because of the probability of that deal not going ahead.

And hedge funds would try and calculate the probability of the deal going ahead and then look at the opportunity of uh of making money out of that. So there's a number of things that we did, but basically it's advising that group of firms, the hedge fund cloud base, Which is probably the most kind of interactive, exciting client base that there was and probably remains today. Okay. Very interesting.

And so I think you were at Goldman Sachs for was it maybe about five years? Um Yeah, that's great. Yeah, yeah. So where did you go from there? I think you went to um was it G or G? And I think that was actually one of the the world's largest hedge funds. What was your experience like there? What were you doing there? Was it much the same?

No, so what happens I um I decided to move across to the dark side to move on to the trading side because I really enjoyed the global macro world and I'd had a really good understanding from learning from some of the some of the very best. and also advising many of the very best on on how to look at global macro.

that um one of my clients approached me and said, Would you like to come and work for us and and run a portfolio? So GLG at the time didn't run macro strategies, so I came to join them um and trade macro. Um, and then it develops and we launched a hedge fund, the G L G Global Macro Fund. So at that point I was then trading myself All asset classes

in all markets worldwide. So it's a it's a very broad remit, but it's looking at the world top down again, looking how economies move, how flows of funds move, and understanding how that impacts asset classes. And that was through the tech bus. and the subsequent recession and then a c a few a few years after that as well. And so as I would spend a lot of time trading fixed income, a lot of time trading currencies.

And then suddenly you'd be focusing on equities or suddenly commodities or precious metals, you know, so it was a really incredibly broad remit. And a fascinating remit, but not very good for getting much sleep because you're trading twenty four hours a day in different markets around the world. Okay. And I imagine you would have had a team of traders um underneath you there. How many guys were sort of working for you on with that fund? In our team, there was...

One we had a we had an analyst, we had a guy who ran execution and two other portfolio managers. So did you find that there were sort of any challenges going from your position at Goldman Sachs over to GLG where you are now actually sort of hands on with the trading. Uh, whereas beforehand you'd kinda been more involved with sales and advising. Were there any challenges in that transition? Well there are huge amounts of challenges with that transition.

You know, originally as you come from a sales mindset You think about doing as many trades as possible because that's how you get paid. When you go to the trading mindset, you have to learn. to do the least amount of trading possible. And people found that also when people were market makers at banks. Again, what they were trying to do is tons of different trades, but when they moved to the hedge fund side, the key is to do the right trades. So learning

what trades to do, which trades to ignore, is a hard lesson. It takes people time to learn that because it's all about assessing what the risk reward is, what the best probability is and where to focus your attention. So th that's by far and away the largest learning curve you have to go through initially.

And then it's about the overall risk management and how what your true trading style is. Because many different people have different trading styles and how you trade a fund is very different how you trade your personal account.

because you have investors to report to, you have time horizons you have to adhere to, because you report your your net asset value every month, for example. So what you have to do is is is figure out how to trade your style and your views around the liquidity and market volatility that your investors expect. Yeah, okay.

while you were operating this fund, uh, it was actually during the time of the tech bubble. How did you How did you go through that that period of time and did you kind of uh anticipate that that was coming seen as you were uh very focused on sort of macro events?

Yeah, very much so. I mean, like many of the macro guys, I was about a year early to it. So many of us by Two thous um nineteen ninety eight had realized what was coming after the Asian crisis, and then ninety nine was the big squeeze up into the final top. Uh and then it was a very complicated market to trade'cause it went up and down, much like the market is today, up and down a kind of a volatile range, didn't go anywhere for a period of time until the economy started weakening properly.

Uh, then there was a big opportunity because once you know once the Fed started cutting interest rates, you knew they had a lot of interest rates to cut. So it was a very easy trade from the fixed income side. Um and equity markets then followed suit. They're they tend to be more volatile as an asset class are more difficult because they're less driven purely by the economic cycle than bonds are, for example. Um, so those were the two markets that we

Um, that I was very, very active in the time and it was a it was immensely profitable time time as well. I mean we we were one of the best performing funds over that period.

Oh that's good to hear. Very good to hear. So uh since two thousand and five you've been out sort of doing your own thing. Uh can you share with us what you've been doing since then? Sure. I mean back in I I decided to leave the hedge fund game back in um two thousand and five because I noticed about the issues I talked about before that you if you had a six month of you on a currency You still had to trade only on a

month to month basis because that's how your assets were reported to your clients and they wanted monthly liquidity. And I realized it was actually becoming a very institutionalized world where the ability to trade long term themes and have some sort of volatility to drive higher returns was disappearing. So I decided to opt out of the rat race and move to Spain um and kind of semi retired.

and decided to write'cause I love financial markets. I was investing my own capital. So I thought maybe I'll start writing for a living. um and I started writing macroeconomic and investment strategy because I'd learnt so much from so many people over the years and also had spent a long time building a research product within uh the GLG Global Macro Fund. um and for my own trading that I kind of had a very different view on how the world works.

Um and so so started writing about that. And my client base was and still is the world's largest hedge funds, um, sovereign wealth funds, um, some government organisations, ultra high net worth individuals,'cause it's a very expensive research service, but that's what I've been doing for the last twelve years, basically.

Okay. And with that research service, you know, you you've got some pretty big clients there that you're serving. Um, what's what's sort of in that research? Like what are you what are you sort of presenting to them? Yeah, so what I did is basically try to give an insight into how I thought as a macro manager and and the sorts of things that they need to know as a um as a manager of assets, what information might be interesting. So basically the first thing is I look at

how the global economy is working and like that's the business cycle. So I look at the business cycle because that drives asset prices. So once you understand what's happening, is the is the global sh economy weakening? Speeding up, stable. whereabouts it is on the cycle will give you a much better idea or probability of the direction of asset prices.

So I spend a lot of time looking at economies and I have various ways of looking at it, including the ISM survey in the US, which is a very good indicator of the business cycle. Then I start overlaying big secular themes, you know, what are the demographics, what's the debt profiles of countries like or markets? Um

then we start looking at um technical analysis. You know, what does a market look like technically? And what you're trying to do is build or build up kind of onion layers about particular theme because what what that does is it allows you to isolate better probabilities.

So what you're trying to do is figure out what is the best odds. Because if you just look at a chart, your odds are not as good as if you look at a chart and understand the fundamentals. If you look at a chart, understand the fundamentals and understand the flow of funds, your odds are better again. Um and if you understand some of the the uh underlying fundamentals of the stocks within the indices that you're looking at.

or the sectors, then your odds are better again. So that's what I try to do is I try and help people understand the probabilities of certain outcomes and create a view on the world to allow them to to make investment decisions and i run model portfolios

s um mainly replicate s my own positions as well in the kind of bets that I would be taking. And that can be again across all asset classes, whether it's crude oil to gold to You know, emerging market currencies, emerging market stock markets, credit, credit default swaps, volatility, everything, all asset classes.

Right. Okay. Well let's focus in on this a a lot more. I'm really keen to hear, you know, about some of the the finer details of um how you invest using, you know, these macroeconomic uh themes. So I guess just to take it back one step. to the the very basics. What is a global macro investor? Global macro investing is a theme in It's a it's a name I don't even know where it came from, but it basically is a description of an investment style.

And what it means is that you're a top down investor. And again, that's a that's another terminology that people may not be familiar with. What it means is you trade asset classes based on What is going on in global economies? So global macroeconomics is the driver of of the asset classes or the types of investments that you make. So for example, in a recession

you tend to find that interest rates fall, so therefore you can bet on bond markets rising because bonds go up and interest rates fall, or you can bet on interest rate futures. You also might find that in a recession stock markets fall, so you can invest in those. you might find that countries that have good demographic

um and have low debt tend to have strongly trending stock markets. So you might want to be long stock markets of those kind of countries. You may find that in a boom that certain types of sectors do really well. um because maybe consumers are spending, so you're you're buying consumer based stock. Um you may find that

when currencies are having there's a lot of volatility in currency markets that people flood to gold, for example. So you may bet on that. You may look at recessions again and understand that if a com country if the global economy is going towards recession,

then something like crude oil will probably fall in value. So there's a there's a number of different ways of looking at things. It's a very complex world'cause you're trying to piece together the world's most beautiful jigsaw puzzle that's always evolving every second of the day.

But that's that's kind of what global macro is. Okay, okay. No, that was a really great answer. Um yeah, no, that was awesome. So How data driven versus sort of opinion or I guess instinct, I'm not quite sure what the right word is there, but how data driven would you say your approach is um as a global macro investor? Um You know it, investing in economics is an arts, not a science. So even though I am data driven, it's not everything.

Um so how I look at things is for example, again, you know, I I I I mentioned before that stock markets tend to rise and fall. when the economy's rising or falling. Well, interestingly enough, I can I can have a proxy for the for the US economy in what's known as the ISM survey, the Institution Institute Supply Managers Survey.

Which they inter they they um they interview a whole group of purchasing managers across America, ask them what they think business conditions and inventories and sales are like. And they built this index and that actually rises and falls almost exactly in line with um US GDP growth. But also if I look at the rate of change of the S P five hundred

the year on year rate of change of the S P five hundred mirrors that movement in the ISM index. So I can pretty much choose if I know where the economy's going, I know roughly the performance of the market. So then if I can anticipate where the economy's going, I can anticipate where the markets will go.

And then as I said, I blend in technical analysis and then other analysis to give me a better understanding. So it's partly data driven in terms of I look at economic data a lot and look at correlations between economic data and asset prices. correlations between um data in one country and data in another, looking for leading indicators and indicators that give you the current state of affairs and then try and express that in what is the best risk reward opportunity.

So that becomes less data driven and then that's experience driven and partly hunch driven, partly again more data driven. You know, what's got the highest beta to that particular theme, what reacts the most to that particular theme. Well what's the weakest sector in a certain situation? What's the strongest sector in another?

Um so that's that's kind of how you do it. Okay. So talk to us about the technical analysis aspect of what you do, like How much of what you do is sort of technical base? Like would it be would it maybe account for maybe ten percent of your approach or How do you use technical analysis and what are some of the chart patterns that you actually find to be credible?

I mean I can't do anything without a chart. I'm a very visual person. So the good thing is you give me a chart And I can A have an opinion on about direction, with a rough probability of how much I'll be right or not right. Um, I can t I I'll know the full history of what it's done over time, so I understand how something trades, how volatile it is. So all the contextual information you get out of a chart is huge. So charts are incredibly important to me.

But I also need to have the macro overlay, you know, the economic overlay, because I won't just trade with a chart. Many people do and very successfully so, but I like to see the macro overlay as well. So those two are equally important. I couldn't do anything without a chart, I guess. And then I use a chart to give me probabilities. And probabilities allow you to, for example, look for a stop loss where you may say, I'm wrong on my idea and maybe I'm gonna risk 3%

um of downside in that, but I could make ten percent an upside, then you have a five for one risk reward. So that'll be an attractive risk reward bet. If something is fifty fifty, you tend not to want to do that bet. Mae'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n So you you you look at those and then try and apply the economic overlay as well. And once everything agrees, it gives you a much higher chance of success.

So in terms of chart patterns, you know, I look at a lot of Mae'n ymwneud â'r hynny'n ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud. They're not always right. So you always know there's a probability of you being wrong, but you know there's a relatively high chance of you being right. The hard thing is sometimes guessing the time.

Um, but generally they work. Head and shoulders tops and double tops and things like that. Those kind of patterns work pretty well. Uh rounded bottoms, those kind of things work too. And then I use technical indicators on top, things like relative strength index. stochastics and I use something called DMARC, which is quite voodoo-like and complex to describe, but I use that as well, which is which uh was developed by Tom Demark and gives you entry and exit points, exhaustion points and markets.

Okay. And as someone who's looking at the the sort of the really big picture, what sort of charts do you spend most of your time looking at? Are they daily charts or even weekly or monthly charts? Yeah, good point. I look for my ideas in a monthly chart. Because I like longer term time horizons. I find there's less competition in the longer term time horizon because all the hedge funds are always forced into the shorter term time horizon.

So um I prefer that time horizon. So I look at a monthly chart first. You know, what's really going on in this sector? What's really going on in this market? Then I'll then zoom in to weekly and then down to daily. Daily is the least interesting to me. That gives me a That just gives me an update of where we are in the current trend. But I really need to understand the bigger picture trend.

And then for me what really is great is when I'm looking for reversals, for example, because I've identified an economic theme or a particular theme that I think is interesting, then I try and look for reversal patterns at monthly, weekly and daily level. And then when you've got that, your probabilities are extremely high of success.

Right. So because you do take into account technicals um and you do, you know, like you said, that charts are incredibly important to you, does this make you somewhat unique to to most

uh global macro investors who are maybe more focused on, you know, just the economics and that sort of thing, um, over what's really happening on the chart? No, I don't know any of the kind of better known traders who didn't start with a chart. So Paul Tudor Jones, always a chart. Stan Drucker Miller, always a chart. George Soros, always a chart. You know, many of these guys or most of these guys are all chart based.

Okay. That's the way you can fill because don't forget global macro, you're having to look at an enormous amount of things. Enormous amount of markets, sectors, asset prices. Um, you know, from you know, wheat prices to sugar prices to palladium prices. You know, I'm just looking at my screens now, the amount of different things I look at. There's no way you can follow that without looking at a chart first.

Okay. So for someone who might be a very short term trader, maybe they're an intraday trader or a swing trader who typically holds a position for, you know, two days to let's say two weeks. Do you think there's any added benefit for someone who trades a style like that to be aware of the economics and and fundamentals? Is that is that any benefit to them?

Yeah, so some of the best short term traders I know, and again, Paul Judah Jones will be one of those, you know, he was he was brilliant at trading short term because what you again, or if you know the trend from the If you know the the trend from the economy, if you know the long term trend on the charts, and you want to capture where the best risk reward is in the next five hours.

Well let's say both of those are going up. So let's say the economic cycle's improving and that's driving your particular asset class your trading. Let's call it the S P five hundred futures. Let's say that's m giving them a potential to rise over time as opposed to fall over time. So therefore you've got a trend. So then you would be more inclined to buy the dip. in the shorter term, to look for new highs.

and take profits, then you would be to keep looking for the reversal because keep looking for the reversal is very hard in a trending up market. Some people do do that reversal strategy and wait for the exhaustion point.

But it's a harder trade. So yes, I think it's for short term traders to understand the bigger picture is really helpful. And some of the best short term traders I've ever met also understand the bigger picture. You know, one of the things I I'd like to ask you, still sort of continuing on this. is that like once you've formed an opinion, you know, from looking at the bigger picture

How do you kind of time the trade to capitalise on it? Like where do you enter? You know, like for a you know, like we're talking about short term traders here. they might look for a a technical signal like a certain level to break or support to hold or something like that. Are your signals much the same? Like what screams a green light by to you?

Yeah, so once you've got your let's say it's a idea that you think is gonna tr let's say for example right now I'm looking at the dollar and my big thesis for a long time is the dollar's going much higher. We've just had a sharp correction in the last couple of days. So you start thinking, okay, do I

add to my position now. So that's goes down to technicals and market positioning. The same as it is for everybody else. Because again, you know, if you can bring even if it's a long term trade that, you know, I'm in this trade in fact I've been in this trade for several years now. But I will trade around within the theme, even though I'll keep my majority of my trade on, is when I want to add and reduce.

Um, I will look at the short term and I'll come down to the daily time horizon. I mean sometimes I'll come down to the hourly time horizon, but very rarely. But I'll come down to the daily time horizon and look for the technical setup. or the confirmations you said, the right reversal, the right trend line break, the right price break, or whatever it may be. Okay. Okay. See the way you actually sort of time the trade is is predominantly based on on technicals, is that correct?

Absolutely. I mean I've f I found that people a lot of people try and trade trade catalysts. And catalysts it's really difficult because so often, you know, you buy the rumour, sell the fact, you know, it does the opposite of what you expect. Um and sometimes it doesn't do anything at all. So I like to see the chart line up with the catalyst and again it just increases the probability of success.

Sure. And you said um in your answer just before that, you know, you've been in a trade, um you're in a in a trade at the moment which you've been holding for a couple of years. Is that the the sort of the typical hold time of your trades? Like how long are you usually invested in the market for any given position? Firstly, it's how long is the theme?

So my dollar theme is, you know, I've been I've been long um the dollar versus the euro from one forty eight and a half. It's currently I don't know one hundred thirteen. And that was several years ago. So I've had that trade on and I'll I'll increase it and decrease it during the course of the of the uh of the trend. I mean this whole period of time, months and months and months.

uh where it's it goes against you, does nothing, but my entry was good in that trade, so I've been able to to stomach that for you know, those ups and downs for a long time. Um so it it it really d it really depends in that way. Um but it's you know, I have a longer term time horizon. Okay, so I'm really interested to hear a little bit more about how you decide to increase or decrease your position. So I mean, is there any reason why you don't um just sort of

go all in, all out? Like what's what's your sort of thought process? Because I've done I've done that over time and I've found that If it's a long term trend and you think it's going to go on for a few years and you go all in and all out, you have to be really good at being right. But if it's a long term trend, you don't have to be really good at being right,'cause it trends that way anyway. You know, you could have been a fool in the stock market from nineteen ninety one.

To two thousand, as long as you were long. If you kept a a long position over time, you made money. But if I if you sold it because it got overstretched and you're waiting to buy it back, you often miss the trade, you get it wrong, you don't get back in again, you buy at the highs, you're always on the back foot. But if you're kind of in a trade that's working for you

I don't use huge levered trades in this kind of situation because you can run them for extended periods. But then what you do look for is, you know, has it got really extended? Well then I can take some of my trade off. But I'm still in the trade because I know the trend is in my favour over time. Um it's only when you start getting towards the end of where you think the trend may finish do you start saying, Well, maybe I close the whole position, take profit.

Or to you know, or or you take losses. I mean we all take losses all the time too. Yeah, so that's that's what I want to ask you about is how do you actually think about profit taking? Like what determines a good a time or a price to exit a position? Really again,'cause I'm a longer term guy, so I look at the long term chart pattern, you know, I think the Euro goes to seventy five cents against the US dollar. I could be wrong, but that's my view. And so

I look at the probabilities, look at the chart patterns as they evolve and I still think, okay, that's the most likely outcome. The odds shift over time when, you know, the market doesn't do what you want it to do. But that's where my that's where my idea is. So I'll just keep with the trade until I see unless I see something really major changing that view. And because I'm in from one forty eight and a half.

I I know I've got plenty of wiggle room and if I give back some profits that's how that's so be it. That's how it goes. So it really depends on your how long your trade time horizon is. So I I'll look at monthly charts to assess that. So for example I'm looking at a chart pattern that's very interesting to me in the European um oil s stock sector, S X E P. Uh that, if I look at the monthly chart, is one of the biggest head and shoulders tops I've ever seen in any sector in

ever before. Now it's not broken the head and shoulders top, but when it does, then that'll give me a price objective of a fall of maybe another seventy five percent from here. So then I will look to try and hold the trade over that period of time. Um and so what I'm looking for is the right entry now to enter the trade.

Look for where I'm wrong and where the chart pattern would be morphing and I would say, okay, it's not the head and shoulders top I thought it was. So where am I wrong and where am I right? And you know, do I need to be the last guy in the trade? Probably not. So in which case, even though I may think it's falling down seventy five percent, if I can make, you know, X percent in it, I'll say, you know, that's enough. I'll walk away and look for something else.

Okay, and then just going to the other end of it, sort of taking a loss, how do you think about and how do you manage your risk? Like at what point do you determine your initial analysis to be incorrect? Well, if you're using a chart pattern, then you tend to know if the chart pattern's not working. So if it's not working, if it doesn't if it's not playing out like a head and shoulders top should do, then you should stop yourself out.

I don't use tight stops because I'm not one of those kind of short term Traders, I just think of the amount of capital I wouldn't uh I'll I'll be willing to risk. I'll have a much wider wiggle room than most other people. Um, you know, you get used to taking a bit of pain over time as well. But as long as the the amount you're risking is

is a fraction of the amount that you hope to gain should your trade play out, then you can do that, you know, over time. I'm not a s you know, I uh I I find stop losses not good because everyone gets stopped out in the same place. I'd rather be kind of a bit more vague in my stopping out process and entering process so I might scale myself out as I might scale myself in on entering trades too.

So I I tend to be very different to other traders in that respect because I I really don't like hard stops unless it's a really obvious line that I've shorted or bought against and said, right, if it doesn't do that, then I'm wrong. You know, then I'm happy to use stops. Are you ready to get serious about trading? Then join Tasty Trade, Investopedia's best platform for options trading in 2026.

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I'd like to sort of move a little bit away from your strategy now and spend more time discussing, you know, just economics in general. Now you gave a presentation, I I found it on YouTube. I was watching it just before we hopped on this call. One of the things you talked about was some of the problems you see with economic models and forecasts.

versus what actually happens in the real world. Can you talk to us about some of the issues that you see uh between these two sort of uh theory and reality based sort of ideas? Yeah, and this is a really huge concern of mine is Economics has now gone down to two schools of economics only as taught pretty much anywhere in the world, and that's Keynesianism and monetarism. They're two different schools of thought based on different principles. Some principles overlap. But basically they're

Theoretical models is how they're built. But as we know, humans don't fit into theoretical models. We tend to be We have behaviour patterns. You know, theoretical models in pricing of options suggest that all outcomes have an equal possibility, but they don't because markets trend. So there's there's whole loads of things where

you know, in in monetary policy, you know, if you increase the money supply, then it will create inflation. That just doesn't work in the world because you have something called velocity of money. And so many of these kind of deep theories about how economics work are based on assumptions that are not correct because they're based on theoretical assumptions and they use words like Keterus parabus, you know, all things remaining equal, which means that in the real world this doesn't work.

So what you find in the real world, things like the business cycle works, you know, we know that what the business cycle does, it goes up and down over time, and you can project how long business cycles generally are, how deep they're generally gonna be.

Um and we know then how asset classes work. But economics doesn't do that. So this is why we've got ourselves into the big economic mess we've got into with the amount of debt that we borrowed. We've got this hybrid world of Keynesianism and monetarism, which is governments spend enormous amounts of money bailing out banks and spending money on, you know, on on um uh on stimulating the economy while the central bank

prints money by quantitative easing. So these are this is both Keynesianism and monetarism running all at the same time in a desperate attempt to revive a over indebted economy, which was caused in the first place by slavishly following model based economics. So I I think it's a really dangerous thing. It's really important that people learn that economics is is not a science.

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if that makes any sense. Um it's all about behavioral economics is the new school of economics, which is basically understanding incentive patterns and how people operate within incentive patterns. So that's a really key behaviour thing.

you know, you know that if you offer certain people money for certain things they'll take they'll make certain outcomes. If you you know, if you tell people something hurts, they tend not to do it after a while. Um if they've done things that hurt in the past, they won't do them again.

So it you know, that's behavioural economics, the reason people aren't um spending money or sp or or borrowing money now because even though the central bank are pumping money into the system, is because they learnt from the last two recessions

that having too much debt is a dangerous thing and they're nervous about it. And that's behavioral economics. And that's not really model based. The models break down with this kind of thing. So I think it's crucial that people understand things like the business cycle and things like behavioral economics. ac yn ymwneud â llawer o beth yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r

Okay, so I just want to pick up on something you said there, um, business cycle, uh, and I know you mentioned it earlier on as well. What does business cycle actually refer to? Could you explain that a little more for us, please? Yeah. Basically if you look at the chart of economic growth, GDP, of any country in the world, or even the world itself, it rises and falls. And it rises and falls.

Um, you know, generally if we look at the US economy, you know, it you know, but it's growing really fast, it might have grown at five percent and if it grows really slowly it might grow at negative five percent. So what you have is it d it's it's it's like a sine wave, a cycle goes up and down. But it's not perfect, so it doesn't go up and down, you know, in a perfect rhythm, but there is a rhythm.

And you know if you look at how the economy has gone up and down over time, you can tell that the average length of a business cycle, you know, is X number of months or X number of years. you can tell that once the business cycle is peaked in the future um it is likely to reach a recession point where boom bust.

That's how the world has always worked and always will work. It goes back to even the agricultural cycle is a boom bust, the commodity cycle is a boom bust, and the overall business cycle is a boom bust. So, you know, we have excess spending, excess speculation. excess euphoria, excess optimism too much borrowing in good times and in bad times we nobody takes enough risk.

Nobody borrows, nobody's hir hiring new workers, nobody's doing all of the things that they should be doing at the bottom of the cycle because it usually means at the bottom of the cycle things are only going to get better from here. So it's understanding the business cycle that's really crucial. And as I said before, it drives asset classes because, you know, corporate earnings are based on the economy. If the economy's doing well, corporates earn more.

Right now, for example, corporate earnings are negative in the US and that's because the business cycle has been particularly weak, um and it may be a forecaster that the business cycle will get weaker, for example.

So what are some of the things which should be taught in economics classes at universities um but as of right now aren't? Like what do you how would you change that? Well I go in I've got gone I was speaking at Cambridge University in the UK the other day and I explained to them that I could make them an expert on forecasting economies in ten minutes.

And they're like, Well, how can that be? How's that possible? And I showed them the chart of the business cycle, exactly as I'm talking about and said, Once you understand that economies rise and fall in a obvious cycle, you know that you can never do what economists do, which is always forecast economic growth going forwards. So that's when nobody forecasts recession.

So if you're building a business, forget trading financial markets, you're building a business and you never forecast a recession, well then when a recession does come, it'll be a surprise to you and you'll make you'll have made bad investment decisions or bad decisions for your overall business. So to teach people to understand that economies rise and fall and they trend. is a crucial thing that people don't know. And I can then teach people how to forecast when the next recession will be.

or, you know, when the next boom will be and to understand therefore that you could then forecast what asset prices do. And I think that's a really crucial thing. I think also people If you say to somebody if you take away from studying economics and study personal finances instead and say, Okay, imagine you're the most indebted guy and you really have huge amounts of debts, you're struggling to pay them

And somebody says, you know, what you need to do is borrow more money, you might do that once or twice, but then you realise you You've got even more debt to pay off and you're never going to pay it off. And after a while, even if somebody offers you debt, you won't take it. That kind of co common sense is not an economic.

It's not mo you know, it's not in the economic models. They don't really realise that happens and don't know how to deal with it. So many of the economic problems that I've said um, as I said earlier, have come from not understanding that the world works in a different way. The world is based on human emotion and human decision making and not a model based on around perfect competition.

Right right. So is you know, with with that being said, is there anything that that scares you or should be um concerning for most people about the current state of economics? Economics or the economy? Uh economy, yeah. the economy yeah i mean we Ha we are the world is the most indebted it's been as a percentage of global GDP in all of economic history. The US is the most indebted economy as a percentage of the world economy of any economy in history.

We have crazy experiments where we're seeing interest rates which the none of the finance percent um industry ever thought was possible, where governments are getting paid to borrow money. makes no sense. Companies are being paid to borrow money as opposed to having to pay to borrow money. you have huge amounts of debt that's causing deflation.

Driven by demographics, that's creating a problem that's so big people don't know and central banks don't know how to deal with it. It's crushing economic growth. and is crushing inflation and which makes the debt burden rise.

Now the issue is is how does do we end up getting out of it? And usually Anytime we've had anything similar in the past, and remember this is the biggest order of magnitude of this kind of event we've ever had before, is usually you end up with a huge loss being taken by somebody, and in this case it's usually the savers. And that comes from either a default where somebody doesn't pay you back for the debts that they owe you, or it's from inflation.

ac yn ymwneud â'r ffinansiaid yn ymwneud â'r ffinansiaid yn ymwneud â'r ffinansiaid yn ymwneud â'r ffinansiaid yn ymwneud â'r ffinansiaid yn ymwneud â'r ffinansiaid ymwneud â'r ffinansiaid And one of those three things is the likely outcome. And Rogoff and Reinhardt who wrote the the book about uh This Time Is Different about the the current debt crisis and how

it is not different from last time that any other debt crisis tends to end in these three outcomes is absolutely right. And that's concerning many of the people. I mean, I I I um my business now is um I uh also own a television company, the world's first video on demand platform for finance, which is kind of the Netflix of finance called Realvision TV. And we interview probably the most famous and best investors, economists, strategists in the world.

um and give people access to these incredible minds. And what's amazing is the amount of people coming on and saying, This is out of control. What central banks are trying to do by printing more money to try and control too much debt is a really dangerous economic outcome. And we don't know how they're ever gonna get out of this. With interest rates at zero and people borrowing at near zero interest rates, how can you ever raise interest rates again without bankrupting everybody?

And therefore what happens if inflation comes, it's a really complicated and pretty grim world in that respect.

Yeah, no doubt. So can we just pull that apart a little more? What's uh you know, there there's been a bit of talk about this lately, negative interest rates. What are negative interest rates and and what's the actual effect of of such a thing? Well if you think about normally in the old world of the last two thousand years longer, if you would go and um put money in a bank you get paid interest because you're essentially lending the bank money and they would pay you a rate of interest.

So in some countries right now you could probably get, you know, five percent interest. There's very few left because interest rates have been falling and falling and falling. But then the world weird world happened that negative interest rates have happened, where central banks have said, you know what, we're gonna charge people to lend the bank money, i.e. put money in a savings account in a bank.

So in some countries now you're losing a percent a year by paying somebody to keep your money in the bank. And the idea is to try and force you to not save money, which is crazy because, you know, everybody wants to save for retirement or save for a wedding or say for

for college or whatever it may be, but now you're being penalized to do so because they're trying to get you to spend money to get the economy going. But what it is is a terrible way of taking your money away from you over time, and that's negative interest rates. Okay, so what countries right now as we're recording this actually have negative interest rates? Is that taking place anywhere?

Yeah, so I'm looking down through bond markets and not even official rates and we've got negative rates in uh Germany right now, negative rates in Spain right now, negative rates in Italy right now, in fact most across all of Europe, all of Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Um we've got so there's negative rates in many, many countries.

Um Switzerland being the m having the most negative rates right now. So if you hold your money on deposit in Swiss two year bonds, if you buy two year bonds you're lending to the Swiss government for two years you get charged two um you get charged a per cent, roughly, to lend to the Swiss government, which is an incredibly weird situation. It's the it's the complete reverse of anything that everybody's ever learnt about finance.

It's very bizarre. So you would be best to just sort of take your money out of the bank in that situation and tuck it under your pillow, is that right? Well, exactly right. But what's in interesting is what happened in Switzerland recently. Somebody, one of the big pension funds, saw what was happening to negative rates and said,

What we want to do is go to the bank and take our cash out and put it in the safe in the bank. So they went to the bank and said, Can we have our cash? And the bank said, No. They said, What do you mean? It's our cash. They said, Yes, it is your cash, but we can choose how to pay you and we refuse to pay you in cash. So we can send you a wire transfer if you want to send it somewhere else.

And that was a really concerning thing'cause it was setting the precedent to show that um, that negative interest rates are a form of financial repression or tax indirect ta taxation where they can basically suddenly tomorrow turn around and say, Well, interest rate's gonna be negative ten percent tomorrow. And what happens is there's nothing you can do about it. accept leave that currency and put your money in a different country. Which is why currencies have been moving around a lot recently.

as countries have tried to lower interest rates and force money into their financial systems, they've actually ended up forcing money outside of their financial system and elsewhere.

Yeah, I mean that's that's very concerning. So I mean, how far could negative interest rates go? Well, considering they'd only been done once before, which was in Switzerland in the seventies or eighties. We don't know. I mean nobody believed this could happen. And we're now at one percent in Switzerland. And

Who knows? It could be five percent, could be ten percent. We have no idea. What does that mean for Sabism? It's a terrifying situation. What does it mean for baby boomer retirees? It's a terrifying situation. What does it mean for you with a mortgage? Well it probably means you don't pay any money on your mortgage really, which is kind of weird. Or will they find another way of getting back that money? We don't know, it's the big financial experiment. So going back to what concerns me about

global economic economics right now and the global economy is we're in the middle of the biggest financial experiment the world has ever seen and we just don't know the outcome. So we can all pretend we're smart and no. We don't know because this has never happened before. So there's very few parallels to draw on.

Yeah, so what what does happen if you you know, you owe the bank money? You know, we've talked a little bit about if you have savings with the bank and there's negative interest rates, what happens if you actually owe the bank money? Like you have a home loan or you've got, I don't know, credit card debt or something like that? Well, in Germany we've seen some banks offering to pay people to take out a loan.

Which is quite bizarre. Now that's only a short term thing and it's it's you know based around in incentives, much like zero interest loans on cars. But that we don't know. It's possible that as a borrower You could actually get paid. to have your debt. Maybe you can't borrow more debt at that price, but maybe your mortgage if it's set to, you know, some particular base rate that's gone negative, that your mortgage will go negative.

Which is why the banks have been not trading very well recently, because people realise that for a bank this becomes a very complicated world in which to make money because nobody understands what the outcomes are or what the knock on effects are.

Mm. Okay. Wow. Scary times ahead, eh? So Yeah. So um In two thousand and twelve uh you did a presentation that was quite a hit online. Uh it was called the End Game and I know Zero Hedge actually called it the scariest presentation ever. Um You know, what's what's changed since two thousand and twelve and you know, do you still think something like this, like a a big crisis, is still on the way?

Um so what happened in twenty twelve? I mean s some people said, you know, you were dead wrong, Ral and yeah, I was wrong, but I didn't suggest I wasn't trying to say that uh nothing I do is about certainties, it's all about probabilities. And what was happening before I wrote that article called The Endgame is I was one of the few people to say, listen, Europe is on the very brink of default. And that was what that was is.

w that article was about listen, if Europe starts defaulting, if one of these countries goes, then the knock on effects of all of these other indebted countries could be massive and we have to be really, really vigilant right now'cause things are getting dangerous. That was a probistic outcome. Now what happened eventually, the banking system almost did go buff.

The ECB had to step in, do whatever it takes, and we had to do you know, they had to force Spain to take a thirty billion dollar bail out of its banks'cause the banks would have gone. Now that's incredible that the entire Spanish system would have gone under if only thirty billion had not been taken by the banks at that time. So we got very close to the edge. That situation has not gone away.

So the European economies are massively indebted, the European banks are hugely indebted, the Japanese massively indebted, the Chinese enormously indebted, the UK incredibly indebted. you know, South Koreans massively indebted. So all of these

bits of kindling are still there and you just don't know where the spark is. Is the spark gonna come this year? Is it gonna come next year? Is it gonna come in five years' time? I don't know. But I know that again, if I look at risk reward I see a very large outside risk.

bias how I view markets right now because it makes me concerned by certain risk rewards. There are other markets that are not involved in this at all, with low debts and excellent demographics, and those are the markets I'd rather be involved in. Okay, so either way you you feel as though that there is um, you know, quite a serious financial crisis looming. Yes. Okay. And we're just not sure when that's when that's gonna be.

That's right. I mean there is an outcome which is to muddle through for decades, which is basically what Japan has done. But Japan had the benefit of other gr nations growing. Right now we're in a situation where Very few countries are growing strongly and certainly nobody has enough firepower to hold up the world should somebody have a really big problem. So, you know, my radar screen is up right now because all of the bit the business cycles are starting to trend lower.

I'm concerned that we could be heading towards a recession. I'm concerned that none of the debt issues have been resolved. Um, so there's several signals out there that make me, you know, sit up and pay attention.

Sure, okay. Well, I mean, this has been very interesting. It's definitely uh been an eye opener for myself. I mean, this is something I'm probably a little bit in the dark about. Um to s to a certain extent. But um yeah, no, this has been this has been really fun. Uh Royal, why don't you tell us a little bit about Real Vision TV and um why you started this?

Yeah, I mean, For many of the things we talked about is back in two thousand and eight, I had been writing about the global economy as one of the people who'd forecast what what what had happened, what was going to happen, um, you know, back from two thousand six, two thousand and seven. And what happened in by two thousand eight, people came up to me and said, Well, why didn't we know about this? And this is more normal people, you know, the average investor. Why didn't we know?

And the answer was the media would let them down. And the banks had let them down. They didn't want to say the truth. They didn't want to say, you know, these this is a ress risky time. There were not good things going on. People are borrowing too much money. There's there's a risk. The markets have run too far.

And people the the financial industry didn't want to do it because it has a inherent bias within it to keep things running as they are. Once you understand there's a business cycle, you understand that things don't always remain as they are, so don't lie to people. So I realised that, you know, I probably had a moral duty hadn't been doing this, I've done this for twenty six years or so now.

That's to give people better access to information, that they don't have to pay for a ridiculously expensive research service like Global Macro Investor my other business, that there must be a better way. And we realise the best way of communicating with the largest number of people at the cheapest possible price was television, or in fact, to be more correct, video on demand.

So we decided crazily to start the a media business from scratch, knowing nothing about media. We built this beautiful video player and this whole platform. Then we went out and spoke to Some of the best investors

peop people some people have never heard of and other ones household names, some of the biggest hedge funds in the world, biggest pension funds in the world, some of the best technical traders, the best economists, analysts, strategists. And we said, right, you know, guys, this is our mission. We really want truth in finance. We don't have a bias. We want you to tell us what you think about the world in long format. We'll give you plenty of time to explain yourselves.

And you just tell us what you how you think the world is, or what opportunities are out there, or what risks are out there, and we'll let our audience decide. We won't treat them as you know, as you know, cheap or, you know, we want to treat people with integrity and intelligence. And and everybody came on board and said, This is a fantastic idea. We'd love to do it.

And so we launched it about a year and a half ago and it's been a phenomenal success. People have just been completely enamored by the ability to have access. The average guy on the street, the average trader who trades from home or the average guy advising clients suddenly gets access

for an hour to pick the brains of the greatest hedge fund managers alive. I mean this it's priceless. They'd never get this kind of access before. And that's what we've done. And I think it's really empowering for people. And it helps people make better investment decisions and really understand what's going on in the world. So it's it's been a really exciting journey.

Yeah, no, you've done a really nice job of it and especially because it is, you know, that long format. It's not just like a a three minute segment on, you know, Fox News or CM something like that. I mean trust me, I appear on CNBC quite frequently in the US and it is terrible experience'cause I'm on it for two minutes, three three and a half minutes. You can't explain anything. So nobody actually gets to learn anything. Everything gets dumbed down to a soundbite.

And much like, you know, with your podcast What you really want to do is drill down into people and understand how they think and why they think and you know, h what made them have those decisions and that kind of thing. And I think that's really adds true value. Absolutely, absolutely. No, I totally agree.

So I mean, Raoul, is there anything you'd like to add before we sort of uh close this out? Uh no, I think I've I've hopefully haven't scared people too much. Hopefully I've taught them a bit about the business cycle. I mean there's a again, you know, real vision

you know, it's a it's a very inexpensive service and you can go and have a free trial and there's a lot of videos on there. I'm I'm about to do a whole video on the business cycle. So if anybody's interested in that, I really urge them to have a look at that. ond any of the other concepts of that kind of thing because i think you know educating yourself is the best thing you can do No doubt, no doubt. So what are some, you know, good resources for learning more about

you know, economics and the economy and and some of the topics you've discussed here. Like are there any books? Obviously uh Real Vision TV's a good one, but are there any books or um, you know, any websites or blogs that you

follow religiously or you know, any anything you can suggest that listeners check out? You see, it's really difficult because there is nothing that does what I do. The business cycle analysis There was some business cycle analysis from the Austrian School of Economics in the um early nineteen hundreds. There's not been much updated textbooks on it, so there's not much about the business cycle.

So that's a matter of process of learning yourself and just experiencing things. I tend to find that learning from traders and one of the reasons, you know, Real Vision w was inherently appealing to me, is the books like Market Wizards and and New Market Wizards.

Uh Jack Schwager who wrote those books and he's been actually on Real Vision as well. But you know, he he dug down into the some of the greatest minds in the trading world. Those kind of books are really helpful. History books, stuff like man um Manias, panics and crashes by Kindleberger is a fantastic understanding of the cycle, of the investment cycle of a mania, a panic, and a crash. That's really useful.

Um, there's a brilliant book by Leo Quat Ahmed called The Lords of Finance written about the Great Depression. and what happened with currencies, etcetera, at that period of time. That's a great learning resource. I tend to look at websites like I Enjoy Zero Hedge, even though I know it's a bearish bias. But what I find is there's an integrity to some of the information that they put on there that is not found elsewhere. So there's a wealth of information and it's free.

Um I like to do that. I've I then subscribe to various services of people I I'll pay for the opinion of, whether it's a technical analyst or a particular strategist that I think adds value to me. Um and then it's learning how to read financial headlines and read anything and apply it to an economic

principle. It's understanding how knock on effects work. And that just takes time. You need to understand when you read a headline it might not be the obvious thing that you get out of it. And that's a whole big different topic that we could talk at another day. But um you know, I urge people to read broadly and try and think along themes. Technical analysis I would start with Murphy's uh John Murphy's uh technical analysis.

um of financial markets. I find that pretty invaluable as well. And then there's a couple of books about DMARC, which is some technical signals that I use as well, that I find pretty useful as well. And also I'd go to any of the books written by George Soros like uh soros on soros or the crisis of global capitalism. And that'll give you a great idea into the mind of one of the greatest investors the world's ever seen.

Hopefully that helps. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. So I'll put a link to some of those resources you just mentioned there um in the show notes at chatwithraders dot com. So uh Royal, where is the best place uh listeners can find out more about you? Um two places. Uh again there's uh a bio and more about me on realvisiontv.com.

Um where there's also the free trial for Realvision or if they want to find some more about my Global Macroinvestor research service, that's globalmacroinvestor.com. Okay. And your Twitter handle is uh Raoul GMI, so R A O U L G M I As much as I handle. I'm very active on Twitter and I engage with people as well, so I'm happy to talk markets, talk ideas or elucidate some of my thinking. Good stuff, good stuff.

Alright, Roa, well let's uh call this a wrap and um yeah, once again, thank you very much for doing this, man. I really do appreciate it. I've enjoyed it. Thanks very much for inviting me. You've reached the end of this episode of Chat with Traders, but rest assured there are more.