John Read may refer to: (wikipedia)
It seems extremely unlikely that gold doesn't trade $600 an ounce in the spot market at some time either today or this week.
I don't think there's any question about that. At some point you move on.
I would say that when buying gold shares, additional risk is taken on compared to buying the metal or a derivative thereon.
We believe that all precious metals are trading above fundamentally justified fair value, but the weight of investor, speculator and commodity-index buying has demonstrated that this does not stop metals trading ever-higher.
I do believe that the recent run up in gold has been almost entirely driven by speculative and investment demand as jewelry demand has fallen sharply.
The risk remains that the rand will be at the higher end of people's forecasts.
Silver's recent rally appears to have been driven by intensifying speculation that the proposed ETF will soon gain approval from the SEC, although we have seen no indications on the possible timing.
Silver is benefiting from pre-positioning ahead of the expected launch of an exchange-traded fund in silver.
We need to find the level at which underlying physical demand will support gold. Until then, I wouldn't be comfortable with gold up here, because it's all investment and speculative money at the moment.
Of course, gold can go higher on investment and speculative demand, but there seems no clear motivation for new money to be committed to gold at this time.