John Reade Quotations

The release of the COTR report tonight is likely to be the final piece of information we need to decide to sell gold,

The outlook for most of the major gold mining companies is for static to lower production for 2006. With the new project pipeline in gold relatively empty and few major discoveries of gold made in the past decade, we do not expect this picture to change.

We had a very good run. You have a pullback and correction at some stage and we are in a process to do that at the moment.

Silver has moved to the fore following the ETF news of the past week and the metal looks set to trade above $10/oz in the near term.

We expect that funds held 17-18 million ounces of gross long positions as of Tuesday. If the net long position is more than this then we will become even more bearish; only a release that shows that the net long positions declined from the 15 million ounces reported last week would make us positive about the short-term outlook for gold.

In an environment where mine supply is broadly static, central bank sales effectively constrained and scrap supply declining, strong physical demand is genuinely important.

Although we view this as a done deal, the lack of finality in the approval may be holding some investors back. We continue to believe that silver will trade higher from here.

As far as we're concerned the tour is going on,

We might be able to find ways that we can mitigate this. And we should be doing this in quiet time before a pandemic rather than under pressure should one erupt.

I still want to see this correction find some decent physical demand ... Once we can prove that physical demand is actually going to support gold, that will encourage people to take gold higher again.