Angus MacMillan Quotations

Mine production is nowhere near what we thought it would be at the start of the year.

Nobody is paying attention to any fundamental news. The funds are still piling in.

I wouldn't want to put a top on it at the moment. It has still got a lot of wind in its sales.

Fundamentals are just taking a back seat at the moment (to funds).

There are no signs that funds have lost appetite. As long as you have a list of problems, funds will keep piling in.

It is going to require a lot of nerve to sell short in this market. The fundamentals are supportive and inventories are falling.

It is hard to say where we go from here, but this (fund) money will keep flowing in.

Reduced production in Zambia adds further pressure under a market already bubbling.

That would mean using a lot of electricity to pump sea water ashore and round the tank system. That would probably contribute to global warming. The fish would not strictly speaking be in its natural environment, because it would not be in the open sea. People want to produce food cheaply and this would simply increase costs by a huge amount.

We've long been aware of the environmental responsibilities you've got when you're in this kind of business. We only feed the salmon shrimp meal, and as far as stocking density's concerned, only one per cent of the volume of the cage is fish.

There are good fundamental reasons that mean copper prices won't come down in the near term. A series of potential supply disruptions have not resulted in the loss of much metal, but with stocks falling at a time when demand usually picks up, no one will (sell) it.

There is no scientific evidence that escaped farmed salmon interferes with the wild salmon gene pool. Wild salmon have been breeding for thousands of years and have survived. Farmed salmon have been bred for 30 years and it is unlikely that they are going to overpower the wild salmon gene pool. We are not in business to let salmon escape; our business depends on keeping them in the cages. There will be incidents of bad weather such as happened last January where farms are damaged and fish escape, but this has not harmed the wild fish. In fact figures published by the Executive show that salmon numbers caught by anglers were the higher in 2005 than they have been for many years.

They're suspended on a system of ropes, so catch the waste before it reaches the seabed. As we harvest them, they're tested to see how much of the waste nutrients they're absorbing. The seaweed is there to absorb dissolved nutrients and the shellfish to dispose of particles.

It is too early to say whether this is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end.

In recent months we have seen a whole different type of fund come in. Myself and a number of my colleagues who have been in this business for years have never seen anything like this.

The market continues to be supported from a fundamental perspective by a combination of falling stocks and supply disruptions.

The market continues to be pushed about on relatively thin volumes.

The fundamentals have become superfluous. None of the metals would be where they are today without the influence of fund buying.

The Chinese have just added to the nervousness of a market that was already nervous. This market is flying on vapor now.

The market was looking for a reason to buy copper again and the strikes were a perfect excuse.