John Read Investment Quotations

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.

Base and precious metals are considerably above what we consider to be fair value - based on fundamental supply and demand factors - but events of the past two years have demonstrated that investment and speculative flows are very capable of lifting prices well beyond fundamental fair value.

We believe the strength of the physical market is vitally important for 2006; even though gold is rising on speculative and investment buying, at some point there will be a reversal of this trend and gold will correct.

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.

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.