Thom Calandra previews Vancouver investment conference

5:30a PT Friday, January 24, 2003

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

What's appended here seems awfully unusual -- an
open invitation to an imminent short squeeze in the
gold market, published in the Financial Times, no
less.

It would be a shame to miss such a party.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

* * *

Gold strengthens further on speculative buying

By Adrienne Roberts
Financial Times
Friday, January 24, 2003

a href=http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?http://search.ft.com/search/art...
id=030124000577amp;query=goldamp;vsc_appId=totalSearchamp;state=Form

Gold strengthened again on Wednesday night
as aggressive speculative buying set in after the US
close. The metal hit a six-year high of $364.50 an
ounce in Asian trade, fixing at $364.70 yesterday
afternoon in London.

Jeffrey Christian at CPM Group suggested that
speculators were positioning themselves to take
advantage of a possible price spike caused by
congestion in the New York market at the end of
this month.

The February Comex futures contract becomes
deliverable on January 31. Mr Christian said
speculators were betting that people who sold the
February contract would find it hard to get the
physical gold they need to deliver against their
February positions.

quot;They will thus want to buy offsetting February
contracts while either closing out these short
positions or rolling them forward into future delivery
months,quot; Mr Christian said.

He pointed out that as of January 21 there was a
total of 11.2m ounces of open interest in the February
Comex futures contract, compared with only 1.7m
ounces of bullion stocks registered against Comex
positions.

Yesterday in New York, Comex February gold futures
also settled at $364.70, $4.80 or 1.3 per cent higher.

Crude oil futures lost ground after weekly data showed
an unexpectedly large increase in US crude oil
inventories.

Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures showed
a 1.5m barrel rise in crude stocks, with the American
Petroleum Institute (API) reporting a 181,000 barrel
increase.

Still, the overall US fuel picture remained tight.

quot;Last week, the difference between total inventories
and their five-year average was 37.1m barrels. This
week the gap has ballooned out to 44.1m barrels,quot;
said Paul Horsnell at JP Morgan Chase.

By the close in London, March Brent was down 62
cents at $29.72 a barrel, while in New York, March
WTI closed 60 cents lower at $32.25 a barrel.