Virtual Gold Investment Conference: February 22, 2007 Featured Speakers: James Turk, Julian Phillips, Peter Schiff & Bill Murphy Featured Companies: Canarc Resource Corp., Gold Resource Corp., Sunridge Gold Corp. & Buffalo Gold Ltd.

The Metals:

CoT Reports: Gold | Silver 

Gold traded a couple dollars higher in after hours access trade and early Asian trade before it fell back off in late Asian, London, and early New York trade to as low as $662.20 a little before 9AM EST, but it then rallied higher for the rest of the day and ended with a gain of 0.29%.  Silver dropped to $13.79 before it also rallied higher into the close and ended with a gain of 0.36%.

Euro gold remained just under €510, platinum lost $6 to $1,202, palladium lost $1 to $337, and copper remained at about $2.60.

Gold and silver equities fell about 1% at the open and then rebounded a bit in early afternoon trade, but they then fell back off into the close and ended with about 1% losses.

The Economy:

Housing Starts fell 14.3% to the lowest since August 1997.

All of this week’s economic reports:

Next week’s economic highlights include CPI, Leading Economic Indicators, and FOMC minutes on Wednesday, and Initial Jobless Claims and the Help-Wanted Index on Thursday.

The Markets:

Charts Courtesy of http://finance.yahoo.com/

Oil rose as OPEC said that about 66% of its member nations are complying with cuts and Nigerian militants threatened to expand their activities and further disrupt production.

The U.S. dollar index held near unchanged despite poor economic data as traders squared positions after the largest weekly drop in two months.

Treasuries again rose on poor economic data, but gains were limited after impressive moves higher the past two days.

The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P traded modestly lower for most of trade on worries over the housing market, but all three indices rallied higher in late trade and ended mixed and near unchanged on optimism over interest rates.

Among the big names making news in the market Friday were Microsoft, Goodyear, Visteon, Smucker, Hormel, and Banco Bilbao and Compass Bancshares.

The Commentary:

“April Gold finished up 1.4 at 672.8, 0.2 off the high and 6 up from the low.

March Silver closed up 0.028 at 13.99. This was 0.15 up from the low and 0.05 off the high.

After some initial profit taking, weakness in the gold market seemed to pull in some fresh bargain hunting buying. However, a sharp upside extension of the early gains in the energy complex probably provided the metals with a bullish impetus. With the Dollar actually managing to close up on the session, we suspect that the currency impact was serving to hold back the market from even bigger gains. Even more impressive is the fact that the European gold market managed to close lower but yet US players were able to push gold back into positive ground in the afternoon action. However, the gold bulls have to feel somewhat disappointed given that the majority of the US reports were soft but yet the US Dollar still managed to close higher on the session.

Like the gold market, the silver market managed to throw off the early weakness and rise in sync with gold and energy prices. Considered the flow of mostly negative macro economic information from the US and the fresh quasi tightening efforts announced by the Chinese overnight, the bull camp in silver might come away from the session with a moral victory. In fact, when one considers the liquidating posture seen early in the session, the action in silver is even more impressive. Apparently the Press was playing up ongoing investment interest in the metals and that probably served to lift prices up off their lows into the long weekend.”- The Hightower Report, Futures Analysis and Forecasting

GATA Posts:

Ecuador pays bond interest after all, prompting talk of market manipulation

Freeport will end Phelps Dodge's hedging of copper

The Statistics:

As of close of business: 2/15/2007

Global Gold ETF Holdings

[WGC Sponsored ETF’s]

Note: No change in Total Tonnes from yesterday’s data.

COMEX Gold Trust (IAU)