Gold will be around $1200 / oz by this time next year. Anyone short gold now has a few screws missing.

Quote from trefoil:
You have to know a bit about the gold market to understand what I said.
Back in the late nineties, Barrick had a deliberate strategy of putting on hedges to drive down the gold price. They did this in order to bankrupt their competitors. They were widely despised in the gold bug community as a result.
This announcement means they're finally throwing in the towel. A lot of the rise in the gold market is due to gold companies buying in their hedges. Barrick was pretty much the last holdout.
This is decidedly NOT a good sign. I've been trading gold for probably longer than most people here have been alive. I can recite gold bug arguments in my sleep. They've never been right, and they never will be, because they don't understand modern economies.
Anti-gold bugs, OTOH, don't understand the cultural hold gold has.
So, me, I just trade the one against the other. This is an extremely volatile market, and if you play it with an ideological mindset, you WILL get burned.
Fair warning.
Is time being called on goldâs bull run?
By John Dizard
Published: September 13 2009 09:50 | Last updated: September 13 2009 09:50
The gold world knows a bell was rung last week by mining group Barrick Goldâs announcement that it will unwind the rest of its hedge book (ie gold sold for future delivery, which partially offsets any price declines). The question is whether the bell signified the beginning of the end for the bull market, or its breakthrough to higher levels.
For its part, Barrick, in its press release announcing the massive de-hedging, made all the right bullish noises about âan increasingly positive outlook on the gold priceâ, which suggests that hedging would be a waste of money, and âcontinuing robust gold supply/demand fundamentalsâ.
For years, gold bulls and conspiracy theorists had excoriated Barrickâs forward gold sales as a lid on the metalâs price and a deviation from the true faith. And, indeed, as goldâs price rises, hedge books cost money...
However, that is not necessarily the whole story. While no doubt the company subscribes to the reasoning in the press releases, there are a few more moving parts here, possibly not mentioned in the release so as to conserve space and preserve simplicity. The Barrick hedge unwind may be partly a delayed consequence of the credit crisis.
Over-the-counter swaps, such as those generated by the companyâs gold sales contracts, were a pretty profitable business for banks in the years just gone by. The OTC swaps have a way of ballooning balance sheets, with huge obligations offset by huge assets. Particularly given the nice fees on this bell and that whistle, that wasnât a problem in a world where risk-weighting was a matter for the banksâ own judgment. In this new world, where OTC swaps are officially a Bad Thing, and where balance sheet shrinkage is the order of the day, the whole business is less attractive. Not that Barrick couldnât continue to finance the forward book, but it could well have been on notice that the price of doing so would be much higher.
Also, there was a simultaneous announcement by Barrick that it would be selling 25 per cent of the annual production of its Pascua-Lama silver mine, which opens in 2012, for a total of $625m to Silver Wheaton Corp, with $212m of that paid upfront. The price will be the lesser of market or $3.90, indexed for inflation. On the surface, selling silver at such a huge discount to the present market price of over $16 would appear to contradict the companyâs announced bullishness on precious metals.
Almost as if some banker wanted that cash back right now, never mind the future.