Keynote Speakers

Alasdair has been a celebrated stockbroker and Member of the London Stock Exchange for over four decades. His experience encompasses equity and bond markets, fund management, corporate finance and investment strategy.

Alasdair commenced his career on the London Stock Exchange as a stockbroker in 1970, becoming senior partner of his firm in 1979. Subsequently, he became an executive director in a mutual fund management company. He returned to stockbroking full time in 1984 during the City’s Big Bang. In 1997 he moved to Guernsey, where he was commissioned as a consultant to a number of offshore companies in the Island’s finance industry. He became an executive director of an offshore bank, Ansbacher (CI) Ltd, with responsibility for fund management activities in both Guernsey and Jersey.

In 2011, Alasdair was pleased to join Goldmoney as Head of Research, since when he has written a weekly column on economics, finance, precious metals, and geopolitics. He is a frequent guest on podcasts, radio, TV, and as a conference speaker.

Mr. Garrett D. Goggin has served as GSA Associate Editor since 2010. He began his financial career on the floor of the NYSE market working for a local brokerage as a clerk where he learned how investment transactions are processed. As Mr. Goggin saw much of the order flow was moving off-floor he joined a derivative arbitrage group in the United Kingdom and Ireland during the advent of electronic trading and the rise of the Eurex. Mr. Goggin next set up Vox Capital Investment Advisor in order to protect client assets from an overleveraged economy with a focus on alternative asset classes. Garrett acted as equity portfolio manager of the Babson College Fund as well as served as president of the Babson Investment Managers Association during his time as MBA student. Garrett is a CFA Charterholder (Chartered Financial Analyst) and a CMT (Certified Market Technician). He serves on the board of the CFA society of South Florida as treasurer. Mr. Goggin holds MS and MBA business degrees in Finance from Babson College.

Charlie graduated from the University of Oxford as a chemist, joining Cazenove in the early 1990s. After brief stints working in pharmaceuticals and oils he settled down as Cazenove’s mining analyst, spending three years in Johannesburg, among other places. He moved to T Hoare Canaccord in 1999 as a specialist mining salesman and also worked for two years as Cluff Mining’s mineral economist, responsible for global target asset valuations. In 2003 he moved to New York, where he developed and marketed a ‘black box’ model for valuing large-cap equities, before returning to join Edison in 2007. He has extensive media experience, having written for MoneyWeek, The Business, Shares, Investors Chronicle and The Evening Standard (among others), presented on LBC and been a guest on BBC One and BBC World.

In her tenure as CEO of LBMA, Ruth was responsible for the governance, commercial, and transparency overhaul of the LBMA and the Loco London precious metals market (~$ 15 trillion annual turnover). Her experience as a human rights expert helped her successfully create the LBMA’s Responsible Sourcing Programme, which covers all Good Delivery Refiners processing 92% of gold mined annually. Ruth is also a Non-Executive Director for Wilton Park (Executive Agency of the UK Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office) and a Trustee for Human Rights at Sea. She also continues to serve as Vice Chair of the OECD Multi-Stakeholder Governance Group for Responsible Minerals.

Toby Brandon is the COO at ICE Benchmark Administration. He was previously Senior Director, Soft Commodities at ICE Futures Europe where he is responsible for the smooth operation and contract rules of the Robusta Coffee Future contract.

After graduating with a BA (Hons) degree in Economics, Toby started in banking before starting in agricultural commodities as a sugar and grains buyer in 2004.
Following a long spell in cocoa as a purchasing manager and then a trader, he joined ICE in 2015 where he is responsible for London Cocoa, Robusta Coffee, White Sugar and the UK Feed Wheat futures contracts.

John Reade joined the World Gold Council in February 2017 as Chief Market Strategist. John is responsible for producing strategy and developing insights on the gold market; leading our global dialogue by engaging with leading economists, academics, policy makers, fund managers and investors on gold; and leading our research team.

John has over 30 years’ experience in the gold industry and related fields, most recently as a partner and gold strategist with Paulson & Co for the past seven years. Prior to that, John worked as a precious metals strategist at UBS for 10 years; a gold equity analyst in South Africa for 5 years; and over 8 years held various positions in production and project evaluation in the gold division of Gencor, then a leading South African mining house.

John has a degree in Mining Engineering from the Royal School of Mines, a constituent of Imperial College, London.

Dr. Thorsten Polleit is an Honorary Professor of Economics at the University of Bayreuth and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute Deutschland. His fields of interest are monetary and capital market economics, the history of economic thought, and epistemology. As an economist, Thorsten worked 15 years in international investment banking, the last 12 years in the precious metals trading business. He is the author of many refereed journal articles and books.

I am a commodity/mining industry analyst having mining education, supporting mining companies, OEMs and financial institutions.
I have strong analytical skills (SQL, Alteryx, basic Python), excellent communication skills and experience in managing team.