Flight to Safety Sees Gold Heading for Largest Annual Gain in 32 years.

Aug. 22, 2011 - PRLog -- The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 13 traders and analysts predicts that gold will reach $2000 an ounce by the year end which would bring the percentage gains for the year up to 41 percent.

This would be the most we have seen since the 127 percent surge in 1979. The precious metal is set for an 11th year of gains with holdings in exchange-traded products having reached a record high earlier this month and central banks adding to their reserves for the first time in a generation.

John Logan - Director of Institutional Trading at Lloyds International in Brazil says: “Debt problems, current economic data and balance sheet problems are all extremely deep-rooted and will most likely take years to work out of the system. This keeps us bullish on the trend in gold and we fully expect to see a price of $2200 or more by year end"

Investors are troubled by a combination of the recent bear market trends and the weakening dollar and gold is the logical safe haven choice. Initial market confidence inspired by QE3 has given way to skepticism as more investors realize that the 3rd stimulus is tantamount to printing more money and is not a long term solution.

Gold for immediate delivery surged as much as 2.3 percent to a record $1,894.80 an ounce today and traded at $1,878.73 an ounce in Asian trading. Prices gained 6 percent in the past week, the most since January 2009. Bullion for October delivery was at an all-time high in India gaining as much as 1 percent.

John Logan is the Director of Institutional Trading at Lloyds International with offices in Sao Paolo, Brazil and San Jose, Costa Rica.

# # #

Lloyds offers commodity trading services to clients in over 60 countries. Our service includes access to our state of the art trading platform. Find out more about the Lloyds advantage here http://www.lloydsint.com