A Comment -- General Comments From an Expert (A Commentary)

Gold: Will trade in part on the US$. Doesn't think the bottom is here yet. Will also trade to some extent on geopolitical events. Technically, the $1,000 mark is where it is heading. Not keen on gold stocks. The price is a psychological one as opposed to a supply/demand fundamental.

Hedge Funds & Commodity Prices: Hedge funds can cause the market to dislocate in the short run. Example: Uranium spot price is around $60 where the longer-term price is around $90. Speculative money going in and out of commodities is going to have a big affect.

Short Selling vs. Option Trading As a Hedging Strategy: Option trading basically uses leverage, while short selling doesn't use that leverage as much. Option trading is great as long as you know what your exposure is to the underlying asset.

Salida Multi-Strategy Fund: - Pretty aggressive trader. Hedge out market risks quite a bit. Don't always get it right. Have some big drawdowns but right now they are sticking with the commodities and have done very well. Up 10% to date. Their performance is still great. Likes what they do.

Hedge Funds & Gold: Hedge funds are opportunistic and sometimes can be proactive and at other times reactive.

Sprott Opportunities Fund: Manager Jean-Francois Tardif recently won an award for being the #1 Canadian Long/Short manager on a risk-adjusted basis. Very good fund. Stressful for him to run because he goes long and he goes short very quickly depending on market conditions.

Sprott Hedge II is run by Erik Sprott and is up about 15% since it was his Top Pick in March.

Goodwood Fund: Going out on a limb on this one because people are going to look at the performance and see it is down 18% to 20%. It tends to be an activist deep, deep value fund. His track record has been phenomenal for the last 10 years. In 2 or 3 years you will look pretty good in this one.

Arrow Enso: Global fund. Have done a fantastic job over the last few years. You don't look for this one to shoot the lights out or generate 40% return but they've never had a down year in the last 5 years. Up about 10% year to date.

Vertex Fund: One of the best portfolio managers over the last 10 years. One of the longer track records in Canada for long/short equity. Do a lot of merger arbitrage and with the global credit crisis a lot of people are worried and they have taken advantage of this.

Dynamic Power Hedge Fund: Management has done a fantastic job over the last 5 years. You have about 10 X your money if you bought it five years ago.

Sectors of Global vs Domestic Performance: Feels that wind power will continue to outperform. Likes the high barriers to entry. Currently there are 8 players in the global arena.

Solar Technology: He prefers wind to solar because of cost competitiveness. Solar sector has come off quite a bit and there are interesting opportunities for you to start chipping away. He divides the solar sector into 2 key parts. Tier 1 such as First Solar (FSLR-Q), Suntech Power (STP-N) and Qcell (?). Tier 2, which they don't buy, would be Arise Technologies (APV-T).

LNG Gas: Countries like Japan are paying $16 to get LNG shipped, so it won’t be coming in to North America. Any kind of disaster could create a natural gas shortage, so the trend is your friend.

Carbon Tax: Probably $2 or $3 a barrel and will be an additional expense, particularly for the oil sands companies. With oil prices over $100 a barrel, the impact will be fairly moderate.