Keynote Speakers

Equity Management Associates, LLC (EMA) is a private investment partnership which pursues investments in gold and silver mining companies that are at all stages: production, development or drill story. Mr. Lepard has focused on this area exclusively since 2008 and has over $60 million of AUM. He has a strong interest in Private Placements and private company transactions as well as larger companies.

Ronald, born 1980 in Vienna, Austria, is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe). During his studies in business administration and finance at the Vienna University of Economics and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he worked for Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) in the field of Fixed Income/Credit Investments. After graduation, he participated in various courses in Austrian Economics.

In 2006, he joined Vienna-based Erste Group Bank, covering International Equities, especially Asia. In 2006, he also began writing reports on gold. His six benchmark reports called ‘In GOLD we TRUST’ drew international coverage on CNBC, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. He was awarded 2nd most accurate gold analyst by Bloomberg in 2011. In 2009, he began writing reports on crude oil. Ronald managed 2 gold-mining baskets as well as 1 silver-mining basket for Erste Group, which outperformed their benchmarks from their inception. In 2014 he published a book on Austrian Investing („Österreichische Schule für Anleger – Investieren zwischen Inflation in Deflation“)

Alfonso Peccatiello is the author of The Macro Compass, the world's fastest-growing financial newsletter. The Macro Compass leverages on Alf's experience running a large pool of institutional money and offers actionable investment ideas and unique macroeconomic insights.

He was the Head of Fixed Income Portfolio Management for ING Deutschland. In his role, he is responsible for the active management of more than 20 billion euros of fixed income in the HQLA portfolio of the firm's Treasury Department.

Brent Johnson brings over twenty years of experience in the financial markets to his position as CEO of Santiago Capital.
Brent enjoyed more than nine years as a Managing Director at BakerAvenue, a $2.5 Billion Asset Manager and Wealth Management firm, with offices in San Francisco, Dallas and New York. He was the lead advisor for several of the firms largest clients.

Prior to joining BakerAvenue, Brent spent nine years at Credit Suisse in their private client group. He got his start as part of the training program at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) in New York prior to moving to San Francisco. He joined Credit Suisse in the fall of 2000 when the bank purchased DLJ.

Earlier in his career, Brent was a financial auditor for Philip Morris Management Company in New York City where he performed audits at the company’s headquarters as well as subsidiaries in Germany, Hong Kong, and Richmond, Virginia.

Brent regularly gives interviews and speaks at conferences regarding precious metals, currencies & macroeconomic trends. His views have been quoted in numerous print, online and television outlets. He lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico with his wife Mary and son Moses.

Sean Fieler is President of Equinox Partners, L.P. and the Kuroto Fund, L.P. Over the past two decades, Sean Fieler and his partners have assembled a research team capable of analyzing businesses around the world, a capability that has enabled Equinox Partners and the Kuroto Fund to consistently purchase superior businesses at substantial discounts to their intrinsic value. Mr. Fieler serves as a member of the Dominican Foundation Board and is very active in the Catholic community. He serves as Chairman of the American Principles Project, is Chairman of the Chiaroscuro Foundation and is a board member of the Witherspoon Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Committee for Monetary Research & Education, the Acton Institute and the Susan B. Anthony List. A graduate of Williams College with a degree in political economy, Mr. Fieler speaks and publishes on the topic of monetary reform. He has given talks on monetary policy at the annual Grant’s Conference, the Atlas Liberty Forum and has written for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard.

Charlie Morris is the founder of ByteTree. He has 25 years’ experience in fund management, where he has built a reputation for actively managed, multi-asset portfolios with strong risk management. He currently manages the Soda and Whisky Portfolios at ByteTree through the Mulli Asset Investor, which is popular with retail investors.

Although an expert in traditional assets, Charlie is better known for his enthusiasm for gold and Bitcoin (BOLD). ByteTree Asset Management has a BOLD ETF listed in Switzerland (BOLD SW), which combines the world’s two most liquid alternative assets on a risk-adjusted basis. Due to their natural low correlation and high dispersion, the results of this combination have been truly spectacular.

In previous roles, Charlie was the head of Multi Asset at Atlantic House Fund Management until June 2020, where he managed Total Return Fund. At the time of his departure, his fund ranked 1st out of 47 funds in the Trustnet multi-asset, absolute return sector. Before that, he was the Chief Investment Officer at Newscape (2016 to 2018) and the Head of Absolute Return at HSBC Global Asset Management (1998 to 2015) where he managed $3bn of assets.

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.