Paul van Eeden is an independent investor, analyst and newsletter editor.

Born in South Africa, Paul graduated from university with a degree in chemistry and applied chemistry with additional credits in accounting, economics, business economics, philosophy, statistics, mathematics, biochemistry and physics.

Paul's first business was an African art distributorship, of which he acquired a 50% interest during his first year at university in 1985. He has experience, either as an owner, manager or director, in plastics manufacturing, food supplements and cosmetics distribution, advertising & marketing as well as the manufacturing and distribution of gas detection equipment.

Paul van Eeden left South Africa in 1994. He joined Yorkton Securities in Toronto as a stock broker in 1995 and moved to Global Resource Investments in Carlsbad, California in 1996. In November 2002, Paul decided to leave the brokerage industry and joined Doug Casey as co-editor of the International Speculator (www.internationalspeculator.com) newsletter.

Paul writes a weekly column that is published on Kitco (www.kitco.com) and shares his investment ideas with subscribers to his electronic investment publication.

His investment approach was shaped by the ideas of Benjamin Graham and David Dodd so Paul is always on the search for tangible value that can be bought at a reasonable price. That can usually be accomplished only during the trough of a market, which is currently not the case for general US equities.

Therefore Paul decided to focus on the natural resources sector, specifically gold. The period from 1996 to 2001 was a trying time - the bottom of the worst bear market in gold in twenty years - but, of course, it was also a time of opportunity.

At the San Francisco Gold Show in November 1998, Paul van Eeden introduced his original thesis that the gold price in US dollars is driven by the US dollar exchange rate, and that traditional commodity style analyses would not yield predictive results when applied to gold. He showed that a dollar-only view of the gold market is inadequate: understanding the gold price requires a global view, incorporating exchange rates across many currencies. This novel line of thinking is now ubiquitously accepted.

In 2003 Paul went further, showing that the price of gold in US dollars is tightly correlated to the expansion of US monetary aggregates (M3) and that an analysis of gold as money not only clarifies the gold price from 1971 to the present, it has other implications that are still unforeseen by most financial and commodity analysts today. One of these is that the gold price will soon exceed $1,000 an ounce. Another is that, aside from operational differences, not all gold mining companies will benefit equally from this increase in the gold price.

Paul van Eeden not only does his own research on the fundamental drivers behind the gold market, he also takes a hands-on approach to investment analysis: interviewing management, studying exploration projects and visiting mining operations. Whilst investing in mining and exploration companies is inherently risky, value is never far from his mind and features forcefully in his selection criteria.

Most of Paul's time, now, is devoted to finding investments for his own portfolio.