DIMITRI SPECK is commodity analyst and chief developer of trading strategies for asset manager Staedel Hanseatic, where he is responsible for the Stay-C commodity fund that won the Hedge Fund Journal's award as best European commodity fund. He specialises in economic history and empirical measurable market patterns, and in 2001 he discovered, with the help of intraday anomalies, that central banks have been systematically intervening in the gold market – research that formed the basis for this book. Speck holds a patent for an iterative financial market, is the author of numerous articles on the gold markets and other financial topics, and is publisher of the financial website www.seasonalcharts.com.