Thank you for reaching out and giving me a chance to speak about this. As you mentioned, we did sustain a loss on our relationship with Republic Metals and their bankruptcy filing. I will not go into details on specifics of how it went wrong and will leave that to the courts to figure out. I will say there was a significant level of trust we put into a partner like them and we were let down along with many others in the industry. They were a large supplier to many in the industry however as large as they were, our sourcing of product from them annually was less than 5% of our sales. So in the grand scheme of things they were still not a very large supplier and the impact was relatively small. As you might imagine, we put many controls in place to prevent over exposure to any one supplier, this is how we protect ourselves.

As you know we have been in business and profitable since 2003 and have a very strong balance sheet. We believe we are the largest online precious metals retailer in the world so, while a loss like this makes a good year not as profitable, we are still profitable and trending very close to our initial 2018 budget. Additionally we bank with some of the largest lenders in the world for precious metals and regionally for dollar borrowing and we have advised them of the situation. This impact has not caused us to break any financial covenants. That should provide comfort to those who would be concerned about our financial viability.

To us, this is an unfortunate event but it is business as usual here and we are shipping orders out every day without a hitch. In the end, we appreciate the opportunity to speak to this issue to the extent we can. We are a seasoned professionally run organization and take pride in serving our customers to the best of our abilities.

Scott Thomas

President