Giuseppe Lorio, the owner of Chantou International Coin & Stamp, in Vancouver on Saturday. Wild swings in the price of silver are confounding dealers.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Giuseppe Iorio reached behind the counter of Chantou International Coin & Stamp in South Vancouver and pulled out a 1957 Canadian half-dollar. Made of 80 per cent silver and 20 per cent copper, the coin is marked for sale as a collectible for $18. He tapped some numbers into a calculator. The silver alone, he said, should be worth $30.
“I haven’t repriced anything in here because it’s too much to change,” said Mr. Iorio, the store’s owner, gesturing at a stack of drawers holding row upon row of coins. “You can’t change [prices] every day.”
Wild swings in the price of silver, which set a record of more than US$120 on Jan. 29 before logging its biggest-ever daily drop the next day, are confounding coin dealers across Canada as they scramble to keep up. Refiners, who melt down silver items including coins to create bars of pure silver, are facing backlogs of weeks or months. Collectors are ruing the loss of irreplaceable historical artifacts to refiners’ furnaces.
Mr. Iorio said he has never seen anything like it.
“Every morning when I look at the market it’s going crazy. And we lost our shirts on Friday,” Mr. Iorio said, referring to the Jan. 30 silver price plunge. In a business built on profiting from the spread between buyers and sellers, that day’s 27-per-cent drop took even a five-decade industry veteran by surprise.
Mr. Lorio displays some silver coins at his shop in Vancouver.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
The trouble for numismatists – collectors of items including coins, paper money and medals – has been brewing for months as the market value of their collections has soared.
What began as a slow rise in the price of silver driven by growing industrial demand and expectations for falling interest rates has turned parabolic. Investment demand has surged on a mix of leveraged speculation and a search for hedges against geopolitical uncertainty.
Data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange shows daily volumes for micro silver futures contracts jumped to 438,000 in January, 2026, from an average of 18,940 in 2024. One ounce of silver, worth less than US$29 at the beginning of 2025, more than quadrupled in value to the top of the market just over a year later.
To deter speculative buying, the CME repeatedly raised margin requirements in December, January and February, requiring investors to put up more of their own money. Volatility has been eye-watering. After tumbling 27 per cent in one day from its Jan. 29 peak, the price of silver recovered before shedding another 13 per cent on Feb. 5. It rose more than 10 per cent a day later and is still up more than 150 per cent over the past year.
Michael Findlay, president of the Canadian Association of Numismatic Dealers, a professional organization, said dealers in Canada “are cutting off sales” as they wait for the market to stabilize.
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In contrast to the United States, where speculators have fuelled strong demand for silver purchases, Mr. Findlay said Canadian dealers have been encountering holders eager to lock in high prices.
What has unified both U.S. and Canadian markets, dealers and collectors say, is a rush to melt down silver coins whose melt value – the market value of their metal content – has eclipsed their numismatic value, or their worth as a collectible. Mr. Findlay said that as the price of silver has risen, the threshold for coins considered for melting has fallen. That has sent larger quantities of historical coins to refiners for conversion into bullion.
“It’s an absolute shame,” said John Daly, owner of John’s Coins, a middleman service between collectors and retail dealers that he operates in Ontario and Florida. Mr. Daly recently spoke with an American dealer who quoted the melt value, rather than the numismatic value, for Morgan silver dollars, 90 per cent silver U.S. coins mostly produced between 1878 and 1904.
“When a dealer buys a couple thousand [Morgan dollars], they just send them to the refineries. They melt them,” Mr. Daly said.
Mr. Lorio speaks with a customer at his shop. He says his refiner hasn’t accepted coins for three months.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
The demand for pure silver has manifested in significant refining delays. Mr. Iorio said his refiner hasn’t accepted coins for three months, while Mr. Findlay said six- to eight-week delays in processing by refiners have become “the norm” across North America. Refiners do not deal with individuals or very small dealers, but with larger dealers who act as wholesalers, Mr. Daly said.
In Canada, it’s illegal for individuals to melt currency and refiners must be specifically licensed to melt legal tender. The Royal Canadian Mint regularly melts and refines Canadian coins, and while there is a backlog, Deneen Perrin, director of public affairs, government relations and stakeholder engagement for the Crown corporation, said in an e-mail that there had been “no significant delays.”
“While the Mint is currently receiving high volumes of silver coins, we are continuing to deliver for all our refining customers,” Ms. Perrin said. A decision in June, 2024, to restrict silver refining to coins rather than other products containing silver “has helped us better manage the high volumes of coins we are receiving today,” she said.
In the U.S., Mr. Daly said, the deluge of silver has prompted some refiners to refuse any less than 10 ounces of silver and turn away items containing the global standard of 99.9 per cent silver. “It’s got to be four nines,” he said, referring to silver that is 99.99 per cent pure.
Backlogs have become a real concern among coin dealers reliant on fast settlement with refiners.
“Your ability to even sell the silver gets restricted,” said Mr. Findlay. “The refineries say, ‘No, we’re not taking any more,’ then it becomes an even more acute cash flow problem.” Rather than relying on silver sales, dealers may need to borrow money to finance cash flow or stop buying altogether, he said.
A coin valued at around $100 at Mr. Lorio's shop.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Not everything is jammed up. High-end collectible coins, whose metal content makes up only a small part of their total value, continue to sell: An exceptionally rare 1804 U.S. silver dollar sold at auction in January for more than US$3.5-million. And demand in recent weeks for American large cents, copper coins produced between 1793 and 1857, has been “off the charts,” Mr. Daly said.
But with lower-value collectibles being melted down, driving up the scarcity and price of remaining coins, the real losers, Mr. Findlay said, are new collectors who will be unable to afford them.
For Mr. Iorio, that is a concern for the future of numismatics.
“There’s no kids collecting any more,” he said.