Silver Conference Featuring John Ciampaglia

February 14, 2026 | (17mins 35 secs)

John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott Asset Management, meets with James Connor of Bloor Street Capital. Ciampaglia explains that silver’s sharp rise reflects a long-awaited “catch‑up trade” driven by years of supply deficits and its growing industrial and strategic importance. Despite short‑term turbulence driven by speculation and geopolitical dynamics, particularly involving China, Ciampaglia remains constructive on silver’s long‑term fundamentals and advises investors to focus on gradual, disciplined positioning.

Video Transcript

James Connor: John, thank you very much for joining us today. You are on the front lines of what's happening in precious metals, and we've seen a great deal of volatility here in recent weeks, both on the way up and the way down. I want to talk about both directions. I first want to get your thoughts on what happened on the upside. One thing I noticed in late 2025 was that the U.S. Geological Survey added silver to its list of critical minerals. How important do you think this was in silver's price rising significantly?

John Ciampaglia: It's been an incredible wild ride for silver over the last six months or so. I think it's important to take a step back because we've been waiting at Sprott for a long time for this silver catch-up trade to play out, and it finally did play out. And we’ve felt as though silver was a coiled spring. Because if you think back to its old market high in 2011 of around $50 an ounce, it basically took all the way from early 2011, $50, to November of 2025 for silver to retest that high. It really lagged behind many other commodities.

We didn't really understand why because there's been a supply deficit for several years. As you mentioned, silver is a strategic metal for several reasons. This catch-up trade has obviously played out. But in the last five to six weeks, we saw a real acceleration of it. We did see some warning signs of speculative fever. We saw a silver futures-based ETF in China trading 60% above its net asset value at one point, and the ETF sponsor basically warned investors about the dangers of buying a fund 60% above its implied value.

There were clearly signs of very speculative late-stage buying, which has obviously dissipated in the last few weeks as the silver price has moderated back into the mid $80s, which is still incredible given we hit $50 in November.

James Connor: Maybe you can also speak to Sprott Physical Silver Trust (PSLV) and what flows you've been seeing into this product.

John Ciampaglia: We have, I believe, the second-largest physical silver fund in the world. We're very proud of the vehicle. We've been running it since 2010. It's a closed-end fund domiciled in Canada and listed on the Canadian and U.S. exchanges. We've actually had positive flows year-to-date in contrast to our larger competitor, which has had outflows. The reason for this is pretty simple. We tend to attract a different kind of investor. We tend to attract investors who want to own silver as a long-term buy-and-hold, strategic investment. In contrast, we find other investors are more day traders, playing the options market, and taking very short-term tactical bets on silver's price direction. Ours is a different demographic.

Sprott Physical Silver Trust is 100% fully allocated silver, segregated, and stored outside of the traditional bullion vaulting system. All of our metal is stored at the Royal Canadian Mint and at one of its sub-custodians, Brink's. We own an enormous amount of silver. Since 2020, I think we have purchased over 150 million ounces of silver, which is an incredible amount. Remember, this is silver that we don't take off somebody's pile and change the title of ownership. We actually buy the silver, physically ship it to our vaults and put it in long-term storage. We have been directly involved in all procurement of that silver, and it's audited by our team and our outside auditors regularly.

James Connor: You mentioned it's fully allocated. What exactly do you mean by that?

John Ciampaglia: That means that the Sprott Physical Silver Trust carries title to all those ounces, that there is no unallocated metal, which is basically metal that could have multiple claims against that ownership pile. These are 1,000-ounce London Good Delivery bars. I've been in our vaults, and it is absolutely a thing of beauty to walk through and see the enormous amounts of pallets stacked with silver bars. It's obviously a very convenient way for investors to own a very bulky metal. If you think about one of these 1,000-ounce bars, they're about 68 pounds. People don't even pick them up. They have machines that pick up these bars, palletize them, and stack them. It's a convenient way for investors to own fully allocated silver without paying high premiums on coins.

We see that when demand for silver is high, there are shortages of coins, and dealers often charge very high premiums to reflect that scarcity. With the Sprott Physical Silver Trust, you're basically buying around the spot price of silver, or in some cases, you could actually be buying below the spot price. It's been a very popular product over the last 15 years, and I think that's why we've grown it to US$17 billion.

James Connor: What flows have you seen in the last few weeks? Have you seen a lot of money come out of that product?

John Ciampaglia: The last couple of weeks have been really quiet in terms of flows, but the trading, obviously, has been very excessive. We've seen some pretty wide intraday swings in silver prices, and the Trust is not immune to them. We did see a few days when the Trust traded at a very wide discount relative to historical norms, which I think reflects some market uncertainty and a search for direction between bulls and bears. They're clearly fighting it out right now. So far, we've built a little bit of a base, and I think we're moving back up, which is good. But it's been pretty quiet, although the trading has been more volatile than I can remember.

James Connor: In addition to the U.S. Geological Survey adding silver to the critical minerals list, the U.S. government recently announced that it's also going to start a $12 billion reserve fund for critical minerals. What are your thoughts on this, and what will this do to the silver price, if anything?

John Ciampaglia: Silver and a whole bunch of other metals have recently been added to the U.S. Geological Survey list of critical materials. I think for a long time, people took it for granted that these metals were readily available. The issue is that much of the silver is mined and processed elsewhere. And recently, China has put export restrictions on silver, which, I think, has really caught people's attention. Silver is not going to flow as easily to other countries from China as it did before.

We will see this U.S. vault project,¹ as they're calling it, is really designed to, I think, stand up or help stand up the U.S. mining sector by addressing reform and reforming permitting timelines and costs for companies. They're talking about protecting their industry, and that also could include price floors. They're talking about public-private partnerships and both equity and debt financing that the government could make, in some cases, in exchange for offtake, which means future production.

There are a lot of things going on, and the U.S. is also trying to protect the industry from what they view as unfair trade practices by China, which heavily subsidizes industries and has been known for suppressing prices or dumping a lot of production in other countries and really undermining local efforts to bring production to market.

I think it's not just the mining of these minerals that's top of mind. It's also processing and refining, because, again, China, depending on the mineral, processes and refines between 50% and 80% of some metals. The entire supply chain needs to be reoriented toward the West. I think that's why you're seeing these big policy announcements from the U.S. government, as well as from many mining companies and end users of these materials, who seem to want to support this initiative.

James Connor: Sixty percent of all silver production is used for industrial purposes. And it's a very important metal for solar panel production. China is the largest producer of solar panels. And you mentioned that China has put export limits on silver. But I'm wondering what your thoughts are on China in terms of driving the price up and also taking the price down. We've seen them do this with other metals before. They did it with uranium in 2010 and 2011. More recently, they did with lithium in the early 2020s. They drove the price up to $80,000 a ton, then it collapsed to $9,000 a ton. But maybe you can speak to that and how that relates to silver.

John Ciampaglia: There's no denying it. Chinese entities are major players across all metals markets. There's a lot of chatter in the media right now about a particular Chinese trading house that has taken a huge naked short position in silver over the last week or so. It seems valid because the reports indicate that the Chinese government has actually intervened to wrangle this entity, basically.

We saw this happen in 2022, when a Chinese nickel producer had massive short positions in nickel that ultimately brought down the London Metal Exchange and led to huge lawsuits. These kinds of market dislocations are rare, but they can happen. It does feel like we've gone from this speculative FOMO the last couple of weeks to, now, people have flipped their bets and are trying to push the price down. This is why I think trading has been so volatile: we had a real tug-of-war between bulls and bears.

Now, putting all that aside, silver is a very important metal in the long term. It has been in a supply deficit for the last five years and is expected to be again this year. The longer-term fundamentals, I think, support higher pricing. If you think about where we are today in the mid-80s per ounce versus $50 in 2011, it still seems very attractively priced to us. This catch-up trade took a long time, but it's clearly in motion. And while it's going to be volatile and bumpy along the way, we are still quite constructive on the price of silver.

James Connor: I want to have a deeper conversation on something you just mentioned. You mentioned FOMO (fear of missing out) and also speculation all in one sentence. I recently read an article in the Financial Times that discussed the retail speculative component of the silver price's rise. They conducted a survey, and the number of silver mentions across various social media platforms, including Reddit, increased 20 times compared to the five-year average. They mentioned a very active community on Reddit, called WallStreetBets. It has 15-20 million subscribers. Another one called Silverbugs. It has over 200,000 subscribers. But I wonder, has silver become a meme stock? Maybe that explains some of the activity we've seen here in the last few weeks.

John Ciampaglia: Silver investors are a super passionate group. I think they're just getting excited because the market signals are very strong, and they've been waiting for these market signals for a long time, given how long silver underperformed. I think where you're seeing a lot of this speculative play come in with Commodity Trading Advisors and hedge funds that have incredible amounts of capital and access to leverage. We see them really piling into trades at times, mostly through derivatives, whether it's futures or options.

To me, those are the ones that have really outsized impact on metals markets in the very short term. Some of that, I think, is starting to wash out. That's obviously not healthy because they can distort a market in the very short term. But I think retail investors are just excited because a metal they have viewed as undervalued for a very long time is being re-rated. It's obviously being pulled higher by the price of gold because there's obviously a very deep relationship between the two. But now you also have the added industrial use case and geopolitics that I think are making silver a more strategic investment and a metal of interest across several superpowers. That is, I think, obviously giving a further bid to the silver thesis.

James Connor: John, maybe you can tell investors who are watching this action in both gold and silver how they should respond. Because when you see a stock go up or when you see an asset go up 70% and then collapse 30% in one day, there's going to be fear associated with that. What would your messaging be to investors who are watching this but haven't invested yet?

John Ciampaglia: It's a great question. Obviously, these kinds of daily moves are not the norm. They're really off the charts in terms of how unusual they are. I think, as a result, you have to be very careful not to get whipsawed by trying to chase the market, selling at a low, and then seeing it bounce back very quickly. Our advice to people is always to build a position slowly over time as you accumulate wealth and to dollar-cost average. It's very hard to react to these very fast-moving speculative moves. You have to think long term, and you have to make sure your position weighting is appropriate for you, because we are obviously in a period of very high volatility. But I think people need to focus on the fundamentals and ride it out here because it will settle down. It always does. And we'll get back to more fundamentally driven markets versus speculative, highly levered performance-chasing.

James Connor: You spoke about the Sprott Physical Silver Trust. Maybe you can mention a couple of other products investors can examine if they want to take a position in silver.

John Ciampaglia: We have a couple of other options. We have the Sprott Physical Gold and Silver Trust (CEF), which is a mix of both metals, popular with investors who want a single position in two metals. Our Sprott Silver Miners & Physical Silver ETF (SLVR) has been very popular with investors over the last 12 months, and that gives you exposure to a basket of silver miners, producers, developers, and explorers, as well as a small allocation to physical silver through the Sprott Physical Silver Trust. That is going to behave differently.

Some of the miners haven't moved as much as the physical market. These mining companies are well-positioned to generate profits given the high silver price, as well as to raise capital, which is really important if you're trying to move a project along to construction and ultimately to production. The silver miners have been huge beneficiaries of this move in commodity prices over the last year. That's been a very popular choice with our investors. Those are the three options that we have right now at Sprott.

James Connor: John, as we wrap up, you and your team have produced a lot of research for investors to read about precious metals, including gold, silver and other metals. If they want to do so, where can they go?

John Ciampaglia: Please visit our website at sprott.com. Visit our Insights tab to read our precious metals commentaries. We have some great podcasts featuring internal experts and external guests. And please visit the product pages for PSLV, SLVR and CEF, those are the ticker symbols. Please review those documents and make sure you understand what you're investing in, because even though a fund might have the name silver in it, another fund might have the same name and be very different. We encourage people to look under the hood and understand what they're investing in.

James Connor: John, great insights. Once again, thank you.

John Ciampaglia: Thanks for having me.

Footnote