“I walked up and just told the two ladies at the front, ‘Can I have $100 in nickels?’” he told me. “Everything was like a normal transaction,” he said, “until I went to pick up the nickel and the guy who brought them out from the back was asking me questions like, ‘So, are you a coin collector?’”Ĭlark Boyles, from West Virginia, had a tougher time at the bank. The branch manager would supply him with only two $100 boxes, each weighing more than 20 pounds. “Worst-case scenario, I can just turn it back to cash.” When Pacino heard about all the nickel madness last week, he told me, he called up his bank and asked for $500 in nickels-his first foray into stashing the coins. “My plan is just to sit on it and see what happens,” Mark Pacino, a hoarder in the Los Angeles area, told me. 🤫” Another hoarder fretted about “the real social threat”: Oprah or a Kardashian tweeting about nickels.Īs far as I can tell, most of these hoarders aren’t actually turning a quick profit off of five-cent coins by surreptitiously smelting them down in their backyards. “The teller said ‘everyone hates nickels,’” posted a user who claimed to have just snagged some coins from a local bank. On, the OG forum for coin hoarders, where bitcoin enthusiasts get branded as “ crypto-cultists,” all the new competition has been met with a swirl of exasperation, frenzy, and paranoia. ” The top comment: “Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-you got the golden ticket.” He said he had one unopened box of nickels left. One post of a cardboard box plastered with $100 NICKELS is captioned with “I know a guy that works at a bank.

On Reddit’s Wall Street Silver channel, users who call themselves “apes” (an apparent reference to silverback gorillas, because, you know, silver) are falling deep inside the nickel vortex. In pockets across the internet, people are plotting ways to add to their nickel stashes and flaunting their hauls. Now that nickel prices have gone haywire, hoarding suddenly seems to have hit it big. According to Boomerang, by Michael Lewis, the hedge-fund manager Kyle Bass owns $1 million in nickels that he stores in a vault in Dallas. Over the past decade or so, a small but spirited subculture of prepper types has been hoarding nickels as a contingency plan against inflation Armageddon. Five-cent nickels were first minted in the 1860s because Americans were squirreling away gold and silver coins during the Civil War. Scooping up coins for their metal is, in fact, an age-old tradition.

Forget bitcoin and dogecoin this small community of financial speculators is pouring money into real, physical coins. Actually melting down those nickels for profit is illegal, but that hasn’t stopped opportunistic investors from zigzagging between banks and credit unions to gather nickels, with the hopes of one day selling them off for more than five cents. Last week, during the height of nickelmania, it ratcheted all the way up to 16 cents.

According to, a website that tracks the value of the metals in coins, the “melt value” of a single nickel currently stands at eight cents. Yes, the coin is worth just five cents, but the metal it contains-75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel-has long been worth more than that. Within the span of 24 chaotic hours last week, the price of nickel rose 250 percent, forcing the London Metal Exchange to halt trading for the first time since 1985.ĭuring all of this, of course- of course-some Americans found a roundabout way to make some money: hoarding nickels. What happened next is as close to a Hollywood blockbuster as commodity finance can get: A Chinese businessman nicknamed “ Big Shot,” who bet that nickel prices would fall, had to cover his mounting losses by buying back shares, shooting the stock somewhere into the exosphere.

This has increased demand for nickel from everywhere else, which, in turn, has bumped up its price on the London Metal Exchange. But with Ukraine under siege, companies in the West have been wary of buying Russian nickel. Russia supplies more than 20 percent of the world’s high-quality nickel, which is a crucial component in everything from stainless steel to pipes to the batteries that power electric cars. In economic-speak, the Ukraine crisis has been a “ supply shock.” In English, that means that in the United States you’ll now find record-high gas prices, liquor stores devoid of Russian vodka, and … uhh … Americans heading into their local banks and politely asking for hundreds of dollars in nickels.

Nickels worth money