Precious Metals Trading Desk
The industry — Mineral, ore and precious metal merchant wholesalers
Base industry report for 4185 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 85
- Under 10 employeesA
- 79%
Of 85 Canadian establishments with employees, 79% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Come with the asset, or buy the business that owns it. Plant, fleet, land or quota decide this market before any operating skill does. Operators here are bought, not started.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 12
The binding constraint — capital intensity
Eighty-five establishments in the whole country, fifty of them with fewer than five people, dealing in bullion, concentrates and rough stones between mines, mints, refiners and dealers. The counterparties are few and findable, and nothing physical has to be built. The cut is the arithmetic of the one listed wholesaler. Gold.com, whose wholesale platform still trades as A-Mark Precious Metals, reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $25.5B and gross profit of $453M — a 1.78% gross margin, down from 1.92% [A]. To earn that it held $2.36B of inventories at year end, $798M of it restricted under financing arrangements, against $318M of derivative assets carried to hedge the position [A]. A wholesaler in metal is paid a sliver of a very large notional, and the sliver only exists if the metal is on hand when the customer wants it. Every ounce in the vault is financed and hedged, and the spread has to cover both before anyone is paid. The incumbent's edge is its cost of borrowing metal and money, plus standing with the mints — A-Mark has been an authorised purchaser of the US Mint since 1986 [A]. An entrant with ordinary resources can finance a small book, on which 1.78% is a small number, or run unhedged, which is speculation rather than wholesaling. The ore-and-concentrate side is larger still in ticket size and is run by global trading houses against offtake finance; it was not separately examined. The scrap-yard record (4181) describes a leveraged commodity position anchored to a permitted site; here there is no site at all — only the balance sheet.
Bullion and concentrates are priced on global benchmarks and move between mines, refiners and mints across borders; a Toronto desk quotes against London and New York. Nothing about the product is local, and the counterparties that matter — mints, refiners, banks — deal with a short list of wholesalers worldwide.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 7 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 7 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold.com (A-Mark Precious Metals)A | $25.5B | — | Fiscal 2026 revenue to 30 June 2026, US$ — The only listed wholesaler. Its 1.78% gross margin is what the whole trade is paid, and it now includes large direct-to-consumer businesses that flatter it |
| Dillon GageC | not disclosed | — | US bullion wholesaler and mint distributor; privately held, publishes nothing |
| Royal Canadian Mint / Asahi Refining CanadaC | not disclosed | — | Refiner and mint — the counterparties a Canadian desk must be accredited with, and competitors for the same metal; their own accounts were not opened for this record |
| Metalor / PAMP / ValcambiC | not disclosed | — | The Swiss and international refiners whose brands set the deliverable bar; privately held |
| Kitco MetalsC | not disclosed | — | Montreal dealer and price publisher — the visible Canadian name in the trade; privately held, not researched for this record |
| Glencore / Trafigura / IXM / Ocean PartnersC | not disclosed | — | The concentrate and ore traders on the other half of this code, competing on cost of capital and offtake finance rather than spread; not examined here |
| The Canadian desksA | not disclosed | — | 85 establishments with employees, 50 of them under five people; Ontario 42, British Columbia 17, Quebec 14 (Statistics Canada, December 2023) |
Evidence
Evidence. All Gold.com figures — revenue, gross profit and margin, net income, inventories, derivatives, total assets and the US Mint authorised-purchaser statement — were read from its fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter and full-year results release (8-K exhibit, 2 September 2026) [A]. The company was formerly A-Mark Precious Metals and its results now include large direct-to-consumer businesses, so the consolidated margin is if anything higher than pure wholesale would show; segment figures were not extracted. It is a US company and nothing here measures a Canadian desk. ISED's Canadian Industry Statistics has no wholesale revenue page for NAICS 4185 — the request returns a 404, not a suppressed cell — so no Canadian revenue, margin or expense series was available at the level checked; and no anchor was found for the ore-and-concentrate or rough-stone trades, which were not examined. That financing and hedging cost consume the spread is reasoning from the balance sheet, not a disclosed figure. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
'198 Member companies across 27 countries' per its About Membership page: banks, refiners, miners, traders, logistics. Sets Good Delivery standards.
'116 Members' in 21 countries per its homepage; the PGM counterpart to LBMA.
'Over 600 members' (organisations) per its homepage: refiners, assayers, traders and recyclers, US-based.
US coin and bullion dealers' trade body (the former Industry Council for Tangible Assets); dealer dues tiers on its Membership page. No member count published.
Annual conference of the two London markets; 2026 registration open per LBMA news at check.
50th annual conference, June 6-9 2026, Orlando; the main refiner, assayer and trader meeting in North America.
Montreal-based (Kitco Metals Inc.) precious-metals news and price site read across the trade.
Australian-hosted bullion forum; Silver board shows 7.1K threads / 150K posts, with posts the day of checking. Buyers and dealers rather than desk traders.
No Canadian bullion-dealer association was found; the Royal Canadian Mint's dealer list is the nearest thing. Note ncba.org is not the NCBA (its site is ncbassoc.org). CoinTalk (70,665 members) is a coin-collecting forum and is left off as tangential.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.