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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Friday was a positive 94-76-140 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose nine points to 885. Well, that is a relief: Paul Zimnisky, now the go-to guru on most things diamond related, has not abandoned gems and is back to updating his global rough diamond price index. Not that it mattered much in hindsight, as prices changed ever so slightly over the past two weeks.

Last week -- the one Mr. Zimnisky missed but has now filled in -- saw prices edge 0.3 point higher to 123.1, and this week he kept his index unchanged. Prices have now stabilized about three points below a horizontal dashed line that dominates the last 11 months of his one-year chart. Worse, that point is a now a new multiyear low, representing a decline of 84.2 points from the 2022 all-time high, a drop of 40.6 per cent.

Adding to the gloom, current rough prices are 22.3 per cent below where they were in the fall of 2015, a time when analysts, promoters and Internet keyboard warriors were riding a merry price escalator that was carrying them and rough diamond prices to a place where annual price increases would surpass inflation by about 2 per cent year after year. Unfortunately, what happened -- year after year -- was that prices fell by about the same extent as prices of goods and services rose, a horror show for miners.

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