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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Thursday was a poor 41-64-157. The TSX Venture Exchange gained five points to 1,000 while diamond prices were flat. Lukas Lundin's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC) fell seven cents to $2.43 on 1.26 million shares. Lucara is down 45 cents from its mid-August high of $2.88. There is no news to account for the slide; investors may be realizing profits from one of the few diamond winners in recent years. The stock was just 50 cents last year, before Lucara began recovering large and valuable gems from its Karowe mine in Botswana. Titanium Corp. Inc. (TIC) gained 18 cents to $1.75 on 1.42 million shares, unsupported by news.

Paul Cox's Adent Capital Corp. (ANT: $0.025) has moved another step closer to becoming Proxima Diamonds Corp. What is soon to be Howe Street's new diamond promotion has the conditional approval of the TSX-V for its reverse takeover of Mr. Cox and Mike Power's private Proxima Diamonds. Now it needs shareholder approval at a mid-September meeting, and Proxima must raise at least $700,000 to complete the RTO. (Gordon Clarke, Proxima's vice-president of exploration, undoubtedly hopes Mr. Power, who will become CEO of the merged company, can raise the maximum amount in his proposed placement: $2-million.) Proxima has acquired 16 separate claim blocks across the Slave district of Canada's North. The company touts its projects as hosting a series of old kimberlite discoveries, but Mr. Clarke apparently hopes to find new pipes through a closer examination of the old indicator mineral trains, since all the old finds were diamondiferous duds. (They were promotional successes, initially, and some of the pipes are (not so) fondly recalled by the first diamond bugs in the early 1990s: Yamba Lake, Ranch Lake, Torrie, LI-201, and Nicholas Bay, among others.) This is the third wave of exploration to wash across the North Slave district. The second was but a shadow of the first, as the modest sums of exploration cash available failed to support claimed advances in exploration technology. Proxima, if Mr. Power raises his $2-million, will focus those technologies on a few targets to start. It proposes till sampling and other preliminaries around Eureka, Tavernier and Hortensia, three targets in the area around Snap Lake and Gahcho Kue.

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