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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Thursday was a bright 50-36-165 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose fractionally to 667. Polished diamond prices inched higher. Eric Friedland's Peregrine Diamonds Ltd. (PGD) gained one cents to 20.5 cents on 67,000 shares. Daylight on Baffin Island is now 12 hours long and increasing quickly, so Peregrine is getting set for its big sampling program at its Chidliak property, northeast of Iqaluit. The company will collect 250 tonnes of kimberlite from its three priority pipes to assess their diamond value and grade. Glenn Kelly's Orbite Aluminae Inc. (ORT) soared 6.5 cents to 43 cents on 8.10 million shares. Orbite is promoting a special method for processing -- monetizing, in the company's words -- the red mud waste generated by traditional aluminum producers. Meanwhile, it is still plodding along with construction of its high purity alumina plant on Gaspe peninsula.

Patrick Evans's Kennady Diamonds Inc. (KDI), down 15 cents to $3.40 on 31,000 shares, has drilled 32 metres of kimberlite in the first of 14 drill holes to be completed this spring at Faraday, just north of the company's Kelvin kimberlite at Kennady North. (Kennady North is 10 kilometres northeast of the rich Gahcho Kue project, where De Beers Canada and Kennady's sister company, Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPV: $4.10) are building an $860-million mine.) Mr. Evans, CEO of Mountain Province since 2007 and of Kennady since he spun it off from Mountain Province in 2012, says ground geophysics at Faraday shows anomalies comparable in size with Kelvin. "This leads us to believe," he says, that "the potential exists for substantial tonnage at the high-grade Faraday kimberlite." (He presumably would like investors to believe that Faraday will prove comparable to Kelvin, where Kennady touts a tonnage potential of between 10 million and 13 million tonnes.)

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