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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a perplexing 33-67-151. The TSX Venture Exchange fell one point to 682 while polished diamond prices fell 0.3 per cent. Robert Gannicott's Dominion Diamond Corp. (DDC), $24 earlier this month and just $18.55 Friday, rebounded 72 cents to $19.27 on 486,000 shares. (Every promising rebound defines a new low, until a subsequent drop turns it into a shoulder seeking a lower head.) Dominion is keeping to its annual production forecast but recently warned of expected lower margins in its second quarter. Roy Bonnell's Argex Titanium Inc. (RGX) reclaimed four cents to 21 cents on 1.25 million shares. Argex slumped from 42.5 cents to 12 cents on word of a planned 37-cent placement. It then cancelled the sale and the stock is slowly recovering lost ground. Without the cash, Mr. Bonnell says he will "pursue other alternatives."

Patrick Evans's Kennady Diamonds Inc. (KDI), down 13 cents to $5.25 on 51,000 shares, has the diamond counts from a 2.7-tonne batch of kimberlite drilled from the north lobe of the Kelvin pipe at Kennady North, 250 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife. The rock, processed by caustic fusion, yielded 207 diamonds larger than a 0.85-millimetre sieve. They weighed 7.36 carats, or 2.74 carats per tonne. With a larger 1.18-millimetre sieve the parcel would probably shrink to about six carats, roughly 2.2 carats per tonne, still an encouraging value. Mr. Evans, CEO, deemed the results "excellent," although he downplayed them, saying that they "confirm that Kelvin has the potential to host a high-grade diamond resource." His conservative "potential" applies to the "resource" and not the grade: Kennady still does not have a resource estimate for Kennady North but all the tests along Kelvin and the nearby Faraday pipe have shown grades between two and 2.5 carats per tonne.

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