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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Tuesday was a negative 43-48-160. The TSX Venture Exchange rose fractionally to 683 while polished diamond prices fell 1 per cent. Lukas Lundin's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC) lost one cent to $1.94 on 563,000 shares. Lucara's revenue will grow considerably when it auctions several large, high-quality gems from its Karowe mine in Botswana, its first big sale of the year. Roy Bonnell's Argex Titanium Inc. (RGX) clawed back another cent, closing at 22 cents on 2.05 million shares. The stock, 42.5 cents in early June, slumped to 12 cents two weeks ago on word of a planned -- and then cancelled -- 37-cent placement.

Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF), down one-half cent to 20.5 cents on 112,000 shares, is set to recover diamonds from 440 tonnes of kimberlite drilled from Orion South, one of the two big pipes Shore wants to mine in central Saskatchewan. Shore thinks it can cut capital costs significantly by shifting the opening phase of its mine plan from the Star pipe to Orion South, where the kimberlite is 30 metres closer to the surface. Shore's drilling was needed to upgrade a six-million-carat inferred resource to indicated, allowing the company to include the diamonds in its economic analysis. That would theoretically boost the internal rate of return for the project and attract greater interest from potential lenders and backers. Shore thinks that paring at least a few hundred million dollars from the projected $2-billion capital cost of its mine and adding the profit from the additional carats would boost its after-tax rate of return significantly above the dreary 14-per-cent rate laid out in the 2011 feasibility study.

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