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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday waws a depressing 34-63-154. The TSX Venture Exchange -- this is becoming all too regular -- slumped 11 points to a 16-year low of 616 while polished diamond prices fell 0.5 per cent. Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF) closed unchanged at 18.5 cents on 275,000 shares. Investors are awaiting results of Shore's $5-million drill program at Orion South in central Saskatchewan. Shore wants to upgrade a six-million-carat inferred resource to indicated, allowing it to beef up its economic projections. John Kanellitsas's Lithium Americas Corp. (LAC) lost 2.5 cents to 38.5 cents on 748,000 shares. Lithium Americas intends to merge with Jay Chmelauskas's Western Lithium USA Corp. (WLC: $0.59) in a stock deal. The new company will be a 50-50 split but Mr. Chmelauskas will be CEO.

Lukas Lundin and Dr. William Lamb's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC), down two cents to $2.13 on 809,000 shares, sold 14 large, high-quality diamonds last week for an impressive $68.7-million (U.S.). (The diamonds, selected from production at the company's Karowe mine in Botswana, weighed just 1,647 carats so the average value topped $41,000 (U.S.) per carat.) The two largest gems achieved the highest values. The 342-carat gem recovered in April sold for $20.6-million (U.S.) while a 270-carat diamond fetched just over $16.5-million (U.S.). Dr. Lamb, CEO, called the sale "an amazing result" that highlighted not just the sustainable quality of Karowe's diamonds but also the "robustness" of the exceptional stone market. Prices for run-of-mine diamond production have fallen significantly since 2011, and demand for smaller gems has softened to the point some producers expect further price drops. (Lucara's run-of-mine production sold for an average of $277 (U.S.) per carat in the first quarter of 2015, down from $305 (U.S.) per carat the year before.)

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