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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a poor 49-58-141. The TSX Venture Exchange gained two points to 697 while polished diamond prices were flat. Lukas Lundin and Eira Thomas's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC) gained two cents to $1.98 in 966,000 shares. Lucara will reveal its first quarter results in two weeks and investors have been primed to expect good numbers, just not as good as last year's results. The company's Karowe mine has been processing a stockpile of lower-quality kimberlite while it upgrades its operation. Still, the recent recovery of a huge, high-quality gem could augur well for second quarter results. Glenn Kelly's Orbite Aluminae Inc. (ORT) lost one cent to 25 cents on 3.48 million shares. The company is sticking to its latest -- and oft delayed -- target of achieving production in the third quarter at its high-purity alumina plant on Gaspe peninsula.

Dean Taylor's Diamcor Mining Inc. (DMI), down four cents to $1.30 on 14,000 shares, has updated a technical report for its Krone-Endora at Venetia diamond deposit in South Africa. A new resource estimate accompanies the regulator-required document, but it looks much like the old one. The company did rejig its tonnages to account for gravels already removed during its bulk sampling program, but the other changes were minor. Diamcor says it has 58 million tonnes of gravel containing 1.39 million carats of diamonds, an average of just 0.024 carat per tonne. The company is most interested in the K1 zone, which hosts 19.5 million tonnes of gravel and 1.19 million carats, or 0.061 carat per tonne. Within that zone are 4.96 million tonnes of basal gravels hosting 632,000 carats, or about 0.127 carat per tonne. That latter zone, the centre of Diamcor's trial mining to date, accounts for most of the carats produced so far.

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