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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Friday was a ho-hum 84-93-133 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell four points to 581. And here we go again. Rough diamond prices, which appeared to have flattened recently, took another turn for the worse this week according to Paul Zimnisky's global rough diamond price index. Prices dropped 0.7 point to 157.1, a 0.4-per-cent decline from a week earlier.

Mr. Zimnisky studiously revises the recent end of his chart to account for late-to-arrive data, but there was no significant change this week, as the late information confirmed the initial calculations. (That is a rarity: One might think diamond traders and diamantaires are a tardy bunch in completing their paperwork, but Mr. Zimnisky may be more of a stickler for accuracy than his analyst peers in other sectors.)

In any case, Mr. Zimnisky says that the current index value is 24.2 per cent lower than its all-time high of 207.4, set in mid-February of 2022. That bubbly high capped a nearly-two-year-long ascent from a pandemic low that saw prices sink to the neighbourhood of the 110-point mark. (It is a broad neighbourhood -- Mr. Zimnisky bluntly said that his calculations during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic were arbitrary numbers that bore little resemblance to the reality for those miners who had no buyers for their production.)

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