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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Friday was a positive 79-73-158 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose two points to 532. Paul Zimnisky's global rough diamond price index had a slightly more energetic advance this week, in part because some late-to-arrive data retroactively levitated last week's setting. The index now stands at 153.7 points, a 0.3 per cent increase over the 153.2 where Mr. Zimnisky had pegged prices a week ago.

This is the fifth consecutive week of slight gains, a rise that began with the index at 152.2 points in mid-October -- a date that matches the start of a two-month-long Indian moratorium on rough diamond purchases. Since then, prices are up 1.5 points, about 1 per cent. In other words, so long as many buyers are not buying and many miners are not selling, rough diamond prices are inching higher.

Where to from here is the obvious question -- or more accurately, a clear concern. Current rough sales are unsustainably low, especially for those miners selling nothing at all. Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD), which did reclaim two cents to 28 cents on 129,000 shares today, had withheld hundreds of thousands of carats from recent auctions and it has now cancelled one -- and technically two -- of its regular sales this summer and fall.

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