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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Friday was an upbeat 105-71-134 although the TSX Venture Exchange lost three points to 552. Paul Zimnisky and his global rough diamond price index ended 2023 on a cheerful note, logging the third successive weekly increase in prices -- and the ninth gain in the 10 weeks since the index hit its 2023 low of 152.2 in mid-October. Mr. Zimnisky now has his index at 155.2 points, up nearly 2 per cent from that low.

It did take some finagling to record this latest rise. Investors attuned to detail may recall that Mr. Zimnisky had his index at 155.2 points a week ago, but he subsequently nudged it lower to 155.0 thanks to late-to-arrive data. It is from that readjusted perch that the latest 0.1-per-cent gain arose. Even so, it has not been a good year for rough diamonds by any measure, as prices at the end of 2023 are 14.5 per cent lower than they were at the end of 2022.

Mr. Zimnisky places two prominent horizontal dashed lines on his latest chart. One extends from the start of the year to mid-spring, the other begins in early fall and runs to the end of the year. The former sits at about 182 points, the latter at 153 points, and between the two, Mr. Zimnisky could have added -- but mercifully did not -- a third dashed line depicting the downward slope when prices fell about 16 per cent from May through September.

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