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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Friday was a weak 79-105-126 as the TSX Venture Exchange lost three points to 587. Well, the curve still looks flattish at least. Paul Zimnisky's latest update to his global rough diamond price index shows no change from late-to-arrive information, but the latest data produced a 0.4-point drop this week, leaving his index at 149.1 points. This 0.3-per-cent drop interrupts a slow, discontinuous rise that began late in January at 148.4 points.

And so, through the last days of January, all of February and March and into the first week of April, Mr. Zimnisky has rough diamond prices up by 0.7 point, or just under 0.5 per cent. Mr. Zimnisky's chart also shows an equally gentle rise that began in mid-October and ended in mid-December, along with the current all-but-horizontal stretch. Between the two, however, is a sharp six-week drop in which prices fell over 3 per cent.

Even so, that drop is nothing compared with the precipitous decline last year that ran from spring to early fall, or with the equally sharp slide that began early in 2022 and ran through most of that year. Recall -- as miners fondly do -- that rough diamond prices set a record high in February of 2022, with Mr. Zimnisky pegging his index at 207.3 points -- 28.1 per cent above its current point.

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