2024-01-12 17:13 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Friday was an upbeat 95-67-148 as the TSX Venture Exchange added five points to 556. Paul Zimnisky's global rough diamond price index continued its slow but steady northward trek this week, reaching 155.9 points, a 0.2-per-cent increase over last week's setting at 155.6. While Mr. Zimnisky shows a horizontal dashed line suggesting prices have been flat since the start of October, a more optimistic view has a long decline bottoming in mid-October at 152.2, with a 2.4-per-cent increase since then.
Unfortunately, that is the extent of the optimism. Prices are 13.3 per cent lower than the 180 points at which the index sat a year ago. Mr. Zimnisky put prices at an all-time high in mid-February of 2022, when his index reached 207.3, and his current setting is 24.8 per cent below that mark. Today, rough diamond prices are level with where they were through most of the 2010s. (Mr. Zimnisky has prices 7 per cent higher than in early 2019 but 10 per cent lower than in early 2014.)
The prices paid for finished diamonds, on the other hand, have flattened. IDEX charts polished diamond prices and while its index bottomed at 107.07 in early November, it reached a high of 110.61 in mid-December. IDEX currently puts its index at 110.60 -- essentially flat over the past three weeks. The IDEX pattern is typical, with prices for finished diamonds topping out during the peak of the holiday buying season, then starting to tail off. Rough diamonds follow a similar pattern -- just with a few weeks' delay.
Where to now is the big question. Dermot Desmond and Mark Wall's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD) is about halfway through its first tender of the year, held through the facilities of Bonas Group in Antwerp. Perhaps the company will cheer some good news shortly -- if the news is good -- but Mountain Province has uttered not a peep about its final sale of 2023, held in early December. And so, the company's stock, which had fallen as low as 19.5 cents late in November but rebounded to 32.5 cents in mid-December, lost one-half cent to 26.5 cents on 173,000 shares today.
The good news is that Mountain Province plans to hold three tenders in its first quarter of 2024. Its second of 10 auctions this year is slated for the last 10 days of February, while a third will come hard on its heels -- a 10-day sale stretching through mid-March. Most diamond miners hold regular run-of-mine auctions on a 10-per-year basis, with a five-week gap between the start of each.