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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a negative 72-88-124. The TSX Venture Exchange fell fractionally to 751 while polished diamond prices rose 0.1 per cent. Peter Ball's Bluebird Battery Metals Inc. (BATT) gained two cents to 33.5 cents on 471,000 shares. The company said last week that it was acquiring the Ashburton cobalt project in Western Australia. A week earlier, it began the acquisition of the Sandy Point cobalt project, in New South Wales, Australia.

Lukas Lundin and Eira Thomas's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC), down three cents to $2.18 on 1.82 million shares, has wrapped up another auction of exceptional diamonds from its Karowe mine in Botswana. The company has been averaging over 300,000 carats per year from Karowe, but the few thousand carats of large and high-quality gems recovered each year account for roughly half of the mine's revenue. The latest sale fell short of earlier results, with 10 diamonds fetching $32.48-million (U.S.). Another sale is expected later this year and it will have to do better than the first if Lucara is to match the results of a few years ago. The company sold $54.8-million (U.S.) in its first sale last year, but that turned out to be its only sale of 2017, as Lucara had to process less prospective ore during the second half of the year.

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