Top Diamond Picks With Risk to Match

Article Excerpt

Investing in diamond exploration stocks is risky. It’s a long way between the exploration phase and the commercial production phase when they begin to produce diamonds for sale and possibly start making money. There’s often a long lag between signs of progress, and share prices can drift down in the meantime. Sometimes news is negative, and share prices fall sharply. Still, here are three promising diamond exploration stocks. All have speculative appeal, but they are buys only for highly aggressive investors. SHORE GOLD $5.86 (Toronto symbol SGF; SI Rating: Start-up) (306-664-2202; www.shoregold.com; Shares outstanding: 177.2 million; Market cap: $1.0 billion) owns 100% of the Star diamond project in the Fort a la Corne area of northern Saskatchewan, an area that hosts one of the most extensive kimberlite fields in the world. The Star project contains a diamond-bearing kimberlite, estimated in the 500 million tonne range. Bulk sampling has already returned high carat-grades of diamonds. Kimberlites are cone-shaped pipes, comprised of a mixture of…