Methods of investing in diamonds
- Polished diamonds
- Cut and polished diamonds.
- Cut and polished diamonds.
Polished and rough diamonds lack some of the desirable attributes of investment vehicles, including liquidity, homogeneity and fungibility. Grading and certification by recognised laboratories goes some way to redressing this. Weight and cutting proportions are parameters which can be precisely measured. Colour and clarity grades are parameters which need to be determined by gemologists.
The increasing quality and size, and decreasing price, of synthetic diamonds also presents a threat to the value of polished diamonds as a long-term investment. The possibility of low-cost ultra-high-quality diamonds becoming available in industrial quantities at some time in the future is not an encouraging prospect for long-term investors in diamonds.
A cautionary example of such a price fall caused by introduction of a new simulant strongly undermining the prices of a natural gem was the permanent fall in natural pearl prices with the introduction of cultured pearls. The mechanism by which prices were affected is complex. In part because of the social acceptability of wearing cultured pearls to much of the market, customers migrated from the natural to the lower priced cultured product. This altered the supply and demand situation for natural pearls and perhaps the overall prestige of pearls in general was lowered. Where synthetic stones are less socially acceptable to the market for the natural version, arguably as with synthetic corundums where the two markets, natural and synthetic are mostly separate, the prestige of the natural stones has been, with effort, retained. Thus increased availability and lowered prices of synthetics may or may not have major implications for the future price of natural diamonds.
There are several factors contributing to low liquidity of diamonds. One of the main is the lack of terminal market. Most commodities have terminal markets, and some form of commodities exchange, clearing house, and central storage facilities. This does not exist for diamonds. Diamonds are also subject to value added tax in the UK, EU, and sales tax in most developed countries, therefore reducing their effectiveness as an investment medium. Most diamonds are sold through retail stores at very high profit margins. This is due to high overhead costs of operating a jewelry retail store.