Clive Cowdery, the Resolution Ltd. founder who made about $240 million buying and selling insurers, is betting on diamonds after prices rose five times faster than gold this year on surging demand from China and India. Cowdery, 48, is among startup investors in Diamond Capital Ltd.’s $20 million fund that will manage a portfolio of the polished gems valued at as much as $400,000 apiece.

Gold's performance has eclipsed that of gold mining stocks this year, but gold equities now are likely to take the upper hand as the flow of cheap US cash slows and miners boast juicy margins and good growth prospects. Gold's status as a quasi-currency and safe haven has helped pushed the price of the metal up about 20 per cent since the start of the year to above $US1,520 an ounce, making it one of the top performing asset classes of 2011.

Platinum, palladium to resume uptrend soon Commerzbank looks for Platinum to rise into year-end. These markets “tightened considerably” last year due to a rebound in demand following the recession-related weakness of the previous year. “The

Gold Fields’ attributable group production for the June quarter is expected to be around 872,000 gold equivalent oz, up 5% from 830,000 gold equivalent oz in Q1, the South African miner said Tuesday. During Q2, production from the country’s South Africa region was affected by six public holidays as well as two significant seismic-related accidents at the Kloof Driefontein Complex mine, which resulted in production stoppages due to safety interventions, the company said.

Brazil's Vale , the world's top iron ore miner, expects prices of the steelmaking raw material to remain above $150 a tonne for at least the next five years on tight global supplies, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Guilherme Cavalcanti, Vale's chief financial officer, said miners would struggle to meet booming Asian demand, according to the newspaper.

The introduction of improvement to the Sena railroad would cost over US$200 million and take at least 18 months, the chairman of Mozambican port and rail company, Portos e Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique, said Tuesday in Maputo. Brazilian mining group Vale and Australia’s Riversdale Mining have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in coal mining projects in Tete province and plan to use the Sena railroad to transport the coal to the port of Beira.

South Africa's role in getting Zimbabwe's diamonds back into international trade is being slammed as "dangerous", amid revelations that government officials there have helped export millions of dollars worth of Zim diamonds. South Africa's State Diamond Trader officials admitted in parliament last week that they had helped Zimbabwe export diamonds from Chiadzwa, despite an international ban on the trade.

Unrest and strikes in Indonesia, Chile, Australia and Africa, a shortage of skilled workers in North America and rising labour costs all over the globe are quickly becoming the most serious downsides of a mining boom that started almost a decade ago. While a historically high overall jobless rate is masking spiking wages in the resources sector in the US, workers in emerging markets are shutting down operations of mining companies deemed not to be sharing record profits fairly.

The destruction of Mongolia's grasslands to access a wealth of mineral riches has sparked an anti-mining movement led by a nomadic herder who says force can be used to bring polluting firms to heel. Tsetsegee Munkhbayar is the head of Fire Nation, a small group on a crusade to put an end to what they say are irresponsible mining operations in the resource-rich landlocked country that are threatening their livelihoods.