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Are Diamond Prices Going Down or Not?

They're based on two different data sets. The PS numbers come from the stones listed on the site. Polished Prices doesn't share what their sources are.

On the other hand, Polished Prices goes into great detail explaining their index. For example, they give more weight to very small diamonds simply because there are more very small diamonds out there. They give less weight to the very low and very high grades. They are not showing the prices of anything, just an indicator of how much prices are changing.

Pricescope is just using average prices for a subset of diamonds. This means that the $100,000 stones pull the averages up. Since very small stones are not included in the PS numbers at all, the chart says more about huge honkers and nothing about little melee.

Pricescope is showing percent change in price, but it's not clear what they mean by price here, or even what they are calling the "unchanged" price.

There have always been styles and grades that are "in." If you could have know that Jennifer Lopez would be wearing a huge pink rock a few years ago, you could have turned over pink stones very quickly for a profit. If you had seen the trend for antiques in advance, you could have made even more. A lot of these charts are designed to be misleading, for example showing only high color high clarity superideals when the typical stone price might be crashing.

See here:

https://www.polishedprices.com/go/methodology
 
I get the difference in methodologies but am still a little confused about the overall trend.

So what you're saying is that wholesale prices might be going down but retail prices are staying constant?

Is polishedprices using rapnet prices? I wonder what percentage of stones are bought at a negotiated price even below what they are listed on rapnet for.
 
Diamond prices don't change evenly across the board. Certain stones, mid-high grades, ideal cuts, medium -big sizes, are going up. Mudball melee, those little tiny things you see set in silver at the Walmart, are going down. Psycho expensive things, like with 7 digit price tags, aren’t moving very well but when they do, the prices are up. This sort of thing leads to very different conclusions depending on which data you look at and how things are weighted.

PolishedPrices doesn’t say what their data is unless you subscribe and maybe not even then (I don't subscribe), so it’s of no use at all in this circumstance. PS does, and it’s really quite narrow. Individual stones being sold one at a time in exactly those mid grades. Nothing under $100, very little over $100,000. No I-2’s or I-3s. Very few below M colors. Nothing with a cut grade below Good.
 
So basically what you're saying is the stuff that people on this forum are interested in is going up in price and other stuff is going down in price. I guess that's good?

I took a look at their methodology and it looks like they do try to capture a trend in the market as a whole, but you have a point that it might be overweighting the big box and department store jewels.
 
I think a suitable phrase is "lies, damn lies and statistics"!
 
HDer said:
So basically what you're saying is the stuff that people on this forum are interested in is going up in price and other stuff is going down in price. I guess that's good?

I took a look at their methodology and it looks like they do try to capture a trend in the market as a whole, but you have a point that it might be overweighting the big box and department store jewels.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's pretty much right.

As for overweighting, you have to understand that there's a lot of melee out there. Go to Kay's or Jared's, and you'll not only see a bunch of low-end stones, you'll see rings where the melee outweighs the center stone 5 to 1. And that's not a style decision--the trend for melee was cultivated by De Boers when the former Soviet diamonds (which tend to be small) hit the western market.

I'm just guessing but I would suspect that Polished Prices chose their weighting to reflect what's actually for sale out there. And there's exactly zero carats of melee in the PS database.
 
Well, the main point of the Bloomberg article was that demand was down because of Asians and millennials. Now, if you and @denverappraiser are saying the reason that we see the PolishesPrices index going down is declining melee prices I can understand that. But then if demand for melee is also actually going up because of clusters and halos and paves, which I believe, then the article and the rationale for the new advertising campaign doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

It would seem to me then the main "problem" is it might be getting a lot cheaper to cut melees, which isn't really a demand problem and I don't see that as a problem for rough manufacturers either.
 
The melee trend and the campaign for more melee aren't new though. It's a question of how much melee costs and how much they can sell it for, and how that compares to the cost of other options. That's a large part of why the stores push bling and halos.

I have exactly no data, but I don't believe that the demand for melee is going up. Those rings look very dated to me. And if you don't buy a diamond ring at all, there's no diamond melee.
 
overall diamond prices are all over the place with what is probably an upward trend overall but some sectors steady and some falling a bit. There is always line noise differences of a few percent up and down will always be present.
 
Karl_K said:
overall diamond prices are all over the place with what is probably an upward trend overall but some sectors steady and some falling a bit. There is always line noise differences of a few percent up and down will always be present.
Click to expand...

So you don't buy the polishedprices chart then as an overall picture, at least from what you're seeing in the market.
 
HDer said:
So you don't buy the polishedprices chart then as an overall picture, at least from what you're seeing in the market.
Click to expand...
Here is the thing, you can segment the market and make the numbers say anything you want them to say.
They are probably correct for the segment they looked at.
Is the segment they chose representative?
I don't know..... but I doubt it.
 
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