The Return Characteristics of Diamonds

Abstract

We outline the ethical considerations surrounding the trading of diamonds, the metrics used to value diamonds, the history of diamond trading, and the current market structure. We provide an analysis of the underlying risk and return characteristics of several individual diamond types. We show that diamonds exhibit low CAPM and Fama-French betas, and low correlations with gold, the S&P 500, long-term U.S. bond prices, and U.S. inflation.