A quiet session into Sight 9's final day: both currencies settle back inside the band and the board is unchanged

💎 Polished — Quotes sit where September's RAPI left them, with the 0.50-carat index at plus 2.5% and the 1-carat index at plus 0.3% for the month, so the small-stone lead is still the only firmness on the board and there is nothing to requote this morning. No new print, sight result, or tender has shifted inventory valuations, and the next reading that can is the October RAPI in early November.

🌍 Demand & macro — Two currency signals from this quiet run have resolved back toward calm. On October 15, we called the rupee's turn below 95.16 a sustained move rather than a blip that would revert above 96 within two weeks, and two weeks on, it is holding at 95.22 to the dollar, softer by 0.79% on the week but well inside the quoting band, so that turn held. The shekel, which we reported firming to about 3.05 yesterday, has eased back to roughly 3.13, a 1.12% move over the week that also sits inside the 1.5% quoting line, so yesterday's firming did not carry into today.

Gold near $4,051 an ounce is down 3.08% since September 29, a figure that reflects the sliding base date as much as any fall and bears on jewelry-metal costs rather than on the price of the stone.

📅 On the radar — De Beers Sight 9 closes tomorrow, October 30, with no public read yet, since De Beers no longer publishes sight values and no sightholder account has surfaced this week. It is the first dated test of whether September's small-stone firmness reaches rough demand and the event the desk has been waiting on to end the quiet run.

Separately, IDEX reports that Petra Diamonds expects its shares to be suspended while it completes a delayed annual audit, a liquidity-strain signal rather than a filing technicality that bears on our open question of whether its strategic review ends in a sale.