Investors will have the chance to ride the speculative wave of diamond-hunting when Australian diamond firm Tawana Resources offers 10 million shares this week.
The Melbourne company is tied to three diamond exploration and evaluation projects in Australia and South Africa.
It also runs a goldmine in Botswanato finance the diamond-hunting.
A research report by Australian Equities Research on the public offering rates Tawana as a speculative buy.
It says Tawana's projects are some of the best on offer from Australian companies.
The diamond market is traditionally a field for brave gamblers. But it has been an attractive one for New Zealand investors who took small stakes in Tawana two years ago.
The company was then valued at $A4.7 million ($5.9 million).
Should its offering be successful, Tawana will be listed on the Australian Stock Exchange at a market capitalisation of $A15 million.
"There's no doubt diamond exploration is highly speculative - even worse so than oil and gas," said Tawana executive director Phil Chisholm.
"But we think we have a less risky offer because we are now evaluating areas that have got diamonds."
Tawana said it had tapped into a potentially big diamond resource in an unusual location - on Flinders Island, off the South Australian coast.
The Flinders operation - Tawana's only greenfields exploration - had revealed large deposits of the diamond-bearing mineral kimberlite.
Mr Chisholm said shareholders would "have their fingers, toes and legs crossed" when the area was drilled in August.
World diamond giant DeBeers has spent $A300 million on largely unsuccessful exploration in Australia over the past 20 years, including looking at a mainland area close to Flinders Island.
The search turned up little, but Tawana now owns one of the finds considered too small for DeBeers to develop.
Tawana chairman Wolf Marx, an experienced diamond geologist who established an Australian diamond mine in the 1980s, heads the company's projects.
Its biggest focus remains the Perdevlei mine in South Africa.
But Mr Chisholm said that might change if Flinders proved a success.
The Perdevlei project is at Kimberley, near the big DeBeers-owned Finsch mine.
Many of Tawana's projects are small, but investors have already shown a healthy interest in the A50c offering.
The offer, which is not underwritten, closes on February 28. Tawana intends to start trading on the exchange on March 14.
