Some of the most bizarre, and I dare say funny, incidents take place in the gemstones market. I remember this enterprising businessman who once bought a few sapphires and rubies at an auction which displayed, with each stone, a certification confirming each stone as an original. He put a few hundred dollars into it, just to find out, to his dismay, that if sold, they wouldn’t even fetch him a Friday night dinner. He couldn’t understand what went wrong. They were not fakes; the flaw was in his perception – that every original stone is a gem. So the question is – what differentiates a gem from any other stone? Read the rest of this entry »