ASX Small Cap Lunch Wrap: Who’s not feeling the Christmas spirit today?

A young buck in British Columbia has a real problem with this red-nosed upstart.

“Every year a buck in the area attacks him or hits and knocks him over and breaks him,” said Arlene Chmelyk, whose homemade decoration doesn’t seem to be too popular with local white-tailed deer.

The theory is that young males can’t tell the difference between a Christmas ornament and a rival buck competing for the attention of female deer.

But Rudolph is here to stay.

Chmelyk says he’s has taken quite a few beatings over the years, losing his head, legs and other body parts – but she just glues them back on again for next year.

To Markets …

The ASX 200 is up 42.60 points or 0.58% at midday today to 7,338.30.

Global oil prices rose by around 2%, the Brent crude price rose by 1.5% to US$75.02 a barrel and the US Nymex crude price added 2.1% to US$72.38 a barrel.

Woodside (ASX:WPL) was up 1.52% and Santos (ASX:STO) was up 1.57% in early morning trade.

Iron ore lifted US$5.00 or 4.6% to US$114.70 a tonne, with BHP (ASX:BHP), Fortescue (ASX:FMG) and Rio Tinto (ASX:RIO) up 1.45%, 0.96% and 0.47% respectively.

According to Morningstar with Dow Jones, the European Central Bank kept its key interest rate on hold and said it wouldn’t raise borrowing costs until inflation was durably above target. Diverging from the Fed, the ECB said it would phase out an emergency bond-buying program while boosting other stimulus measures.

And the Bank of England became the first major central bank to raise rates since the pandemic began, raising its main interest rate to 0.25% from 0.1%, saying it was necessary to bring inflation back to its 2% target.

In the US, major indexes have been roiled with volatility stemming from the new Covid-19 variant and shifting Fed policy since Thanksgiving.

“There’s a lot going on under the surface,” said Adam Phillips, managing director of portfolio strategy at EP Wealth Advisors.

“The underlying narrative and sentiment has changed.”

A survey released Thursday by the American Association of Individual Investors showed that bullish sentiment among investors recently fell to a three-month low.

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for December 17 [intraday]:

Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:

The biggest small cap winner today was Audio Pixels (ASX:AKP) up 37%, after announcing a comprehensive fabrication agreement with Eagle Mountain (Shanghai) Intelligent Technology Co. – a semiconductor company focused on mass commercialisation of devices and systems rooted in Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems (MEMS).

EM is guaranteeing AKP long-term resilient supply of tens of millions of digital loudspeaker chips per year, and will mass produce the company’s products from the first quarter of 2022.

“This agreement with EM represents a major milestone toward the commercialisation of our technologies is all the more valuable given that it comes at a time when industry at large is struggling to secure semiconductor fabrication capacity,” AKP chairman Fred Bart said.

Close on its heels was Carnaby Resources (ASX:CNB) up 36%, after the copper explorer reported a “spectacular” copper discovery from its Greater Duchess Copper Gold Project in northwestern Queensland of a 34m downhole interval of strong copper sulphide mineralisation – which includes a 24m downhole zone of semi-massive copper sulphide.

It’s the first hole to test the Polarisation (IP) chargeability inversion anomaly, which the company says is “almost certainly attributable to copper sulphide mineralisation”.

And up 33% was Bass Oil (ASX:BAS), which reported that November production from its Tangai-Sukananti licence in the South Sumatra Basin totalled 10,403 barrels of oil JV share or 5,722 barrels net to Bass.

This was slightly below October production levels, but Bass still netted November sales of 11,157 barrels of oil JV share or 6,136 barrels net.

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

The biggest loser today was Newpeak Metals (ASX:NPM) down 33% on no news.