ASX Small Cap Lunch Wrap: Who’s over making the worst possible moves?

Literally everyone understands the gigantic, teetering pile of suck that is moving house.

The packing, the boxes… the tape that won’t stick until it irreversibly does to itself (and only itself). And then there’s the actual shoving of life into the back of a mate’s stolen van that his boss wants back, stat…

And yet, no matter how bad your story is a couple of creative chaps from Louisiana will be able to one-up everyone at the pub with their relocation horror show.

Don’t move house with these guys:

Local cops from Louisiana’s Iberia parish have pinched Tony Domingue and his (we assume) good mate Nico, after the pair tried to move home on the weekend.

Domingue and Nico decided to forego the packing, and just put Tony’s home – walls and all – on the back of a truck, so he could literally move house.

It went… poorly.

Police say Domingue left a trail of destruction in his wake, taking out letterboxes, road signs, trees and eventually powerlines before figuring out they were on a fool’s errand – and dumping the home in the middle of the street.

The only consolation for the pair is that they won’t need to worry about where to live for a while – they’re being held in jail on US$125,000 bonds.

Speaking of moves…

To Markets

The ASX 200 is up an unselfconscious 0.8% at lunch as action for the banks and miners is easily offsetting the agony of being a tech company for the last few months.

Overnight on Wall Street, the catastrophic 43% nosedive performed by Snap’s shares after a profit downgrade headlined another rush to the exits across the tech-laden Nasdaq which bled some 2.5%.

It’s volatility to the max on our ASZ Emerging Companies (XEC) index. The dial is flat, but with tech crashing and gold spiking one suspects it might go in whatever direction the wind is blowing.

Among the bigger names, Tabcorp (ASX:TAH) is about 5% lower after its own violent demerger on Tuesday. It really does want to be a small cap for life.

Fortescue Metals (ASX:FMG) is back in court over failing to come to an agreement with the Yindjibarndi people who were awarded native title, with exclusive possession, by the Federal Court over their land in the Pilbara in Western Australia.

Negotiations over royalty payments fell apart when FMG couldn’t come to an agreement and now the traditional owners are pressing ahead with a compensation claim in which could be worth many millions of dollars.

And AGL (ASX:AGL), the nation’s very best polluter, is facing an uphill demerger plan as more and more investors start to oppose it, including super investor Geoff Wilson.

In the US, it would appear there are still pockets of economics with the capacity to surprise:

US new home sales MoM

consensus: -1.7%
Actual -16.6%

Umm wow. Feds fund rate is only 1%

— Thrillhouse‼️ (@ThrillhouseCap) May 24, 2022

And finally, the happy-go-lucky Kiwi dollar has jumped more than half a US cent, recovering losses after the New Zealand central bank (RBNZ) lifted the interest rate and warned of further  moves on the cash rate as inflation settles into the NZ economy, flagging a rise to at least 3.25% this year, from its current 2%.

The NZD is at about US65¢, a 20-day high.

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for May 25 [intraday]:

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Vectus Biosystems (ASX:VBS) rallied 13% this morning, after the fibrosis and blood pressure specialist reported its single ascending dose (SAD) Phase I study demonstrated no adverse events.

Vectus has been studying the effects of single and repeat doses of VB0004 on healthy volunteers, as well as on patients with mild to moderate hypertension with low cardiovascular risk.

The results of the 2mg, 10mg, 30mg, 100mg and 300mg doses of VB0004 have been reviewed by the Trial Safety Review Committee.

Of greatest significance, no adverse events have been observed at any of the five doses of VB0004 studied to date.

And Reuben says Bryah Resources (ASX:BYH) has boosted resources by 15% to 36Mt at the Gabanintha nickel-copper-cobalt project in WA.

The resource is nestled among Australian Vanadium’s (ASX:AVL) flagship project of the same name and, with AVL having completed a BFS and looking toward production, “BYH can now realise the value of their battery metals”.

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for May 25 [intraday]:

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