Enjoy your porn, old man – it will be your last. Pic via Getty Images.
ASX Small Caps Lunch Wrap: Righto… which one of you bozos porn-bombed the US Fed?
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Aussie markets have opened higher this morning, dashing to a 0.6% gain before investors proved that they’re simply not match-fit for the start of the footy season, letting an easy 0.2% slip through their fingers to leave the market at +0.4% by lunch.
It came off the back of a solid Friday on Wall Street, which left some pundits baffled and others bemused – but which most likely had something to do with the US Fed issuing a monetary policy report which, for once, did not include the phrases “concrete survival bunkers” and “forced to eat cat food”.
I’ll be honest – it sounds like it was a miracle that the US Fed was able to issue its policy report at all, because a scheduled live Zoom event by Fed officials had to be scuttled on Thursday, because old people think technology is hard.
The online event, which had about 220 virtual attendees, was binned after it was “porn bombed” by an attendee known only as “Dan”, and the highly tech-capable folks at the Fed couldn’t figure out how to make it stop.
Porn-bombing, for those not in the know, is the practice of joining a Zoom meeting and then blasting graphic footage of a gathering of one or more sex-positive individuals exercising their right to enjoy physical intimacy for the titillation of others.
However, the US Fed – obviously not fans of consenting adults enjoying an active sex life – deemed attendee Dan’s broadcasting of the simple and natural act of procreation “offensive”, and the start of the meeting was delayed while they tried to figure out how to make it stop.
Sadly for everyone who was waiting – quite impatiently, I assume – for the unbridled thrill of listening to Fed Governor Christopher Waller get into some proper dirty data talk (with percentages and everything, the grubby old sod), event organisers were unable to block the offensive broadcast.
The Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), which hosted the Zoom event, was left with no option but to pull the pin on Waller’s $$$-rated performance.
“We are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret. We have had various programs and this is something that we have never had happen to us,” Brent Tjarks, MBCA executive director, said.
A word to the wise for Mr Tjarks: the “this has never happened to me before” excuse is older than dirt, and no one’s falling for it, mate.
And if the MBCA wants better attendance numbers at its next Zoom events, spicing up a catastrophically boring discussion of fiscal policy with video of some rail-thin German dude Oof, Ja Baby-ing his way through a gaggle of semi-plastic participants will almost definitely do the trick.
TO MARKETS
Aussie markets opened higher this morning, emboldened by a surge on Wall Street on Friday and powered by a surge in InfoTech and Consumer Discretionary shares.
InfoTech is 2.65% higher today, Discretionary is up 1.89% and the recent horror show for the Real Estate sector has been given something of a reprieve today too, with that sector 1.66% higher.
As is very often the case this year, Materials and Energy are lagging behind, down 0.84% and 1.10% respectively.
Up the top end of town, Block Inc (ASX:SQ2) has continued its bullish run, adding another 5.4% this morning to a weeks’ worth of gains – but it’s still down more than 1.0% for the month.
Likewise, Domain Holdings (ASX:DHG) is up 5.4% on no fresh news, which puts it up 5.99% for the week but still down for the month (-1.65%) as well.
But the big news is from Core Lithium (ASX:CXO), which has added a relatively middling 5.2% this morning on news that it has more than doubled its Mineral Resource Estimate from 4.37Mt @ 1.53% Li2O1 to 10.1Mt @ 1.48% Li2O2 at BP33, a key deposit for the Finniss Lithium Operation (Finniss) in the Northern Territory.
There was a time when that sort of announcement would have sent the market into a buying frenzy, but the love affair with lithium is running a little lukewarm at the moment, so investors have sent a lovely card, rather than a fancy box of chocolates, to say “well done, you”.
NOT THE ASX
On Friday, Wall Street had itself a bit of a party by the looks of things, with stocks staging a strong rally that saw the S&P 500 and Dow Jones surging by well over 1%, and tech heavy Nasdaq lifting almost 2%.
A large chunk of the market’s buoyancy has been attributed to those old scallywags at the US Fed issuing a monetary policy report that said “high inflation is not becoming entrenched”, despite months and months of individual Fed representatives telling everyone quite the opposite.
Still, it was enough to give hope to US investors, so Friday ended well in New York, giving rise to hopes that things would be looking a bit rosier on our local markets by the time this morning had rolled around.
Earlybird Eddy Sunarto reports that the best performing US stock on Friday was AI-tech specialist C3.ai, which rose by 33% after the company posted Q3 revenue that beat analyst expectations.
Meta lifted 6.0% a after announcing it would slash prices of its Quest Pro virtual-reality headsets – a move which normally has shares in companies that make ‘expensive things that are easy to knock off the mantlepiece during a game of Virtual Zombie Tennis Boxing’ soaring as well.
The US has also opened up applications to companies for a share of the US$39bn funding earmarked by the US Chips and Science Act (CHIPS) to build an advanced chips manufacturing capability on shore.
Meanwhile in Japan, the Nikkei has risen by 1.13% this morning, following news that a 63-year-old Naoki Sera has been arrested after it was discovered that he had been sharing his rented home in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, with the bodies of his elderly parents for more than a decade.
Police say Sera had told neighbours that his parents had gone to live with his brother – despite being an only child – so that he could continue to collect their pensions.
Sera admitted his crime to police, but was at pains to say that he wasn’t all weird about it or nothin’, and kept his parents’ bodies on top of each other, wrapped in paper and blankets, and stored them in their bedroom.
Japanese officials admit that while this sort of crime is not very common in Japan, a 6.7% spike in the country’s Living with Parents’ Corpses Index (LPCI) suggests that the Bank of Japan’s recent drastic moves to curb inflation are yet to be having the desired effect.
In China, men on the internet dressed up in sexy lingerie (more on that story tomorrow…) seem to have distracted investors, dragging Shanghai down 0.07% and the Hang Seng lower by 0.22% in very early trade.
And in CryptoLand, where the money’s basically Disney Dollars whose value swings like a Pirate Ship ride, Friday afternoon was, to borrow a phrase from Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, “a bit painful”.
See if you can spot where things went wrong:
Things have apparently stabilised over the weekend, though, with a number of commentators laying out their cases for fresh sets of crucial price levels, and Rob “The Dollar-Cost Average King” Badman is making a lot more sense than I am over at Mooners and Shakers.
ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS
Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for March 6 [intraday]:
Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:
Code Company Price % Volume Market Cap RLG Roolife Group Ltd 0.017 113% 25,976,181 $5,724,465 XST Xstate Resources 0.0015 50% 120,000 $3,215,182 LNU Linius Tech Limited 0.002 33% 1,042,800 $4,759,119 CHK Cohiba Min Ltd 0.005 25% 3,448,982 $7,092,977 ROG Red Sky Energy. 0.005 25% 515,093 $21,208,909 ASQ Australian Silica 0.062 24% 2,084 $14,083,019 AOA Ausmon Resorces 0.006 20% 331,210 $4,846,447 AXP AXP Energy Ltd 0.003 20% 580,000 $14,561,702 MTH Mithril Resources 0.003 20% 306,501 $8,157,725 RR1 Reach Resources Ltd 0.006 20% 300,000 $11,887,753 TIG Tigers Realm Coal 0.013 18% 362,919 $143,733,726 AKO Akora Resources 0.165 18% 284 $10,106,629 BRN Brainchip Ltd 0.6 18% 16,123,212 $901,199,654 MXR Maximus Resources 0.04 18% 766,798 $10,847,896 EPX Ept Global Limited 0.035 17% 151,143 $11,609,880 CXU Cauldron Energy Ltd 0.007 17% 2,522,758 $5,589,408 SI6 SI6 Metals Limited 0.007 17% 3,549,760 $8,972,368 AKP Audio Pixels Ltd 9 15% 4,742 $228,001,225 DXB Dimerix Ltd 0.125 14% 498,397 $35,296,103 LSA Lachlan Star Ltd 0.0125 14% 590,338 $14,509,140 ADG Adelong Gold Limited 0.009 13% 230,908 $4,270,578 GMN Gold Mountain Ltd 0.0045 13% 249,999 $7,879,730 NWM Norwest Minerals 0.037 12% 830,008 $7,329,544 360 Life360 Inc 5.365 12% 772,545 $937,496,544 AII Almonty Industries 0.87 12% 12,200 $15,749,823
In Small Caps today, an early leader this morning was Noble Helium (ASX:NHE), which has shown a significant spike in interest on news that seismic exploration in Tanzania has discovered a potential Birthday Grade helium deposit at its Rukwa Basin project, and is up more than 25% for the week.
Leading the ladder, however, is Roolife Group (ASX:RLG), up a smashing 125% (and counting…) on news that it has secured stocking and distribution for Remedy Drinks into Alibaba’s 300 high-tech Freshippo supermarkets and stores in China.
And lastly for the morning, BrainChip (ASX:BRN) has soared 17.6% on news of the launch of the company’s second-generation Akida platform, which the company says “drives extremely efficient and intelligent edge devices for the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) solutions and services market”.
Brainchip also says its “hyper-efficient, yet powerful neural processing system, architected for embedded Edge AI applications, now adds efficient 8-bit processing to go with advanced capabilities such as time domain convolutions and vision transformer acceleration, for an unprecedented level of performance in sub-watt devices, taking them from perception towards cognition”.
I know most of those words, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in that order before – but if it means we’re on the cusp of sentient dishwashers, what a time to be alive.
ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS
Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for March 6 [intraday]:
Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:
Code Company Price % Volume Market Cap CCE Carnegie Cln Energy 0.001 -50% 250,000 $31,285,147 SIH Sihayo Gold Limited 0.001 -50% 1,445,000 $12,204,256 MBX My Foodie Box 0.02 -44% 285,650 $1,329,056 RHY Rhythm Biosciences 0.535 -44% 3,116,868 $208,480,885 AQX Alice Queen Ltd 0.001 -33% 403,272 $3,795,431 CLZ Classic Min Ltd 0.002 -33% 1,606,976 $3,777,791 SSH Sshgroupltd 0.14 -26% 22,153 $8,209,160 RBR RBR Group Ltd 0.003 -25% 1,481,897 $5,626,952 CLU Cluey Ltd 0.175 -22% 12,590 $31,113,052 AUK Aumake Limited 0.004 -20% 96,389 $4,372,235 MMI Metro Mining Ltd 0.008 -20% 90,043,921 $43,638,296 MTL Mantle Minerals Ltd 0.002 -20% 1,600,000 $13,364,013 ICG Inca Minerals Ltd 0.023 -18% 4,884,885 $13,519,894 AMD Arrow Minerals 0.005 -17% 28,911 $17,449,863 DTR Dateline Resources 0.021 -16% 2,636,821 $14,129,613 NME Nex Metals Explorat 0.017 -15% 13,043 $5,576,380 WEC White Energy Company 0.145 -15% 19,668 $6,896,779 AJQ Armour Energy Ltd 0.006 -14% 498,743 $16,323,987 RML Resolution Minerals 0.006 -14% 100,000 $7,558,223 HPC Thehydration 0.069 -14% 111,204 $11,701,805 HXG Hexagon Energy 0.014 -13% 144,000 $8,206,654 HXL Hexima 0.014 -13% 20,000 $2,672,634 ASW Advanced Share Ltd 0.15 -12% 2,040 $32,879,322 ANR Anatara Ls Ltd 0.03 -12% 4,350 $4,077,415 RCW Rightcrowd 0.03 -12% 55,000 $8,916,883
