ASX Small Caps Lunch Wrap: Who else is feeling a teensy bit crushed this morning?

If you’ve ever been invited to what should be an absolute cracker of a party, and it’s turned out to be more boring than An Evening with Andrea Bocelli, then you’re not alone.*

Yesterday, New York City’s somewhat-erratic Mayor, Eric Adams, staged an event that – on paper – reads like it should have been face-meltingly fun.

“100 dirt bikes. 1 Bulldozer. 1 Man. Winner Takes All” was the gist of the invite.

So, a bunch of folks turned up to watch the spectacular show, where more than 100 confiscated motorcycles and ATVs were lined up to be crushed (TO DEATH!) by a bulldozer.

How freakin’ awesome is that?!?

When Mr Mayor started the event by waving a chequered flag (the kind usually used at the end of a race), some slack-jawed Teamster-type hit the loud pedal and really slowly and rumbled over the assembled machines, in a manner best described as painfully methodical.

It was an enormous, Fyre Festival-level letdown. But even still, there’s a strange quality to the footage that makes it almost meditative.

And here, for your edification (and, possibly, calming form of lunchtime relaxation) is the footage, courtesy of the good people at Reuters.

The thing about Mayor Adams is that he’s no stranger to stunts that don’t quite go the way he imagined they might.

In January this year, he famously proclaimed that New York City would become the international hub for cryptocurrency – and said he’d be taking his pay cheque in Bitcoin.

He reportedly kept his promise, logging onto Coinbase and tipping his entire month’s pay into Bitcoin and Ethereum, promptly losing 10% of it in less than 24 hours, when the price crashed.

But this latest stunt isn’t all bad news – the unregistered dirt bikes and ATVs that were destroyed had been confiscated from roving packs of yahoos that terrorise the streets of Manhattan on a regular basis.

How these high-speed wheelie machines were caught and sentenced to die remains unclear, as the NYPD says it’s far too dangerous to go chasing them through the streets. Apparently, the city’s $5.4 billion dollar police budget doesn’t include a line item for cartoonishly large fishing nets to haul them in.

*Ed: Before we learn anything fiscal, here’s Mr Bocelli’s greatest ever performance:

TO MARKETS

Speaking of feeling flat… the ASX 200 this morning done very little, heading into lunch time with a slight rise of around 0.4%.

There were some market sectors performing really well, most notably Real Estate (+2.5%) and Health Care (+2.1%).

However, it was hard to get the benchmark too high up the ladder, with Materials (-2.5%) and Energy (-2.2%) getting dragged along like dead donkeys through the desert as we crept towards the oasis of lunch.

There were some big individual moves around the place, though – sadly, not all of them good.

In a horror start for what had looked like a promising IPO, Leo Lithium (ASX:LLL) roared into life at 11am this morning, and it didn’t go so well, with the newbie dropping well below its initial $0.70 price, bouncing around a bit and trundling towards lunch ~18.0% down.

It’s an indication of a broader issue with lithium in general, and there’s more detail on that – plus other IPO news – right here from Reuben.

At the big money end of the park, there were a couple more Bad Thursday Mornings, including Champion Iron (ASX:CIA), which sank ~7.0% after a dividend update.

Three others who had shockers yesterday have shareholders sprouting even more grey hairs today: Lake Resources (ASX:LKE), Stanmore Resources (ASX:SMR) and Sayona Mining (ASX:SYA) continued to decline, falling ~18.0%, ~8.0% and ~7.5% before the wrappers were even off the sandwiches.

It wasn’t all bad news, of course – as anyone holding PayGroup (ASX:PYG) shares will tell you. This morning’s announcement of a spectacularly generous buyout by global payroll company Deel, Inc. and Deel Australia Holdings, offering $1 a share – a $174% premium to the last closing price.

Also on the rise was Insurance Australia Group (ASX:IAG), which has had a couple of solid days this week, adding more than 5.0% in morning trade.

Around the world, and Wall Street had a quiet night, with the Dow and Nasdaq down 0.15% apiece. The S&P was marginally less dour, falling 0.13%.

Asian markets are performing about as well as the ASX today, with the Nikkei basically flat, Shanghai up 0.11% and Hong Kong standing out from the pack, up 0.43%

In Commodities, things are grim. Or great. Depends on your outlook, really. Anyway – oil has fallen ~3.0%, gas is down 1.41%, gold is slightly lower, down 0.2% and copper has dropped 2.2%.

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for June 23 [intraday]:

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Among the small cap winners now, and we’ve already mentioned PyGroup’s massive PayDay – but there’s another small cap winner that is seriously newsworthy.

The tech heads at archTIS (ASX:AR9) have inked a juicy $7 million defence contract to let heavily-armed people do super-secret-squirrel stuff with its field deployable Multi-Level Security platform document-sharing platform Kojensi.

There’s a bit more to the story, obviously, but Emma Davies has it covered off here.

Also outside of the micro-money players, Aims Property Security Fund (ASX:APW) has responded to a takeover bid t $1.25 from AIMS Investment Group Holdings by asking shareholders to “take no action”. Someone’s missed the memo, though, and its price has shot up 18%.

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for June 22 [intraday]:

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