ASX Small Caps Lunch Wrap: Who else is feeling pressure to perform today?

The “we want some grandkids” is a faded old trope, so ancient that anthropologists have been collecting crudely-carved statues of cranky-looking parents dating back to the time when Jesus rode the dinosaurs to an emphatic victory against the Flintstones. Possibly.

But anyway, this version of that tale (the grandkids one, not the blasphemy) is bonkers with a capital “WTF”. And that’s because 61-year-old Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad has taken it to a whole new level of weird, taking his son and daughter-in-law to court.

Prasad says his son’s been married for six years, and has so far failed to produce a bouncing bundle of joy for he and his wife to dote on and shower with their love, until it poops or cries and they can hand it back to someone else to handle.

To encourage a bit of ‘movement at the station’, Prasad has reportedly asked the court to help him enforce an ultimatum: Crank out a kid, or cough up some money.

And we’re not talking small potatoes, either. According to the court filing, the young couple have just 12 months to add a new branch to the family tree before they’re hit with an eye-watering $950,000 (50 million Rupee) fine.

There’s some unfathomably difficult mental gymnastics involved in the back-end of this tale, but the upshot is a potentially life-crippling lawsuit if the stork fails to deliver… just the ticket to trigger the kind of performance anxiety that’s guaranteed to end any shot at hitting a deadline in the baby-making department.

Speaking of deadlines, here’s a quick look at what’s been happening on the markets this morning.

TO MARKETS

What a glorious feeling it is, the day after everyone stops taking their crazy pills and cooler heads are allowed to prevail – which saw Aussie markets open this morning without feeling the need to let the street run red with blood (or ink – it was hard to tell).

The ASX 200 dropped a relatively, and mercifully, small 0.2%, with the benchmark falling a little deeper into the red, pushed lower almost immediately following the Fair Work Commission’s delivery of an early win for the Albanese government, which arrived in the form of a ~5% pay bump for more than 2 million Australian workers.

Energy and Health Care were the major sectors moonlighting as millstones around the market’s neck this morning, each dropping more than 1.0% before lunch, with small gains across Consumer Staples and Financials helping to turn down the heat.

Up in the heavy end of the market, Novonix Limited (ASX:NVX) took a bit of a pounding throughout the morning, dropping around 8.4%.

It was mostly movement in the cheap seats providing success stories this morning, but we’ll get to them in a bit… here at Lunch Wrap, we like to take you round the world before bringing you back down to earth, because that’s just the kind of people we are.

First though, we’re off to the United States, where Wall Street also took a welcome break from setting fire to piles of furniture in the streets to post far more modest losses.

The Dow fell furthest, down just 0.5%, with the S&P (-0.38%) and the Nasdaq (-0.18%) trailing behind. Happy days.

Closer to home, Japanese shares were also in the red, falling 0.58%.

However, Chinese and Hong Kong shares all skipped merrily into greener pastures, hand in hand with better than expected economic data for May, defying early analysis that suggested Covid would have rained pretty heavily on that parade.

In the commodities column, oil and gold went neck and neck for gains, pushing 0.278% and 0.237% increases in the lead-up to lunch, while the Aussie dollar went up against the US dollar, which is feeling the pinch ahead of a super-important US Fed meeting to decide on how ugly an upcoming interest rate rise is going to be.

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for June 15 [intraday]:

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

The day after one like we had yesterday is always a bit chaotic in places, and our small cap heroes certainly stepped up to the plate to bring in big rewards for the lucky few hundred who’d heard of some of the little guys.

Six (count ‘em… six!!) of the top 10 winners this morning were from the Basic Minerals sector, with Polarx (ASX:PXX) stacking on what looked like a chunky gain… except it’s more or less breaking even after yesterday.

Solid gains on decent volume came from Chase Mining Corporation (ASX:CML) which shot up 36% after it released a proposed issue of securities.

Lithium Plus Minerals (ASX:LPM) informed the market that the Mining Management Plan for its flagship Bynoe Lithium Project has been approved by the Northern Territory Department of Industry, Tourism and Trade, sending its price up a freakishly huge 36% as well, putting smiles on the faces of everyone who’s still got their “Loving Lithium and Loving Life” T-shirts on.

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for June 9 [intraday]:

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