Australian markets have opened with a 0.2% dip this morning, despite Wall Street doin’ its thang with a reasonable degree of competency overnight.

By lunchtime, despite the best efforts of paramedics, the benchmark remained down by about 0.5%.

We’re not sure who it was that started the ball rolling on this morning’s early dip, but – as with most days around here – once someone starts a tumble then everyone gets on board with it and before too long, we’re all essentially passengers as mob mentality takes over.

Speaking of which (what a segue that was), our news this morning comes from a California beach, where a shocking incident has left an elderly corgi with terrible injuries.

Just how shocking is this incident? Well… remember when you found out that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father? Way more shocking than that.

Or that time Lady Gaga turned up at some fancy music awards show dressed in an outfit made entirely out of dying Smurfs? A bit less shocking than that one.

Anyway, the story goes like this: A woman – let’s call her Kathrin Burleson, because that’s her name and it’s the polite thing to do – was walking her beloved elderly corgi “Emma” along Trinidad State Beach, in a remote part of northern California.

Emma is a fine upstanding member of the canine community, who volunteers her time as a support animal, visiting lonely old people who live in a nursing home and have nothing else to look forward to in their lives except the cold embrace of death.

So you can imagine Emma – and her owner’s – surprise when they were set upon by a pack of 10 vicious, ravenous poodles. Not the little frou-frou “I live in a handbag!” poodles, either.

No… these were the big kind – the kind you see and go “I had no idea they even made poodles that big! That’s amazing!”. Yeah. Those poodles.

The scene was much like the Battle of Fishguard on February 22, 1797, when 1,400 highly-agitated French soldiers landed on British soil.

(For those of you playing at home, that French invasion lasted less than two days before … you guessed it … the French surrendered. Vive Les Lâches, and all that.)

But it should come as no surprise that poor little Emma, cursed to go through life with stubby little legs because who needs to be able to walk upstairs anyway, was essentially defenceless against this unwarranted Gallic aggression.

Ms Burleson tried her best to save her, leaping into the fray to protect her 13-year-old stumpy-legged beast – until she, too, was bitten savagely on the finger… BY THE OWNER OF THE POODLES.

Emma was eventually saved by another stranger who was (presumably) a bit taller than everyone else, and managed to scoop up the corgi and hoist her aloft.

The owner of the poodles eventually explained that they thought they were biting one of their own dogs in the melee.

Emma was treated for some terrible injuries, requiring lots of stitches, but is expected to make a full recovery.

From all of this we have managed to learn three very important things, though.

  1. You can’t rely on a corgi in a fight, because they’re useless against anything taller than five inches.
  2. People who own 10 poodles at once are, most likely, completely unhinged and highly dangerous.
  3. Annnd we should all be on high alert, as it seems France has finally managed to export something that doesn’t surrender about 15 seconds after trouble breaks out.

Now, speaking of pack animals doing crazy things, let’s take a look at the market to see who’s behaving like wild animals this morning.

TO MARKETS

The ASX 200, as mentioned, opened with a 0.2% dip this morning, struggled like a fighter in a poorly-applied arm bar and then sagged again to be -0.3% as we tumbled into the lunch break.

Across the sectors, and it’s an even split today, with five sectors up and Energy leading the charge at +1.43%, and Utilities absolutely flat on 0.00.

That leaves is with five sectors down – including Financials (-1.32%) and Consumer Discretionary (-1.29%) in the kind of determined race to the bottom you’d normally only see in certain inner-city nightclubs.

There are a few big players making waves today, including Nufarm (ASX:NUF), which says it’s had quite a good year and reports that its underlying EBITDA is up 24% to $447 million on revenue of $3.8 billion, 17% higher against the prior comparative period. It’s up 6.3% this morning.

Meanwhile, Sandfire Resources has had a banger this morning as well, up 6.7% on news that it has decided to withdraw completely from the farm-in agreement it had with Enterprise Metals (ASX: ENT) at the latter’s Doolgunna copper-gold project in WA.

Losing money in a burst of bright golden irony is Aristocrat Leisure (ASX:ALL), which fell 5.0% this morning after releasing its annual results, showing a jaw-dropping $5.6bn in revenue, the majority of which comes from its Pixel United mobile gaming division, which has put pokies in the pockets of tens of millions of people around the world.

‘Nuff said.

NOT THE ASX

In the US, Wall Street had a bit of a boogie on its way to a modest rise across the board, after a busy day in New York with economics data and earnings.

Earliest Eddy Ever Morning reports that among all the numbers, Walmart’s Q3 results provided optimism as its store sales grew 8.2% in the quarter, while ecommerce sales increased 16%. Walmart’s share price also jumped 7% as it raised its full-year outlook.

All the major US indices closed the day higher, the S&P 500 by 0.87%, the Nasdaq by 1.45% and the Dow Jones by 0.17%.

In Asia, the news this morning is running in the same direction as our local markets, as Japan’s Nikkei sank by 0.71% into a rich pork-bone broth, settling like moist slices of roast pork chashu onto a bed of firm egg noodles garnished with black sesame, seaweed, pickled ginger and a lightly boiled egg and now I am STARVING.

Hong Kong has also dipped this morning, down 0.99% on the realisation that Japanese chashu ramen is the far superior noodle soup by about a million miles and I’ll fight anyone who says different, while Shanghai has edged down a mere 0.16%, just to stay out of everyone’s way.

In Crypto, pretend-money lender BlockFi is reportedly about to go bust, as the nuclear FTX fallout keeps raining down on the broader crypto landscape, but the majors like BTC and ETH have seen some value relief overnight.

As always, Rob “I’m safe in my bunker, right?” Badman has all the news you need to read in Mooners and Shakers.

ASX SMALL CAP LEADERS

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In Small Caps news, it looks like there’s a Trouble at the Old Mill for Bass Oil (ASX:BAS) after someone – we don’t know who – looks to have made the fattest of fat finger mistakes on its discovery announcement this morning.

Bass Oil informed the market that it’s found, and had independently confirmed, an in-place oil estimate totalling “845 billion barrels”, which would (if correct) be roughly four times the size of the entire resource that the Saudis are camped on top of.

Within seconds, Bass was trading a lot higher, and broke through $0.09 per share (+153%) before somebody – we don’t know who – realised what a colossal overstatement it was and (we assume) checked the maths. The pause button was pressed at 11:08am.

Of course, it’s meant to be 845 million-with-an-M barrels – but that’s still a considerably big in-place estimate for a small explorer to get into. BAS issued a correction just before 12:00pm, and it’ll be worth keeping an eye on its price to see where it lands once the dust has settled.

Meanwhile, it’s a red-letter day for Rectifier Technologies (ASX:RFT), after it announced that it had received a US$22 million order from i-charging mobilidade elétrica for a customized version of the RT22 charger module for i-charging’s blueberry range of DC Fast Charger.

It is a chunky shot of revenue in the arm of RFT – A$32.6 million into a $48 million market cap firm is no small boost, and Rectifier’s trading 42.8% higher this morning as a result.

The last time RFT hit a massive leap like this was on similar news in February 2022, when Tritium snapped up about US$20 million worth of 35kW high-voltage and high-efficiency modular power supply units for high-powered DC electric vehicle charging.

Annnnd, just as we’re about to hit ‘GO!’ on our lunch wrap today, WA1 Resources (ASX:WA1) dropped news that it’s found another chonky Niobium-REE mineralised carbonatite system at West Arunta.

It’s in a trading suspension at the moment, but the is zero doubt that this discovery will send WA1 through the roof again. At the end of October, it moved from $0.13 to around $2.00 on its first hit at the project… and word on the street is that this news is going to send it right over the top again.

We’ll have more to say about it later in the day, once we know the final score.

 

ASX SMALL CAP LAGGARDS

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