ASX Small Caps Lunch Wrap: Who else is wondering what that hideous smell is?

Throughout the history of humanity, an enormous number of baffling decisions have had terrible consequences, including a couple of world wars, helium-filled passenger airship disasters, the Kardashians, and… this.

Topping today’s list of why we should probably be finding a fella called Noah and asking him to start knocking together a boat is a news release from an unlikely pairing: beauty product brand Nails.INC, and the undigestibly-unbeautiful Velveeta Cheese.

They’ve teamed to produce a nail polish that stinks of cheese – just the ticket for those nights when you want to feel a little bit pretty, while smelling like the bottom of a bag of Twisties.

This isn’t Nails.INC’s first stab at the “why on god’s green earth?” rodeo – a few years back, it launched a nail polish that tasted like KFC.

Legend has it that product was pulled from the shelves after a number of near-fatal muggings by confused cannabis enthusiasts and/or seagulls.

This latest collab obviously raises a number of questions, pretty much all of which start with the word “Why?” and end in words that you aren’t supposed to say on telly before 9.30pm.

“Velveeta is known for its rich, creamy texture and cheesy, melty goodness, so what better way to bring this to life for our fans than with something equally as rich and creamy — nail polish,” says Kelsey Rice, senior brand communications manager at the Kraft Heinz Company, trying desperately to rationalise a Thing that simply Should Not Be.

From this, we can surmise one of two things: Either someone at the Kraft Heinz PR department has a nail polish-drinking problem – or they’ve never been game enough to try consuming Velveeta.

For the uninitiated, Velveeta combines the salty flavour of a week-old sweat sock with the mouthfeel of someone else’s phlegm. But it’s spreadable, so it goes great on toast, or as a rodent-luring replacement for crack-filling plaster compound on your walls.

Technically, it’s not even cheese. It’s a cheese-like product – Cheeze-with-a-Z, at best – made from whey protein and fat by an uncaring, unfeeling machine that has about as much regard for human life as a door knob.

Anyway – if you were looking for another excuse to start looking to hitch a ride to the other side of the galaxy, it’s right there. Just make sure to take off your nail polish, so your thumb doesn’t smell like a sun-ripened stilton when you do.

TO MARKETS

Tensions were high for Australian markets this morning, after we had the weekend to digest Wall Street’s Friday Follies and did our best to put last week a long way behind us.

The ASX 200 chart looked a little like a tweaker’s ECG between breakfast and brunch, and managed to hold relatively steady – right up until about 11am, when the wheels came off and it fell to nearly 1.0% below market open.

Brunch had been looking positively peachy until Energy and Materials pulled up in a rusty old diesel ute, belching black smoke, and clearly still bummed about how the week ended in the US. Energy fell 5.0% and Materials dropped over 3.0%, and were still heading south when we were starting to squeeze the sauce onto our pies.

Utilities also took a ~2.0% hit throughout the morning, while Consumer Discretionary (+1.9%), Financials (+1.2%), Health Care (+1.4%) and Industrials (+1.2%) tried to smile through the pain.

Pointsbet (ASX:PBH) (+9.7%), Home Consortium (ASX:HMC) (+4.2%) and Harvey Norman (ASX:HVN) (+2.9%) were the top movers among the big caps for the morning, with Genesis Energy (ASX:GNE) defying the sector-wide drag, climbing a brow-furrowing ~7.0% on super-thin trade – quite possibly helped out by movements across the Ditch, but it’s still a bit of an outlier result.

Aussie investors will no doubt be waiting with bated breath for tomorrow’s speech from RBA governor Philip Lowe, in which he is expected to give markets a clearer indication of the trajectory of interest rates over the coming months.

Around the world, and Wall Street finished with a mixed bag on Friday, with the Dow short about 0.1%, the S&P up 0.22% and the Nasdaq not-exactly-leaping 1.43%.

However, radical tightening of monetary policy in the US and elsewhere has continued to weigh on markets, with Japanese shares down more than 1.0% and Korean shares falling further, past 2.0%.

Hong Kong shares fell a shade over 0.6%, and in Shanghai the market reacted with a deafening round of indifference, sitting nice and quiet after China announced it would be keeping its benchmark lending rate unchanged.

It’s all happening over at the Commodities desk, where oil prices have crashed down through the $110 per barrel mark, causing serious sell-offs through energy markets.

Natural Gas prices have also fallen, in the face of Russian chest-thumping over its provision of gas to Europe as the conflict in Ukraine threatens to go from flash-in-the-pan to Dostoyevski-esque and drag on towards winter.

Gold prices are slightly lower, down around 0.15% this morning, while the Aussie dollar had a short-lived win before settling 0.09% down against the dreenback.

Crypto kept shedding value over the course of the weekend, with Bitcoin falling below a sentiment-busting US$20,000 mark, before rebounding overnight – but the carnage across the crypto market is still causing some pretty severe discomfort.

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for June 20 [intraday]:

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This morning, it’s Culpeo Minerals (ASX:CPO) in the news again, after announcing multiple high grade copper hits at its Lana Corina project in Chile, with the standouts being:

• 49m @ 0.83% Cu and 41ppm Mo (216 to 265m) and;
• 80.87m @ 1.06% Cu and 145ppm Mo (302.13 to 383m).

That was enough to have investors piling on like footy stars in a pub fight, sending Culpeo’s price up a very handsome ~70.0% before lunch, which is not a bad morning’s work for a little miner.

Also making waves this morning was Control Bionics (ASX:CBL) reversing some of last week’s losses with a healthy ~40.0% gain, and this morning’s news of Douugh (ASX:DOU) hitting a major market compliance milestone has helped the personal finance super-app developer to climb ~23.0% today.

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for June 20 [intraday]:

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