Usually our Lunch Wrap headline is something of a rhetorical question, but today, we are genuinely curious to find an answer.

Someone crashed a rocket into the moon last year – for real – and like a cadre of whistling innocents in a fart-blasted elevator, no one seems willing to  own up to being the culprit.

And it’s not a little rocket, either. It’s a thumping great big thing with “a mass at each end” – so it’s left not one, but two new 25m wide craters on Bert Newton’s face, as he smiles down upon us from TV Heaven.

NASA scientists are reportedly “baffled” – which is not a term you want to hear coming from a collection of some of the most-smartest scienticians in the whole wide world.

So baffled, in fact, that the agency turned to social media, posting what could well be the world’s most expensive “Guys! WTF?!?” image ever produced. #LOL #BurningMoney.

 

 

What makes this weird is that getting very large things into space is not something that people can do without being noticed.

So it’s unlikely to have come from a shonky backyard operator, ruling out the dinky Blue Origin penis compensation thing, and whatever contraption it was that carried the ambulatory rictus grin who runs Virgin into not-really-space.

And neither of the really big names in the space business are in any position to be shooting stuff at the moon.

NASA hasn’t had a rocket of its own since it forced the Space Shuttle into an assisted living facility in Florida, and Russia is too busy trying to rough up Ukraine for its lunch money to be bothered with such matters. #DecadentFreeWest.

That leaves two options: Either it’s a piece of Elon Musk’s hardware gone haywire, or it’s China – and both of them deny any involvement in the matter.

So who are we to believe? A company quite famous for being able to bring its big loud burny bits back to Earth and land them on a pontoon, or… China?

Far be it from us to tell you what to think or believe, so we’ll let you make your own mind up about the undeniable fact that it was absolutely, without a doubt, 100% China. #MadeInChina #PleaseDontHackMe

 

TO MARKETS

The Australian markets have opened with a sigh and a sag this morning, following a tepid performance on Wall Street overnight. The ASX 200 benchmark is currently ~0.6% down on yesterday’s close.

Across the sectors, it’s our current batch of Usual Suspects – Energy (-1.77%) and Materials (-1.35%) and Utilities (-1.07%) – causing hip pocket headaches, only this time Financials have also come to the pity party, with a 1.50% fall.

Telcos (+0.38%) have called the ambulance, and Health Care (+0.44%) is slapping on the Band-Aids, but it might not be enough to stop investors from pulling the sheet up over the market’s face this afternoon.

It’s the little guys doing all the heavy lifting in the winning and losing department today, with all the heavyweights in hiding as the small caps dominated the volume charts – for better or worse.

Leading the losses was Cyprium Metals (ASX:CYM), which announced it wants $26 million to keep digging at its Nifty Copper Project.

The announcement went out, Cyprium came out of its trading halt and sank like a stone, losing nearly 30% of its value, despite the first $16 million of its capital raise all but in the bank already.

SciDev Limited (ASX:SDV) continued to slide into some heavy loss territory following news yesterday that CEO and MD Lewis Utting had quit, to attend to some family matters.

SciDev also issued a healthy-looking update on its financial and operational performance for the quarter ended 31 March 2022, but it wasn’t enough to stop investors following Utting out the door.

And – goddammit. Every day. Every MothMan-flippin’ day, there it is… it’s Sayona Mining (ASX:SYA) topping the volume table for the morning, this time losing ~10%.

After a few deep breaths, let’s take a look at something different – we can talk about the small cap winners after this short trip overseas.

 

Not the ASX

Looking wistfully over the oceans now, and Wall Street ended the day flatter than a primary school choir, with the S&P down 0.07%, the Nasdaq down 0.03% and the Dow adding a hopeful but not helpful 0.2%.

The big losers on Wall Street came almost exclusively from the Floating Petri Dish, sorry… Cruise Ship industry, after someone at Morgan Stanley (maybe) got a case of the squitters from a dodgy prawn buffet, and slashed Carnival Cruise’s (NYSE:CCL) price target from $13 to $7.

That $6 difference may as well have been an iceberg, sending Carnival 14.0% closer to the bottom of the sea, dragging Royal Caribbean (NYSE:RCL) (-10.2%) and Norwegian Cruise Line (NYSE:NCLH) (-9.33%) with it as collateral damage.

In Asia, it’s an oddly similar story to yesterday; Japan has dropped 0.90%, Hong Kong has dipped 0.18% and Shanghai shares have climbed 0.32%, possibly on news that China has discovered an enormous deposit of high-grade green cheese on the moon that it totally didn’t ever crash a rocket into.

To commodities, and things are looking greener than the moon cheese China is now desperate to offload. Oil is up 0.46% and gas is up 0.22%.

In precious metals, gold has climbed again, adding 0.2% to $1,822/oz, silver is up by a sliver (+0.13%) and copper has been beaten into a slim 0.05% gain.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for June 30 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

Big Little Guy winners this morning included rural and regional telco Field Solutions (ASX:FSG), which announced it has been selected as exclusive preferred supplier for enterprise Managed Desktop, Network and general IT services for Kestrel Coal on a 5-year contract term.

FSG shares came out of a trading halt this morning and jumped a gratifying 40.0% to $0.14, after dipping slightly as the lunch bell rang.

Cann Group (ASX:CAN) popped a 17% pill after the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has granted the company a GMP licence to manufacture therapeutic goods which includes GMP testing at its Mildura facility.

4D Medical (ASX:4DX) continued yesterday’s hefty surge by adding another 29% to yesterday’s 51% hike.

And MetalsTech (ASX:MTC) jumped 21% on news of its second visible gold strike in the past nine days – two rounds of huge news that investors have greeted with open arms, and wallets.

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for June 30 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin