Australia’s markets have opened lower today, down around 1.5% at lunchtime following another sharp drop on Wall Street on Friday that set the tone for more bitter disappointment today.

But as disappointed as Australian investors are today, it’s unlikely to be anywhere near as disappointed as the people of Mexico are in their president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, took to Twitter over the weekend to post a photo of something he quite earnestly believes is an “aluxe”, a mystical elf-like spirit from Mayan folklore.

 

 

For those of you whose Spanish is a little rusty, that says: “I share two photos of our supervision of the Mayan Train works: one, taken by an engineer three days ago, apparently from an aluxe; another, by Diego Prieto of a splendid pre-Hispanic sculpture in Ek Balam. Everything is mystical.”

It’s no secret that Mexico is not travelling very well at the moment – rampant poverty, marauding drug cartels and a daily body count that makes John Wick look like St Francis of Assisi have combined to make it a deeply unpleasant place in many respects.

So it’s gotta feel bad when your president seems convinced that some rando rail worker in the middle of nowhere has managed to snap a blurry photo of a South American smurf stuck in a tree – and decides to very publicly admit that he’s 100% lost his mind by posting about it on las sociales.

It’s gotta feel even worse when Twitter does what it does best, quietly shouting at him that he’s an idiot because the photo is a) from 2021, and b) was taken by a wildlife photographer in the in the city of Singkawang, Indonesia.

But all hope has to be lost when the tweet is still live on Twitter, more than 24 hours since it was posted, since El Presidente apparently hasn’t quite figured out how to delete stuff yet.

 

TO MARKETS

With the market kicking off the week with a bruising tumble down the stairs, investors are bracing for another afternoon of licking their wounds.

By mid-morning, the benchmark was down nearly 1.4%, with every sector showing losses ranging from -0.11% for Energy and -0.13 for Utilities, all the way down the ladder where Real Estate (-1.92%) and Materials (-2.92%) are busy lurking like bog trolls in a basement, stinking the place up.

Materials in particular has had a shocking run since Australia Day, and this morning’s drop-off takes it to a woeful -9.22% over the past month.

The best that the top end of town could muster this morning was a 5.0% lift by nearly-$1-billion market capper Neuren Pharmaceuticals (ASX:NEU), after releasing its full-year results and letting the market know that the company has made “substantial progress”, leaving it “very well placed for the transforming catalysts that have been anticipated to crystallise in 2023”.

The Ladder of Losers, however, is a forest of big ticket miners today, though – hardly a shock with the Materials sector sinking as low as it has – with Pilbara (ASX:PLS), MinRes (ASX:MIN) and Sandfire (ASX:SFR) among those posting losses between 5.7% and 6.6% today.

Fortescue (ASX:FMG) is also taking a hiding today, down 7.5% and groaning under the combined weight of poor sector performance and going ex-div today.

 

NOT THE ASX

US markets plunged again on Friday, because of all the usual reasons that I’m sure you’re as sick of reading about as we are of writing about them.

But, in the interests of keeping everyone up to date, Earlybird Eddy Sunarto reports that the reason Wall Street got spooked was the release of the US Fed’s preferred inflation reading, the PCE, which came in “scorching hot” and prompted a brand new veneer of inflation panic to the already unpleasantly ugly sentiment among US investors.

It also prompted comment from the White House, which said: “Today’s report shows we have made progress on inflation, but we have more work to do.”

So it’s no surprise then that we got more hawkish Fedspeak following the PCE results, and other data that showed US consumer spending increasing by the most in nearly two years in January amid a surge in wage gains.

A handful of US companies dropped earnings on Friday, including Block Inc, which  rose 4% after it reported Q4 financial results that saw profit and revenue top expectations.

Afterpay contributed $196m in gross profit to Block’s bottom line, up from $150 million in the previous quarter.

Boeing closed 5% lower after the airline manufacturer said it paused deliveries of 787 Dreamliner jets due to documentation issues.

In tech news, Meta has launched its own entrant in the AI race with a LLama, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI.

The bad news for Meta is that it’s been scientifically proven that any time anything even remotely intelligent happens on its platform, it is immediately killed off like a pathogen by the relentless swarm of dumb for which it is justifiably famous.

So it’s a safe bet that LLama AI is gonna be dumber and deader than a drowned dromedary in a matter of weeks.

In Asian market news, Japan’s Nikkei has dipped 0.3% this morning on news that fans of Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World – a popular anime series featuring “Roxanne”, a wolf-girl with implausibly large bosoms – are now able to indulge in an immersive multi-sensory experience to bring them closer to the character than ever before.

The anime’s publisher, Kadokawa, has released a body pillow and accompanying ASMR audio data bundle called A Night Spent with Roxanne, so pimply Western perverts can relax with the their head resting on the wolf-girl’s lap, while listening to her perform such classics as “ear puff puff, ear cleaning, oil massage, and close-contact hair washing”.

The bundle also includes the red-hot favourite “in bed together”, which I’m going to assume consists of 45 minutes of sleepy remonstrations on the topic of sexual inadequacy, followed by eight hours severe respiratory distress brought on by the combined weight of two grossly enlarged breasts and a desperate man on her chest.

The audio bundle costs US$10.25 for the initial purchase – and for the low, low price of just US$1,000, users can purchase the ability to make it stop.

In China, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng has dipped 0.21% in early trade, while Shanghai’s flatter than an illegally-fished flounder as the markets there get warmed up for the day.

In crypto, Bitcoin saw something of a late-weekend rally yesterday, after SEC Chairman and semi-professional Disappointed Thumb impersonator Gary Gensler decided to go on another rant about how every cryptocurrency (with the exception of Bitcoin) is a security.

 

 

The bad news for Gary (and good news for crypto boffins) is this:

 

 

There’s more news from the world of crypto, and Rob “The Sunday Bouncer” Badman has all the deets over at Mooners and Shakers.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for February 27 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

 

Leading the way for Small Caps this morning is 4DS Memory (ASX:4DS), which has climbed 33.3% following an announcement that it’s had a turnaround in fortunes since letting the market know last October that testing its tech had gone somewhat poorly.

The good news for 4DS is that the team’s been hard at work since then and has managed to achieve cell operation in a megabit memory array utilising improved test capabilities.

“This allows further exploration of optimised programming conditions with the access transistors and write circuitry of imec’s megabit memory platform,” 4DS says, which indicates that the 4DS Interface Switching ReRAM cells are potentially more likely to be compatible with imec’s megabit memory platform, de-risking a fresh round of testing due to produce results in late Q2 2023.

Meanwhile, Security Matters (ASX:SMX) has gone soaring today, up 45% on no news since the company revealed that it received overwhelming support from shareholders for a capital reduction which would see all of its issued shares cancelled.

And lastly for this morning, Avita Medical (ASX:AVH) has continued its climb of recent days, putting on another 16.7% to take its boost since the beginning of 2023 to a very tidy 86.7%

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for February 27 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

Read MoreCopperCryptocurrencyGoldLithiumTech

Featured Companies

You might be interested in