Astronaut Glenn McGuinness, pictured during a bold attempt to run away from his tax obliagtions on Earth after getting "accidentally" stranded on the moon. Pic via Getty Images.
News
Local markets are largely flat this morning, with the overarching narrative pretty similar to yesterday’s tune: Miners are making just enough gains to offset the growing pudgy softness of the rest of the market.
In particular, it’s the goldies that are doing pretty well this morning, with big names like Newmont Goldcorp Corporation (ASX:NEM), De Grey Mining (ASX:DEG) and Perseus Mining (ASX:PRU) piling on some very handy gains, while the rest of the market bumbles around doing not very much.
I’ll get into the details of all that shortly, but first to some exciting space news – the Australian Space Agency has opened up a poll to let the public help decide the name of the first all-Aussie lunar rover.
The rover – which looks a lot like a remote-controlled recycling bin that could be equally at home on the moon as it would being driven around a backyard barbecue, chock-full of ice and cold tinnies – has an important job to do.
The plan: collect soil from the surface of the moon, and use some kinda high-tech wizardry to break it down on-site, and see if anything in it can be turned into oxygen.
Thankfully, the people at the ASA are smart enough to realise that asking the public to name stuff is fraught with obvious danger.
Who could ever forget how endlessly amusing the whole Boaty McBoatface thing was, way back in 2016, an actual PR nightmare that left the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council torn over acquiescing to the will of the British public.
Go ahead with the clearly ridiculous name, or simply push past it and go with the name that came second – RRS Poppy-Mai, in honour of a 16-month-old girl with incurable cancer. Yikes.
Seven years later, that child is long-departed – she “married her dad” and then passed away about a month after the poll – the boat’s named after Sir David Attenborough and people learnt their lesson.
Most people, anyway. This story can’t possibly be written without a nod to former NSW transport minister Andrew Constance, who ran a poll to name a new Sydney ferry.
Of course, because people are dumb, we believed Constance when he informed us all that the public had voted Boaty McBoatface by an overwhelming majority.
Because Constance is dumber, he then spun an outrageous lie that his own knee-slappingly hilarious name – Ferry McFerryface – was the second most popular, and so that’s what he was naming the vessel.
Five years later, Constance is out of a job, and the ferry is named after the founder of Clean Up Australia and 1994 Australian of the Year, Ian Kiernan.
Which is why it’s not an open poll to name the Aussie lunar rover – instead, there are four pre-approved names to choose from, and they are predictably mostly complete rubbish.
The choices are Coolamon, Kakirra, Mateship, and Roo-ver – presumably Rover McRoverface isn’t on the list, thanks to a last-minute injunction from formerly relevant but now strangely reclusive Channel 10 star Rove McManus.
McManus knows only too well the pain of letting the public name things – a public poll to name himself back in 2003 ended with him being named after his own arse.
At this juncture, I’ll refrain from individually nit-picking each of the official Aussie Rover naming options, on the basis that I don’t feel like getting cancelled today – but the fact that a machine, purpose built to go to the moon to dig stuff isn’t going to be called The Little Aussie Digger is an absolute travesty.
For what it’s worth, the poll is open and you can go here to cast your vote.
So, anyway… the ASX 200 is flatter than a primary school choir today, despite the goldies doing some stellar work as the price of shiny stuff continues to nudge US$2,000 an ounce.
With the benchmark ASX 200 needle barely moving above zero today, the XGD All Ords Gold index is outperforming the market in a very tidy fashion, up more than 1.2% mid-morning, but settling just below 1.0% as we trundle towards pie o’clock.
Utilities is actually the market-leading sector this morning – the Materials sector as a whole is being held back by poor performances across a gaggle of lithium players today.
Meanwhile the local InfoTech sector is taking a surprisingly solid bath, considering the barnstorming Nvidia earnings report that landed this morning in the US.
It’s leading the losses, with the Telcos and Real Estate keeping it company on the red side of the ledger.
Up the top end of town, there aren’t many of the big names making stellar gains today, but there’s one name on the wrong side of the news this morning, and that’s Life360 (ASX:360).
The Orwellian family-monitoring platform maker has been sliding gracelessly into the sea for the past week, after delivering its earnings report to the market on 15 November showing that the company is doing something wrong.
Life360 has managed to turn a YoY profit increase of 38% to $78.6 million, with core Life360 Subscription revenue of $50.6 million (up 50% YoY) making up the bulk of that, into a Q323 Net Loss of $6.5 million.
Shareholders have since been making a fairly steady beeline for the exits, and as it stands, Life360 has dumped 18.2% of its pre-earnings value, falling from $8.88 to $7.265 per share.
The US market was on tenterhooks overnight, with investors waiting breathlessly for the Big Reveal from chipmaker Nvidia, and the US$1.2 trillion dollar company dropped a massive earnings report on Wall Street after the market there was closed.
The bullet points are:
Any way you slice it, it’s a massive result – but even still, there are investor concerns around whether it’s sustainable, especially considering that the company is scrambling to find a way back into the Chinese market, which it’s currently locked out of due to trade restrictions on AI chips.
Looking more broadly, Wall Street ended the session down after the S&P 500 fell by -0.2%, the blue chips Dow Jones index was down by -0.18%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq slipped by -0.59%.
The downward pressure came mostly from the release of the minutes from the latest US Fed meeting, which showed that board members have not shut the door on another rate hike.
During the meeting, FOMC officials agreed that further rate hikes would be appropriate if data suggested progress toward the 2% inflation was insufficient.
AI-focused stock Symbotic surged 40% on after reporting its first profit since going public in June 2022.
Elon Musk’s X is suing media watchdog Media Matters after the non-profit said that ads on X often appear alongside antisemitic content.
Musk and the team at X say they have tried (and failed) to replicate the claims made by Media Matters, and – it seems – have called in some law enforcement back-up, in the form of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.
Fraud has both civil & criminal penalties pic.twitter.com/BdC5Zfr1XM
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2023
And the OpenAI saga continues as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hinted he was open to Sam Altman rejoining the ChatGPT maker.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the Nikkei is up 0.48% despite news that North Korea reckons it’s managed to successfully launch a “spy satellite” and put it into stable orbit.
It seems that the Japanese population is less concerned about a tinfoil-lined shoebox with a 1996 Logitech webcam taped to the side hurtling through space above their heads than I thought they would be.
Meanwhile, Shanghai markets are 0.10% lower, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng is flat as a tack in early trade.
Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for 22 November [intraday]:
Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:
Code Company Price % Volume Market Cap ALM Alma Metals Ltd 0.011 38% 3,167,569 $8,912,006 BP8 Bph Global Ltd 0.002 33% 1,500,000 $2,423,345 DXN DXN Limited 0.002 33% 5,000,045 $2,585,010 BDG Black Dragon Gold 0.032 28% 29,351 $5,016,751 4DX 4Dmedical Limited 0.845 26% 3,213,876 $232,132,682 BMR Ballymore Resources 0.125 25% 2,198 $14,619,726 ASP Aspermont Limited 0.01 25% 46,236 $19,510,110 LSR Lodestar Minerals 0.005 25% 1,000 $8,093,589 RNX Renegade Exploration 0.01 25% 1,438,500 $7,624,990 MRR Minrex Resources Ltd 0.026 24% 7,800,705 $22,782,218 AUE Aurumresources 0.235 24% 145,628 $6,935,000 FRS Forrestaniaresources 0.033 22% 3,668,512 $4,368,215 WSR Westar Resources 0.023 21% 1,467,212 $3,521,793 NC6 Nanollose Limited 0.03 20% 19,000 $3,722,159 ESR Estrella Res Ltd 0.006 20% 134,174 $8,795,359 FME Future Metals NL 0.048 20% 1,467,896 $16,528,161 SFG Seafarms Group Ltd 0.006 20% 637,333 $24,182,996 STK Strickland Metals 0.195 18% 9,346,015 $268,743,770 C1X Cosmosexploration 0.145 16% 142,032 $5,934,375 BIT Biotron Limited 0.105 15% 4,571,200 $82,106,502 TOY Toys R Us 0.015 15% 1,385,165 $12,772,026 GNM Great Northern 0.023 15% 266,867 $3,092,582 C29 C29Metalslimited 0.086 15% 70,426 $4,047,518 IVX Invion Ltd 0.008 14% 3,618,239 $44,951,425 NTM Nt Minerals Limited 0.008 14% 45,522 $6,019,320
Leading the Small Caps this morning is Alma Metals (ASX:ALM), which has a very well-timed announcement of some juicy copper-molybdenum mineralisation at its Briggs copper project in Central Queensland.
Assays from recent exploration have returned intercepts such as 188.5m @ 0.30g/t cu and 46ppm Mo from 8.5m, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
As it stands, Alma carries 30% of the Briggs project and can earn up to a 70% interest from owner Canterbury Resources (ASX:CBY) through a staged earn-in.
Weirdly, though, Canterbury’s trading flat so far today. Go figure.
BPH Global (ASX:BP8) is second on the list this morning, in the wake of an AGM that saw board member Huang Qing Gu ousted, leaving room for Mathew Leonard to be appointed as managing director.
And in third place is data centre operator DXN (ASX:DXN), up handily this morning on news that it is planning to decamp from its Sydney data centre, in a bid to provide savings of $1.4m in cash costs per year in lease liabilities over the remaining nine years of the lease.
The company has also signed binding commitments for equity placements to raise A$2.1m to facilitate the exit from the Sydney lease, repay some existing liabilities, and provide working capital for growth of its modular data centre division.
Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for 22 November [intraday]:
Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:
Code Company Price % Volume Market Cap ATH Alterity Therap Ltd 0.004 -43% 22,873,768 $17,079,283 AMD Arrow Minerals 0.001 -33% 10,400,000 $4,535,648 HLS Healius 1.2 -29% 10,263,349 $967,993,686 PPS Praemium Limited 0.415 -28% 8,559,840 $289,479,501 KNM Kneomedia Limited 0.003 -25% 450,000 $6,019,141 YPB YPB Group Ltd 0.0015 -25% 200,000 $1,560,923 REM Remsensetechnologies 0.03 -25% 335,000 $4,227,334 XGL Xamble Group Limited 0.056 -20% 15,000 $20,690,937 1TT Thrive Tribe Tech 0.016 -20% 58,023 $5,932,430 IEC Intra Energy Corp 0.004 -20% 3,566,457 $8,303,908 RGS Regeneus Ltd 0.004 -20% 1,898,110 $1,532,185 SP8 Streamplay Studio 0.008 -20% 152,597 $11,506,238 OAK Oakridge 0.062 -17% 8,037 $1,319,956 WRK Wrkr Ltd 0.025 -17% 80,000 $38,147,671 ME1 Melodiol Glb Health 0.0025 -17% 10,019,363 $12,575,830 ADX ADX Energy Ltd 0.096 -17% 1,474,665 $41,761,021 MGT Magnetite Mines 0.355 -14% 257,734 $31,857,495 1MC Morella Corporation 0.006 -14% 3,766,970 $43,145,149 VRC Volt Resources Ltd 0.006 -14% 7,711,111 $28,507,967 BWF Blackwall Limited 0.45 -13% 17,538 $35,407,589 REZ Resourc & En Grp Ltd 0.013 -13% 100,000 $7,497,087 PNT Panthermetalsltd 0.06 -13% 30,000 $4,219,350 AVE Avecho Biotech Ltd 0.0035 -13% 1,000,000 $10,793,168 NAE New Age Exploration 0.007 -13% 2,787,592 $14,351,191 CKA Cokal Ltd 0.097 -12% 87,422 $118,684,388
Get the latest Stockhead news delivered free to your inbox.
