ASX Small Caps Weekly Form Guide
Mongolian peak hour traffic can get pretty crazy. Pic: Getty Images
- From Monday’s flop to Friday’s finish, the ASX stays in the race
- Expert analyst David Franklyn chimes in with his three stock picks
- And which stocks have been ‘in the money’ this week? We’ll tell you, below
Stockhead’s end-of-week wrap covering small-cap ASX movers, news of note and expert recommendations.
The working week, ending Friday, September 19, 2025, tracked like this:
ASX 200 (XJO): -0.36%; ASX Small Ordinaries (XSO): +1.16%
The market ran like a real mixed bag of nags this week.
On Monday the ASX flopped out of the gates, but late energy sector gains pulled it back from the rail, while healthcare was the dead weight.
Rounding the turn and into Tuesday, big miners took the bit and dragged the index back into positive territory, shaking off Monday’s wobble.
A steady canter ensued on the backstretch ahead of the highly anticipated US rate call, with Droneshield stealing the show after bagging fresh contracts.
Through the far turn and onto the homestretch, on Thursday the market faltered out wide again as the Fed news sold off and Santos weighed heavy on energy, but… at least Stakk thundered along at 500% pace for the punters.
Friday: The ASX 200 picked up a tad, finishing the weekly race on a (slightly) brighter note in the slipstream of Wall Street’s record lead. Healthcare set the pace with Telix surging 7% after Citi’s blockbuster “buy” call, while Santos rebounded. The Small Ords kept momentum, sealing a tidy +1.16% weekly win.
Tips Trifecta
This week…
Argonaut’s co-head of funds management David Franklyn recommends:
Price: $3.74
MC: $1.2bn
Who are they?
The Bill Beament-led company is commissioning the Woodlawn copper-zinc mine in NSW with the project ramping up to nameplate production of 22,000tpa copper equivalent. Early works have commenced at the Sulphur Springs zinc-copper project in Western Australia which has the potential to produce 30,000tpa copper equivalent from FY28. The group also operates an underground mining business and owns the Pioneer Dome lithium project which will be progressed when market conditions improve.
The upside
Following the $180m capital raise in June 2025, Develop has a strong balance sheet with an expanding production profile and benefiting from a strong outlook for both copper and zinc. The share price is currently 19% below the June raise price.
Price: 34c
MC: $271m
Who are they?
AIC is a copper-gold producer from the Eloise mine in Queensland with target production of 13,000t copper in FY26 along with 60,00oz gold. Importantly, the group is developing its adjacent Jericho deposit and expanding its processing plant to 1.1Mtpa, which will see copper production lift to 20,000t per annum by FY28 and gold production of 9000oz.
The upside
AIC is an established and growing Australian based copper producer with a market cap of only $270m. The company is well managed, has a strong balance sheet and a growing production profile. It provides good leverage to higher future copper prices.
Price: 48c
MC: $499m
Who are they?
St Barbara’s major asset is the Simberi gold project in PNG. The Simberi Expansion Project looks enticing with a relatively high grade and low strip ratio open pit mine plan that would generate annual production of approximately 200,000oz with a capital cost of approximately $350m. The group has net available cash of about $70m and could realise additional funds from the sale of its Atlanta gold asset.
The upside
Recent company announcements suggest the company is close to a resolution of the mining lease extension and a disputed tax liability. Should these hurdles be removed then the market focus will shift to the inherent value of the Simberi Expansion Project and the stock is likely to rerate higher. St Barbara is not for the faint hearted – it is a high risk, high return proposition.
Note: The Argonaut Natural Resources Fund is a shareholder in Develop Global, AIC Mines and St Barbara.
In the Money
Robinhood, the favourite marketplace of redditors who short-squeezed Nasdaq-listed GameStop to US$80/sh (at US$25.88 it still has a price to earnings ratio close to Apple’s), is behind the big run in this ASX fintech.
Formerly known as Douugh (pronounced how Homer Simpson says d’oh, we assume), its reinvention began with the acquisition last year of Radical DBX Inc., which provided a platform to get its B2B offering Stakk into the US market.
The two-year agreement with Robinhood will see Stakk provide image capture, authentication and transaction processing capabilities for the retail stock, crypto and ETF broking app, which is launching a banking offering.
“Although the revenue Stakk will generate under this agreement is largely predicated on the success of Robinhood’s new banking offering and is therefore unknown at this time, this agreement is material to Stakk due to the size and scale of Robinhood, and their significant investment in and commitment to their new initiative,” the company said.
Shares ran a mad 600% in just five trading days, giving SKK a market cap of $56m. It reported a loss after tax of $2.46m in FY25, but saw ordinary revenues up 158% to $1.24m.
Kaolin is a versatile industrial ingredient, but few value cases for the clay material are as high as high purity alumina.
HPA is currently largely produced via an expensive and environmentally murky process that converts refined aluminium metal back to the tech product, used in batteries and LEDs.
Instead, Andromeda thinks it can use 30,000tpa of kaolin from its Great White project in South Australia as a kaolin feedstock to produce 10,000tpa of 4N HPA (99.9985% purity) based on a scoping study released to the market this week.
The project would carry capital costs of $155m and operating costs of US$3020/t, well below other methods of production currently used by Japan’s Sumitomo and Chinese refiners.
With a product margin of 85% at a ‘conservative’ price assumption of US$10,000/t, the project carries a pre-tax NPV10 of $1.48bn and post-tax $1.01bn with an IRR of 69% post-tax, payback period of 3.2 years and mine life of 24 years.
HPA demand is growing at a lithium-like 20% CAGR, leading to a potential shortfall in 2030 running 127% beyond the world’s current production capacity. For sustainability’s sake, the developer also estimates its HPA would run at 6.47t of CO2e per tonne of HPA using natural gas, 48% below the reported 12.44t CO2e of the traditional aluminium alkoxide process.
There are few hotter market plays right now than US critical minerals.
Dateline Resources, which holds a resource of just 1.1Moz and some rare earth targets but is located close to the Pentagon-sponsored Mountain Pass rare earths mine, is now worth over $1bn. Other juniors are sitting on multi-bag gains without a single ounce or tonne in resource.
Felix is playing the same theme but is arguably more advanced. Its shares have run hard this week, picking the Alaskan explorer up from a $120m market cap to close to $220m.
The announcement of high-grade drilling from its NW Array antimony target was a big trigger, along with the discovery of a 25m long stibnite vein in an area where surface samples previously graded upwards of 50% Sb.
That’s important, since Felix is aiming to get that near surface mineralisation into production sometime in Q4 2025 or Q1 2026 to provide military grade spec for the US. The metal is used in ammunition and high-quality glass – think solar panels, night vision goggles and infrared sensors.
Antimony prices charged from around US$13,000/t to US$58,000/t in the West last year after China moved to restrict exports, forcing prices up as importers sought back-channels to bring it to the States through Thailand and Mexico.
America has just one small smelter and no domestic production. It desperately wants some, putting Felix, which also has over 800,000oz of gold resources within cooee of Kinross’ large Fort Knox gold mine, in an enviable position.
At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Andromeda Metals and Felix Gold are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.
The views, information, or opinions expressed from any interviews in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.
Stockhead does not provide, endorse or otherwise assume responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.
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