• Emerging Companies (XEC) index rises on Tuesday, up over 1.2%
  • ASX 200 same, but a wee bit more
  • Lode Resources rises sharply on more than just a sliver of silver

 

Everything’s higher on Tuesday. Not by a heap, but enough to cancel the coffins and take the kids off e-bay. The RBA says a recession’s unlikely, the ASX 200 is up and small caps are smoking after Lode Resources hit the mother of all that is high-grade and silver.

So it’s ‘good night Gracie’ to seven straight days of hard fought losses for the benchmark, both indices climbing between over 1%.

Some kindly words from RBA Governor Philip Lowe may’ve helped ease some of the angst going about suggesting all these aggressive rate hikes aren’t really much to price in after all.

“I expect that next month we’ll be having the same discussion at our board meeting – 25 or 50 basis points”, the guv’nah told AMCham in Sydney this morning.

The major banks and revivified miners are among the standouts, mainly the blue chips, with volumes decidedly lower following the US market holiday on Monday.

 

TODAY’S BIGGEST SMALL CAP WINNERS

(Stocks highlighted in yellow rose after making announcements during the trading day).

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Today’s hero of the dish is Lode Resources (ASX:LDR) which this morning announced a bunch of hits including 2.9m at 1,126g/t silver eq, at its ‘Tangoa West’, part of a larger 26.7m intersection grading ~400g/t silver eq from ~300m. The share price took off in response as old hands gleamed what the assays imply.

LDR listed half way through last year touting three key digs in the mineral-rich but underexplored and not quite as famous New England Fold Belt in New South Wales, the northern little bro of the famed Lachlan Fold Belt.

Well, LDR is quickly making a name for the New England Fold after punching some lucrative holes into a number of high-priority targets at its Webbs Consol project, including several shafts with a history of high-grade silver production along a 3km strike which Reuben says, have never been drilled.

Tangoa West is 2km south of Webbs Consol ‘Main Shaft’ where drilling previously returned an intercept of 27.5m @ 468g/t silver eq from 104.6m.

Here’s a pic – with Tangoa West a good deal away from the strikes enjoyed at Lucky Lucy North.

Webbs Consol Silver-Base Metals Project – Phase I Drill Results.

LDR managing director Ted Leschke said the high-grade silver-base metal discovery at Tangoa West was super exciting, not least because it extends the high-grade Webbs Consol mineral system to 3km.

“In addition, the newly recognised vertical mineralisation and alteration zonation identified in drilling to date has strong implications for mineralisation at depth at Webbs more broadly,” Leschke added.

Electromagnetic surveys – which enable the company to ‘see’ into the ground without drilling – are currently underway prior to deeper drilling, LDR says.

Leschke previously described Tangoa West as a game changer for Lode because of the fact it has volume potential and high-grades – two key things every explorer hopes to find.

The view is that there are multiple deposits within the Webbs Consol project that should extend at depth. Tangoa West is one of a number of targets currently being drill tested at the Webbs Consol project.

The current in situ resource value of the New England Fold Belt is estimated to be just 2 per cent of the entire state due to a lack of exploration. Despite historical production of gold, silver and base metals, it has seen very modest drilling compared to the well picked-over Lachlan Fold Belt to the south

The $10.5m market cap explorer is up 21% in 2022. It had $2.9m in the bank at the end of March.

Elsewhere, Indiana Resources (ASX:IDA) has locked in $1.8m via placement to explore its ‘Central Gawler Craton’ gold-rare earths-base metals project in South Australia.

The IDA directors collectively subscribed for $110,000 worth of placement shares, which is always a good sign.

Indiana also revealed it has snaffled a $255k funding grant from the South Australian Government through the Accelerated Discovery Initiative.

Leading industry expert Dr Jon Hronsky AOM recently completed a technical review of the Harris Greenstone Domain that has highlighted the potential for yummy Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide (‘VMS’) Zn-Cu mineralisation.

IDA says the grant will also go a fair way to advancing its VMS targets at the Harris Greenstone Domain in the Central Gawler Craton Project.

 

TODAY’S BIGGEST SMALL CAP LOSERS

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The Brisbane-based, smartphone-focused, respiratory diagnostic making medtech ResApp Health (ASX:RAP), is in a little bit of hot water.

RAP shares plunged by almost 30% after announcing its cough app might need a bit of fine tuning, unfortunately that was the one defining hurdle which its prospective buyer, Pfizer, carved into the flesh of it’s all cash offer – which, as Gregor so delicately put it this morning, “had shareholders on the cusp of a gigantic round of wallet-fattening goodness.”

Late last week Pfizer inflated its already widely-backed original offer for 100% of ResApp by near $80mn but, with the proviso – and this would seem a no-brainer – that RAP could reproduce the promise of its pretty sensational COVID-19 screening cough results.

T’was those results out of a smartphone-based screening test for its algorithm which attracted the attention of Pfizer in the first place – I mean –  the thing successfully identified COVID infection in nine out of 10 COVID-positive patients just by recording their coughing.

That didn’t happen, Eddy Sunarto’s been covering and RAP has shed 30%.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS YOU MAY’VE MISSED

CountPlus Limited (ASX:CUP) has announced that its CountPlus One subsidiary firm has bought Sydney-based accounting firm CDC Partners Pty Ltd. The terms of the buy are $600,000 (based on CDC revenues of $500,000 in 2021), plus an upside payment to a maximum of $800,000, with 70% of the consideration upfront and the rest due over 24 months. By our count, the only number not mentioned in all that information is three.

Group 6 Metals (ASX:G6M) has told the market that construction at its Dolphin Tungsten Mine on King Island, Tasmania, is continuing apace. Process plant earthworks are done, the G6M team says that delivery of equipment from Victoria is also underway and the power’s even been connected – all of which is keeping the company on track for first concentrate in Q1 of 2023.

And last cab off the rank for today is some uplifting news from Mach7 Technologies (ASX:M7T), which has just been handed renewal agreement paperwork by Cabell Huntington Hospital in West Virginia, to keep the hospital’s Enterprise Imaging Platform online for another five years, along with a five-year renewal on support for the eUnity Diagnostic Enterprise Viewer. The deal is worth a very handy $2.8 million to Mach7, and will almost certainly help doctors at Cabell see inside people without needing a torch and a map to find their way back out.

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