Last Orders: Small caps dip 0.5%, but finish week in the green

Small caps have closed lower today, but they finished the week in the green for a second week in a row.

The Small Ordinaries index dropped 16.9 points, or 0.5 per cent, on Friday, doing slightly better than their larger peers. The ASX100 finished down 0.6 per cent and the ASX200, 0.56 per cent.

For the week the index of Australia’s 101st to 300th biggest companies was up 0.8 per cent, bolstered by a particularly strong performance on Tuesday.

The Emerging Companies nano-cap index closed down 0.49 per cent, but ended the week up 2.2 per cent.

Most sectors were in the red on Friday, with energy the worst hit, falling 2.0 per cent. Tech was essentially flat; telecom, utilities and property trusts were the sectors in the green.

Oneview Healthcare (ASX:ONE) was the biggest gainer, rising 59.6 per cent to 37.5c.

As Stockhead has reported, the healthcare technology company last week agreed to give the publisher of Next Investors millions of shares in return for “research coverage”.

Oneview Healthcare $ONE gets a $1M investment from Stocksdigital at 6c a share just to get some research cover on the stock…..

A week later the stock is up 6x to a market cap of $140M!!

I’m sure there’s nothing to see here 🤔🤷🏻‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/9VD3GhEpeU

— Ron Shamgar (@RonShamgar) March 19, 2021

IDT Australia (ASX:IDT) was the second-biggest gainer, soaring 54.1 per cent to 28.5c after announcing that the Australian Department of Health had asked it to assess the possibility of using its sterile pharmaceutical manufacturing company to supplement the production capability for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Spacetalk (ASX:SPA) gained 31.8 per cent to 14.5c after Telstra (ASX:TLS) agreed to sell its smartphone wearable devices for kids.

Medibio (ASX:MEB) gained 11.1 per cent to 1c after Compass Group agreed to implement its mental wellbeing software to its UK workforce of 1,000.

Overall with just a week and a half left in the first quarter, the Small Ords is up 3.8 per cent so far in 2021, while the Emerging Companies index is up 6.9 per cent.