Market highlights and 5 ASX small caps to watch on Monday

The Aussie market is poised to open 1.5% higher this morning
Iron ore slips by 4% on Friday
The RBA will make its interest rates decision on Tuesday

The Aussie sharemarket is poised to follow Wall Street higher at the open, with the ASX 200 July futures pointing up by 1.5% at 8am AEST.

On Friday, major stockmarket indices in the US rose by 1% ahead of the Independence Day long weekend.

It’s been the a bruising first half of the year for Wall Street however, as it recorded the worst start of the year in 50 years.

“A choppy period seems likely until investors feel confident that the economy is still in decent shape, and that the Fed won’t miss the opportunity to decelerate their tightening pace in September,” said Oanda market analyst Edward Moya.

As fears of a recession rise, US bonds are rallying hard with the 10-year Treasury yield falling to the 3% level on Friday on demand for safer assets. Just a few weeks ago, the 10-year yield was trading as high as 3.4%.

“Fixed income traders are now starting to realise that the market might not be pricing in enough rate cuts for when this market falls into a recession next year,” Moya added.

Commodity prices are also starting to price in a recession possibility. The iron ore price shed another 4% on Friday to US$113.9 a tonne, taking its loss for the week to 12%.

Bitcoin meanwhile, is back below US$20k and was trading at US$19,300 at 8.30am.

Back on domestic shores, this week’s most important economic event will be the RBA’s interest rates decision on Tusday. 32 out of 33 economists surveyed expect the RBA to raise its cash rate by another 50bps to 1.35%.

5 ASX small caps to watch today

Quickstep Holdings (ASX:QHL)
Quickstep and the Department of Defence, in collaboration with DMTC Ltd, are co-funding a project to identify, analyse and test high temperature materials for the development of hypersonic aerostructures. Hypersonic aerostructures are components of an aircraft’s airframe that are capable of withstanding extreme conditions experienced during hypersonic flight (>five times the speed of sound), including high heat loads.

iCetana (ASX:ICE)
icetana has secured a four-year maintenance agreement in support of its motion intelligence platform with an existing Middle East customer with several large shopping mall sites. The contract is valued at US$132k.

Volpara Health (ASX:VHT)
The breast cancer diagnostic specialist signed a deal with US-based RadNet for an initial contract period of 42 months. The contract includes Volpara’s Analytics and Risk Pathways, both deployed in the cloud. No contract amounts were disclosed.

X2M Connect (ASX:X2M)
The utilities tech company says its full year FY22 revenue will come in at $10.1m, a 77% rise on pcp. Connected devices using its technology at 31 May were 223,635, up 94% on pcp.

Blackearth Minerals (ASX:BEM)
The graphite explorer says further assay results received from the company’s Razafy NW Resource add to the potential of this high-grade area. Assay results include: 22.3m at 8.14% TGC (total graphite content), and 38.25m at 6.45% TGC.

At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Volpara Health and Blackearth Minerals are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.