Local markets have been a bit variable this morning, opening with a teensy little slip before rallying to +0.1% mid morning and things were looking slightly rosy.

This morning’s ANZ/Roy Morgan’s consumer behaviour report seems to have put paid to that, though, so the benchmark is slouching like a sour, moody teenager as we travel towards lunch.

And speaking of food (because I am clearly the undisputed champion of terrible segues), I’ve got some super-important news from Coopers Hill in Brockworth, near Gloucester, which is in England, near Scotland and France.

Coopers Hill is a near-vertical slope, globally famous for a tradition started by local idiots around 600 years ago, which has since become one of the most hotly contested races on the planet.

Racers start at the top of the improbably steep hill, and a 7kg wheel of the region’s fabulous Double Gloucester Cheese is sent rolling away, with a one-second head start.

The aim of the race is the impossible task of actually catching the cheese, which has been known to reach speeds of up to 110kmh, posing an enormous threat to spectators at the bottom of the hill.

In my youthful years, during a “free and frank exchange of ideas” with a particularly volatile lady friend during a dinner party I really didn’t want to be a part of, I was hit in the face with a high-speed Tasmanian camembert, weighing just 250g.

The injuries I sustained were far from life-threatening – a black eye, a broken heart and a severely dented sense of self-worth – but I can attest to the fact that being struck by well-thrown 250g soft cheese from the far end of the dinner table hurts like the absolute Dickens.

I can only imagine the carnage of being walloped by 7kg of Double Gloucester moving fast enough to get from Sydney to Perth in just 35 hours (36.2 hours if it wants to avoid tolls).

Yet, every year hundreds of participants line up to see if they can hurl themselves down the hill to catch the cheese – or, at least, be the first to reach the bottom of the hill, and collect the Grand Prize: The wheel of cheese.

Given the near-vertical slope they’re racing down, you can bet your badly-fractured arse that it is preposterously dangerous.

Which is why this year’s winner of the Ladies Downhill event probably won’t ever remember doing so. Canadian woman Delaney Irving was – technically – the first competitor to reach the bottom of the hill.

Luckily for Ms Irving, there’s nothing in the rules that says you have to be conscious in order to win the race.

Plus, she will always have this scintillating footage to look back on and barely remember.

 

 

The 19-year-old from Vancouver Island said the race was “good … now that I remember it”.

“I remember running, then bumping my head, and then I woke up in the tent. I still don’t really believe it, but it feels great,” Irving said.

I’m sure it does, Delaney… I’m sure it does.

 

TO MARKETS

The ASX 200 got off to a sputtering start this morning, with an initial tiny dip before its engine was warm enough to get the market moving (slowly) in the right direction.

By mid-morning, the benchmark was a tiny 0.1% higher, but right around the time the ANZ/Roy Morgan consumer sentiment report came out, the benchmark dropped sharply, heading back below break-even shortly before lunch.

The report is not great news. Not by a long shot. Consumer Confidence is the lowest it’s been in 37 years, after Holden launched the almighty VL Commodore and Australians were too busy doing donuts on each other’s front lawns to spend money on anything other than petrol, and new front lawns.

The morning’s early dip was driven by a sharp drop in tech stocks, but that sector has recovered to be close to flat at lunchtime.

The leaders among the sectors this morning are neck and neck at lunchtime, with Materials (+0.41) a single gold nugget ahead of the Telcos (+0.40).

Recent top performer Real Estate is giving back some of its recent gains, phoning in a -0.75% performance this morning, while Financials (-0.34%) and Health Care (-0.28%) delivered less-than-ideal results as well.

In the Big Money Zone, Mader Group (ASX:MAD) – provider of specialised contract labour for maintenance of heavy mobile equipment all round the world – has moved sharply on no news this morning, up 5.0%.

And 70s bubblegum pop music sensation Leo Lithium (ASX:LLL) is continuing its climb to the top of the charts, up 6.5% this morning after the Austero Network put Leo’s latest hit You Only Love Me For My Lithium, Baby on high rotation.

 

NOT THE ASX

It was all ponderously quiet overnight, thanks to a duo of market holidays that left investors feeling lost, lonely and Jonesing badly for fresh market data.

It was Memorial Day in the US yesterday – a chance for all Americans who aren’t forced to work for $3.40 an hour with the ever-present threat of being fired on the spot at the whim of power-crazed “managers” to pause and remember all of the men and women who have died in service to their country.

Americans honoured their war dead by taking a day off from shooting each other, with the death toll – from mass shootings alone – currently standing at “at least 16, with dozens more injured”. That’s a new US daily record according to NBC News.

Meanwhile in London, the Exchange was closed for the Spring Bank Holiday, a chance for young, reedy men wearing bow ties and flat straw hats to pitch woo to the gap-toothed object of their desires in a rowboat on the Thames.

There were no reports of any shootings, but officials from several London hospitals have reported dozens of men hospitalised for symptoms of blue balls.

As the French would say, Vive le Difference! – which, if my rusty high school French is correct, loosely translates to “I’m bored. Let’s set fire to Paris again”.

In Japan, the Nikkei is down 0.44% after a magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck the nation off the coast of Tokyo.

There are no reports of damage, and no threat of a tsunami, however several sightings of a giant radioactive lizard have come in from several locals.

Japanese citizens remain unconcerned, however, as the nation’s own meteorological service said the quake only measured a 5 on its local Shindo earthquake intensity scale, putting the quake firmly in between “Heavyweight Sumo champion Atsushi Igarashi falling out of bed” and “Acoustic fallout from a Baby Metal show”.

 

 

What a banger.

They’re touring Australia soon, by the way, just in case you feel like being completely deafened in a delightfully Japanese way.

Anyhoo… In China, where the most popular heavy metal is delivered fresh to your door by the unrelenting smog that blankets the country, Shanghai’s markets are up slightly at +0.09%, while in Hong Kong the Hang Seng is down a tiny trickle on -0.08%.

In Crypto Chasm, where evil profit takers lurk in the shadows, BTC is down because it surged a little while ago and a couple of people needed a fresh Lambo in time for the weekend.

The other news is that the US is making noises about scrapping a proposed 30% tax on electricity used by crypto miners, as debt ceiling negotiations continue to muddy America’s policy waters.

Rob “Please Don’t Give Albo Any Dumb Ideas” Badman has all those details, and more, in this morning’s Mooners and Shakers.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for May 30 [intraday]:

Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:

Wordpress Table Plugin

 

The pickings are a little slim in Small Caps this morning, but there are some clear winners amongst them.

Top of the heap this morning is cold cathode X-ray tech company Micro-X (ASX:MX1), which has climbed 33.3% this morning on news that it has successfully completed the first field testing of its Argus IED X-ray camera.

The device has been developed to specifically search for and detect Improvised Explosive Devices (hence, the IED in its name), and pre-production unit testwork delivered “useful, high-definition backscatter images of an IED training aid through a car door”.

“This field testing demonstrates two significant capabilities of Argus – the ability to remotely capture high-definition backscatter images through a solid barrier, together with the ability to capture a high-definition image of a shallow-buried ordnance,” MX1 CCEO Kingsley Hall said.

“We are extremely excited by the way that Argus performed in these realistic scenarios.”

“Looking ahead, we are confident that Argus can not only transform how the bomb tech community images suspect packages and explosives, but that there is an even wider application to the military, especially clearing large areas of buried explosive hazards such as land mines. We look forward to putting our product in the hands of customers.”

Both hands, I assume.

Second best performer this morning is Warriedar Resources (ASX:WA8), which is up 30% this morning following yesterday’s exciting news from its Rothschild deposit at the Fields Find project in WA.

Exploration drilling has delivered further extensional success at Rothschild, returning high-grade extensional intercepts including 5m @ 4.36 grams per tonne (g/t) Au from 91m, 12m @ 1.61g/t Au from 179m, and 12m @ 1.29g/t from 228m from the latest set of assays.

And in third place is Pure Foods Tasmania (ASX:PFT), after the company issued a highly positive trading update, which includes news that the company expects revenue to grow a solid 50% in FY24 against its FY23 results.

The revenue jump is likely to be driven by booming sales of PFT’s potato and gravy product – a 450g bucket of mashed spuds and gravy and if you’ll excuse me, I very urgently need to pop down to the supermarket for some reason, so that’s the end of Lunch Wrap today.

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for May 30 [intraday]:

Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:

Wordpress Table Plugin
 

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