Australian markets have opened a little higher this morning, enjoying an unexpected 0.5% bump in early trade after Wall Street hit some sour notes overnight – probably because just about everyone in the US is too busy losing their minds over a US$1.2 billion Powerball jackpot to pay attention to the market.

They’re not the only ones going mad over lotteries and such. In news out of China, one recent lottery winner has reportedly embarked on what any sane person will tell you is a complete and utter disaster waiting to happen.

According to reports, the man – only identified as “Li” – scooped a lottery prize worth 219 million yuan, or roughly $48 million of our puny Australian dollars. Great for him, but it’s not really huge news so far.

However, here’s the kicker: Mr Li has decided not to tell his family about it, because he doesn’t want them to “become lazy”.

“I didn’t tell my wife and child for fear that they would be too complacent and would not work or work hard in the future,” Mr Li told a local newspaper.

You’d think that a win that size would be hard to keep quiet, but Mr Li had a cunning plan.

He travelled alone to the lottery office in Nanning, in the southern region of Guangxi, and wore a bright yellow costume covering his head, while being photographed receiving his winnings.

Local reports say Mr Li donated 5 million yuan to charity, but hasn’t decided what to do with the rest of the money – or, we assume, how he’s going to keep it a secret when he gets back from his secret trip riding a gold-plated jet-ski down the main street of his home town.

One thing is 100% certain, though – you’d definitely want to be a fly on the wall the moment Mrs Li learns that not only is she now massively wealthy, but that she has been for quite some time…

Because if there’s one thing the Chinese people do well, it’s fireworks.

 

TO MARKETS

It looked to be an honest-to-god uncharacteristic thumbing of the nose at Wall Street by local markets this morning, when the ASX 200 jumped to a 0.5% rise in the first half hour of business.

But all good things must eventually come to an end – and, by “eventually”, we mean “about 25 minutes after it began”. The ASX 200 is a fickle beast, unable to be tamed by even the stoutest of men (or women) with the sturdiest of chairs (or stools) and the crackiest of whips (or crack).

As we head towards time to unwrap the sandwiches and break out the orange cordial, the benchmark has eased to a far more familiar +0.30%, refusing to just pick a lane and stay there.

Looking at the sector breakdown, there are a number of sectors in dire need of a tow truck, with Real Estate leading the laggards on -1.46%, InfoTech (-1.22%) and Telcos (-0.75%) not too far behind.

Energy and Materials, however, are putting in an honest morning’s work, climbing 1.89% and 1.10% respectively, with the rest of the sectors hanging around in the middle to see who’s gonna win.

Topping the list of Heavies this morning is Lake Resources (ASX:LKE), which has climbed 9.91% on solid news from its Kachi project lithium processing demonstration plant.

Completion of construction of the demonstration plant on site and the wet and dry commissioning process took place during September and October, and the results are “at spec”, the company says.

Also hitting a high note this morning is Coronado Global Resources (ASX:CRN), up 6.7% this morning on Day 2 of a winning streak, since revealing that life is peachy enough in the Coronado bunker to warrant a special dividend of US$225 million, to be distributed just in time for Christmas.

Time to twitch the curtains and have a peep at what those delightfully devilish neighbours of ours are up to at the moment.

 

NOT THE ASX

Wall Street had a slightly disappointing session overnight, with the major indices dipping ahead of the US Fed revealing its next step in The War on Inflation.

“It will be difficult for the Fed to deliver a dovish market tomorrow as fresh data releases continue to paint a buoyant economy,” Eddy tells us this morning.

“In the JOLT job openings data released overnight, vacancies were shown to have climbed by 437,000 to 10.7 million in September. The US ISM manufacturing report also came in better-than-expected, signalling that the goods sector of the economy is doing just fine.

“US Treasury yields have been climbing over the last few days in anticipation of a hawkish Fed decision.”

The Dow weathered the session the best, down 0.24%, with the S&P falling 0.41 and the Nasdaq sinking 0.89% by the end of the day.

Not helping things along was an after-the-bell slump from Airbnb, which dropped around 6.0% when it revealed a less-than-stellar outlook for Q4 2023.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei has dipped at the start of the day, down 0.27% after a Global Wildlife Survey found that 99.4% of all living creatures prefer to be dead before they are consumed by humans.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng is down about 0.4% in morning trade, while Shanghai is faring slightly better, down just 0.3% so far.

On the commodities desk, oil and gas are on the rise again, up 0.31% and 2.15% respectively, but it’s a bad day to be shiny and made of metal.

Gold is flat at -0.02%, copper is down 0.13% and silver is on a 0.29% slide so far today.

In crypto news, BTC is currently flat but ticking down below break-even (-0.07%) for the past 24 hours, while ETH is up slightly by 0.35% for the same period and Dogecoin is rising like a gristle souffle, up a baffling 15%.

And for you trivia buffs out there, with  the overall crypto market cap at US$1.06 trillion, it’s now worth more than Amazon (as in, the entire Amazon company). So… if you guys are keen, I reckon we have a chat to Bezos and see if he wants to do a swap or something.

There’s obviously more happening in crypto today, and as always, Rob “Enjoy Badman Prime™ for just $12 a month” Badman has everything you need to know over at Mooners & Shakers.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for November 2 [intraday]:

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In Small Caps, Winsome (ASX:WR1) is back in the news, and back in investors’ good books, too – here’s a brief explainer as to why.

On 28 October, Winsome announced that “160m of Pegmatite” had been “collectively intercepted” at its Adina project in Canada, hidden away under the recently discovered, well mineralised Jamar outcrop – and WR1 rose in price.

That is, until trade was paused and it became clear that there was something amiss. Winsome put out another release retracting this section of the initial announcement: “Diamond drill core samples from Adina show the pegmatites to be consistent with previously reported surface mineralisation.” And on 29 October, WR1 fell in price.

Then, late-ish last night, Winsome put out another announcement, this time including some tables that it was supposed to have included right from the beginning of this story, which made investors happy again – and this morning, WR1 rose in price by 41.3%.

Also rising is Finder Energy Holdings (ASX:FDR), up 25% today on no news, but most likely off the back of recent movements in prices across the energy markets.

And Cosmos Exploration (ASX:C1X) has been bumped up 17.8% today on news that it has spotted significant rare earth potential at the Byro East Ni-Cu-PGE Project in WA, after a review of surface soil geochemistry has returned values of up to 1,283ppm from a total of five rare elements (TREO5) plus yttrium in clay-rich soils.

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for November 2 [intraday]:

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