After a heart-stopping early morning 0.3% dip, the ASX has bobbed and weaved its way to a rare (at least recently) positive territory lunchtime result.

It’s nothing to get too excited about, though – the benchmark was up just 4.2 points, a gain of +0.058%, which means it’s fine to go to lunch, but probably just the wrong side of “merry” to risk driving to the pub for a midday feed.

But first, a super-quick look at how one Canadian man’s genius business idea has – for some completely inexplicable reason, which I can’t quite put my finger on – gone hilariously, horribly wrong.

The man, identified as Vancouver local Jerry Martin, was nabbed by the fuzz less than 24 hours after he threw open the doors of his business venture, which he had rather ambitiously named The Drugs Store.

Given that marijuana is legal in Canada’s famously-liberal province of British Columbia, that might come as something of a surprise – but that would be giving ol’ mate Jerry a bit more intellectual credit than he may deserve.

And that’s because The Drugs Store – which was literally Jerry parked up in a mobile home in the middle of one of the worst parts of Vancouver – wasn’t selling weed.

Instead, Jerry was openly selling heroin, meth and cocaine.

Not irresponsibly, mind you – he was enforcing a strict limit of 2.5g per person, per drug, per transaction.

Unfortunately for Jerry, local authorities were far more keen to enforce their own strict limit of 0g per person, per drug, per transaction, and carted the current front-runner for Vancouver Small Business Operator of the Year away.

It’s not 100% clear how police were able to track Jerry’s business down so quickly, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the fact that it was parked next to a police van, and had bright yellow sandwich boards featuring a price list for all the drugs out the front, as a potential lead for police to follow.

Jerry, who was charging $10 for a point (0.1g) of meth to $250 for 2.5 grams of crack, says his heart was in the right place, as all he was doing was trying to make sure that local addicts weren’t buying “bad drugs” that might kill them.

Obivously, it’s now up to a judge whether or not that level of altruism is enough to keep Jerry out of jail for the next 5-10 years.

 

TO MARKETS

As noted earlier, the ASX got off to a rocky start this morning, but has managed to recover by lunchtime and appears to be gaining momentum at the start of the afternoon’s activities.

The initial 0.3% plunge this morning would no doubt have had more than a few punters bracing for another tough day, but the fairly rapid turnaround seems to have buoyed investor confidence at the tail end of a solidly ordinary week.

Round midday, the benchmark was pretty much flat, and at the time of writing had edged up close to 0.2%.

Early doors this morning, it looked like the Tech sector had finally had enough and was on its way off the planet entirely, surging fast against a rising tide of losses everywhere around it.

But, like a newly-minted school leaver arriving on the Gold Coast, it was a case of going too hard, too early and InfoTech was last seen wandering out of McDonald’s with two cheeseburgers in each hand a look on its face like it had no idea what just happened.

By midday, it emerged that Real Estate was likely to be the best performing segment overall, up 1.7%, ahead of Utilities (+0.6%) and Financials (+0.44%), the latter pulling itself out of a nosedive that I’ll get to in a minute.

Languishing, though, were Consumer Discretionary (-0.3%) and Energy (-0.24%), which seem to have missed the memo about heading up instead of down today.

Among the Large Caps, the mercurial performance of Weebit Nano (ASX:WBT) has it pointing skyward today, climbing 10.5% on no news.

 

NOT THE ASX

In the US overnight, the three major stock indexes on Wall Street – the S&P 500, the Dow Jones and Nasdaq – fell by 0.50% ~ 1% as bearish sentiment on regional banks continues to spook investors, Earlybird Eddy reports.

Eddy has very politely referred to the American banking sector as “a shambles”, because it absolutely is.

Regulators had to step in and call halts on two more regional banks overnight – Los Angeles-based PacWest and Arizona’s Western Alliance – after their trading prices both plummeted dramatically.

PacWest sank another 50% as the bank considered options – including an outright sale – while Western Alliance fell 38% despite the bank denying it was looking for a buyer.

In Asian market news, Japan’s Nikkei is up 0.12% – a somewhat muted performance considering that it’s the first time in many, many months that nothing completely absurd happened.

For real – it’s eerily quiet on the Weird AF islands today… which is possibly great news, as the most likely explanation is that Japan’s going to hit bonanza-grade baffling news between now and Monday.

In China, Shanghai markets are down 0.56%, inversely matched by Hong Kong’s Hang Seng on +0.56% in early trade.

In crypto, that PEPE frogsh-t coin thing has proven to be annoyingly popular and aggravatingly robust, rose another 100% overnight on its way to providing 628% worth of gains over the past seven days.

Rob “Told ya so” Badman has all the smug details over at Mooners & Shakers, and I am not even the slightest bit jealous of him, the jammy git.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for May 5 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

 

In top spot this morning is Codrus Minerals (ASX:CDR), after it became the latest explorer to find clay rare earths, reporting grades up to 4,764ppm TREO in a maiden drill hole at the Karloning REE-niobium project in WA.

“The result from KLRC001 significantly upgrades the Karloning project’s REE potential, with two styles of REE mineralisation now confirmed within the project area – hard rock pegmatite mineralisation and clayhosted REEs,” the company says.

In second place, it’s Recharge Metals (ASX:REC), up 18.1% on news that it’s finalised the acquisition of the Express project in the heart of Quebec’s James Bay region, which is fast becoming a major lithium district.

“Following shareholder approval at last week’s GM, we are delighted to have concluded the acquisition of the Express Lithium Project,” managing director Felicity Repacholi-Muir said.

“Our immediate focus is now on the planned exploration program at Express with oversight from Dahrouge Geological.”

And last quick one for now, it’s more REE news for Caprice Resources (ASX:CRS), adding 14.6% so far today on news that it has uncovered an anomaly over at least 300m at the Mukinbudin project, with rock chips and soil samples returning up to 3,761ppm REO.

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for May 5 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

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