Aussie markets opened lower this morning, falling 0.7% and breaking a three-session winning streak just because it felt like it, okay?

There’s plenty of musings on the real reason it’s dropped this morning, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first, let me take you to the shores of a land that remains to many an unexplored wilderness, where apes boast a social status sometimes well above their human counterparts, and the currency they prefer to use is completely made-up nonsense that is “100% not a security, so please stop suing us about it”.

Regardless of what you think about magic internets money, a depressingly large number of crypto traders got stupidly wealthy in a very short space of time, and those beloved, tormented souls turned from Boffins, to Bros.

Given that there are only so many Lamborghinis one man can eat, and only so many vacuous Instagram influencers prepared to be groped on a private jet for a free trip to Dubai, it wasn’t long before these newly-minted bazillionaires went searching for something to do with their time and enormous fat stacks of cash.

Some of them found solace in the arms of poker – the “game of skill” that requires an inhuman combination of mathematical skill and psychology, alongside a gargantuan dose of luck, in order to be really good at it.

People like that don’t come along all the time – but when they do, they also tend to get stupidly wealthy, very quickly… the classic example being a young fella by the name of Tom Dwan.

Dwan – also known by his online handle “durrrr” – burst onto the poker scene when the game moved from seedy Vegas poker rooms to the even-seedier internet, making a big enough name for himself as an online player to earn an invite to the biggest (public) game in town… the heady heights of a televised cash game called “High Stakes Poker”.

He promptly completely pantsed poker veteran Barry Greenstein, taking the crown for what was – at the time – the Largest Televised Poker Hand in History, winning a cool US$919,000.

 

 

The title for that crown has changed hands (pardon the pun) a few times, but last week Dwan took it back in an emphatic fashion… this time from a crypto millionaire whose luck really ran out.

The crypto-rich guy in this story is Hustler Casino regular Wesley Fei, whose Twitter handle @CryptoApprenti1 tells you pretty much all you need to know about him.

I’ll restrain myself from a blow-by-blow account of the hand, and instead offer you a simple summation: Wesley brought a knife to a gun fight, tried (very, very badly) to bluff Tom Dwan, and lost a large sum of money in the process.

 

 

Yes, it’s a 26-minute video, but the world of poker operates on its own weird time scale.

And yes, if you’re not a poker fan, watching grown men think for a quarter of an hour isn’t exactly fascinating.

So, for the good bits, you can skip to the 9:20 mark and watch, in the span of 30 seconds, our crypto-genius make an incredibly poor decision, shove a total of US$1.3 million into the middle of the table, realise what he’s done and then see the rational part of his brain “Dude… really?” its way out of his head.

Just over 3 minutes later, Dwan calls the bet, exposes the fact that Mr Fei had nothing – I know, right? Not even a pair! – and pocketed a very handsome US$3,081,000.

Bonus round: For the s..tcoin aficionados among you, Dwan is (of course) currently spruiking something called Fareplay, which – despite my award-winning jernalizm skilzz – remains an impenetrable mystery.

 

TO MARKETS

Local markets kicked off the day with a slump, and things just kept on getting slumpier as the morning session unravelled and took us all on a 0.7% journey to the Land of Negative Growth.

‘Tis a magical place, where grown men weep openly in the village streets, weird scaly dragon-born fiends hoard all the wealth while the peasants dig for copper and lithium in a labyrinth of tunnels they’ve dug beneath their turnip farms.

I’ve been off sick for a few days, so I genuinely don’t know what’s been happening… but I reckon if I blame the slump on market jitters ahead of the RBA meeting this afternoon and a pissweak show on Wall Street overnight, everyone will agree that I’m super-smart and we can just leave it at that.

Looking at the sectors this morning, and it’s the Consumer Twins proving to be the most aggravating set of same-day siblings than those wretched Olsen things that were on that dreadful TV show, where Bob Saget sold his comedy soul.

Consumer Discretionary has shed 1.25%, and Staples isn’t far behind it, on -0.95%. They’ve dragged Health Care along for moral support and Band-Aids, so it’s down 0.92% as well.

Up the top of the list, InfoTech and Utilities are duking it out for top spot around the +0.3%, and that’s about as hot as the action’s been all morning.

There aren’t any of the truly massive players in the winner’s circle this morning, and it is worth noting that the market’s Little Fellas are outperforming the big players, with the XSO Small Ords index up 0.03% against the ASX 200’s broader fall.

As Earlybird Eddy Sunarto reported this morning, the RBA will meet today and hand down its interest rates decision at 2.30pm.

“Fears are heightened as another rate increase is looming. The recent CPI data has raised concerns about inflation, potentially leading the RBA to increase the cash rate from 3.85% to 4.1% today,” Eddy writes.

Goldman Sachs is forecasting the RBA cash rate to reach 4.35% by July, meaning that 25 basis points rise today and an additional hike in July is possible.

“Given that the RBA terminal rate is lower and lagging behind the likes of other central banks including the Fed, BoE, RBNZ, concerns are that we may be seeing one more rate hike,” said Zoran Kresovic of derivatives broker Eightcap.

 

NOT THE ASX

It was not a great session on Wall Street overnight, leaving the Dow lower by 0.6%, the S&P lower by 0.2% and the Nasdaq down 0.1%.

The Nasdaq was most likely propped up by a couple of big performers in the US tech space, namely Palantir Technologies which jumped 5% after being awarded a contract by the US Special Operations Command, and Apple which briefly touched an all-time high of US$184.95, before closing at US$183.58.

Apple spiked following the company’s WWDC Apple conference, where it unveiled a US$3,499 mixed-reality headset that offers both virtual reality and augmented reality, which is being hailed as the Biggest Thing the company has launched since that ghastly watch that everybody but me seems to love.

Meanwhile in Japan, the Nikkei is up 0.33% on news that the Japanese Government has issued a “firm promise” that the country’s ball-twistingly expensive toll roads will be made free for motorists. Soon. Ish.

The expressway network there was kinda-sorta privatised in 2005, when the government formed a series of companies and listed them to offset the cost of building and maintaining them, with the government mandated to always hold a controlling stake in each.

Which is why, currently, if you want to enjoy a quick-ish drive from Tokyo to Osaka, it’ll take about 6.5 hours and cost you a mere $135 in tolls. Or you can stump up $150 and take the bullet train.

Anyway, according to Japanese officials, there’s now a plan in place that will ensure that all expressways in Japan will be toll-free by the year 2115… so, you should probably hold off on your travel plans until well after you’re dead.

In China, Shanghai markets are up 0.15%, in Hong Kong the Hang Seng is up 1.31% and in New Zealand, the NZX 50 is down 0.6% this morning, after the market there was closed for the Queen’s Birthday celebration and the guest of honour, embarrassingly, failed to show up.

In Crypto, the US SEC has sent shockwaves through the market by launching legal action against “CZ” – the Binance boss so cool, he’s named after fake diamonds – alleging all manner of malfeasance and other not-good stuff. Like no one saw this coming…

Rob “You’ll Be Hearing From My Lawyer” Badman has all the details over at Mooners and Shakers, which you should read once you’re done with this drivel.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for June 6 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

 

The morning’s Small Caps standout is Adavale Resources (ASX:ADD), which has cranked out a +100% gain this morning on news that diamond drilling has confirmed the presence of nickel-bearing massive sulphides at the Luhuma Central prospect within its Kabanga Jirani nickel project in Tanzania.

The intersection of massive sulphides over 4.15m from a down-hole depth of 223.35m is further evidence that the company’s exploration program is on the right track, a major positive given the Kabanga Jirani project’s location right next to Lifezone and BHP’s development Kabanga project, which has a resource of 58Mt at 2.62% nickel.

The company says that visual observation of between 1% and 5% pentlandite – an iron-nickel sulphide – appears to align well with portable XRF readings that indicate a nickel grade of between 1.2% and 2.3% nickel, though the latter is no replacement for laboratory assays.

Next best for the morning is Blaze Minerals (ASX:BLZ), which is up another 33.3% this morning and still running on news from late May that it had entered an agreement to buy 340sqkm at the greenfields North Spirit lithium project in Ontario, near Patriot Lithium’s (ASX:PAT) tenements.

The acquisition is set to cost BLZ an initial $100,000 cash and $550,000 worth of shares (55m shares at 1c). The company will then pay an additional $2.65m cash and $5.95m shares in staged payments right up to the release of a mining feasibility study.

And in third place is Structural Monitoring Systems (ASX:SMN), which has jumped 25% this morning after an update on installation and testing of its Aft Pressure Bulkhead (APB) system in commercial aircraft.

The company says that testing through US carrier Delta is continuing, with the 23rd installation deemed a success, and that “the final tests requested by Boeing are now almost complete and we expect the certification package to be submitted soon”.

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for May 26 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

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