So… that was Christmas – and I really do hope that Santa left you something pleasant to unwrap under the tree this year.

Because so far today, the post-Christmas blues are looking like they’re going to set in on the market, which hiccuped at open, spent a very brief moment in the sunshine of +0.2% before basically giving it the ol’ “yeah, nah… it’s too hot, mate” and heading back to sleep on the couch.

It’s all bit irritating, really – but, in the scheme of things, not nearly as irritating as when some crusty old mega-rich dude decides to ‘Tell It Like It Is’ by suggesting that anyone unhappy about the current wealth inequality should just “be happier”.

We have obscenely wealthy investment guy Charlie Munger to thank for those pearls of wisdom – a 98-year-old who is besties with the Legendary Warren Buffet, who recently told CNBC that “he doesn’t understand why people today aren’t more content with what they have, especially compared to harder times throughout history”.

Munger, who was born a few months before the dinosaurs went extinct, reckons that anybody who doesn’t like the status quo, with a handful of people controlling an outrageously high percentage of the world’s wealth, should just suck it up.

“It’s weird for somebody my age, because I was in the middle of the Great Depression when the hardship was unbelievable,” Munger said.

While we’re not disputing that The Great Depression was genuinely depressing, drawing that sort of comparison is either horribly reductive reasoning designed to shield his own internal guilt about sitting on a private fortune while an alarmingly massive number of his fellow US citizens are living so far below the poverty line…

Or it’s just another case of Old Man Shouts at Cloud reasoning, where everyone who isn’t rich should just hang themselves by their bootstraps or get back to work at their minimum wage jobs.

Or… maybe he just missed the memo about how tone deaf it is when rich people bang on about how poor they used to be.

 

 

See that, Munger? That’s what you sound like, you scrofulous old goat.

We’ll leave you with this startling observation from Old Man Munger: “I can’t change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything’s improved by about 600%, because there’s still somebody else who has more.”

Wise words from a man who’s life has improved by at least 2,300,000,000% since the time he held his first $1 note, and who 100% could change the fact that people are very unhappy.

… and with that short burst of Socialist Rage out of the way, let’s take a look at what’s happening in the world of Rampant Capatilast Consumerism today.

 

TO MARKETS

As we enter the lunching period, the benchmark is about -0.4% down, largely due to a 1.14% slump in Health Care, with InfoTech (-0.92%) and the Telcos (-0.89%) hot on its heels in the race for Worst Sector of the Day.

Energy (+0.74%) and Utilities (+0.36%) are trying – no, they really are – but it looks unlikely to be enough of an effort to get things back into positive territory in the short term.

There’s a solitary billionaire in the winner’s circle this morning, so let’s give a warm round of applause to Liberty Financial (ASX:LFG), which has climbed 4.9% in what can only be described as a Christmas miracle, given that it’s on volume so thin ($14k worth…), you can expect to see it on the catwalk during the next Paris Fashion Week.

But there is a laundry list of losers at the top end of town, most of them in the battery metals sector.

In a nutshell, if you can connect any of the big miners (on paper, or in your mind) to Tesla (and EVs in general), then they’re lower today. In some cases, by quite a substantial percentage.

Lithium stocks are down; Pilbara (ASX:PLS) 4.61%, Allkem (ASX:AKE), down 4.48%, and Sayona (ASX:SYA), down 6.58%.

Syrah (ASX:SYR) is down the worst, falling 13.5%, and that’s despite recent news that its offtake agreement with Tesla for natural graphite active anode material has hit a key milestone, and that things are looking pretty peachy.

And that could be largely down to just how appallingly toxic Tesla is to the market at the moment. Like the prettiest girl in high school who’s lost her looks and now lives in a trailer park, Tesla is an all-round ugly and bitter presence.

It sank 11.4% overnight. It’s down about 44% since the beginning of December. It’s down 73.2% from its high of $407-ish all-time high in November last year – a collapse so profound that it may as well be a crypto shitcoin at this stage.

And with that analogy in mind, let’s take a look at what Tesla (and the rest of our American friends) have been doing while we were listening to the cricket on the radio.

 

NOT THE ASX

In the US, The NASDAQ was heading flat-blatter for Mexico, down 1.38% overnight after student filmmakers took over Wall Street to film The Christmas Tech Stock Massacre, or something.

The rest of Wall Street did okay, though – The Dow added 0.11% and the S%P slipped 0.4% – but the techies really did take a hammering throughout the course of the session.

We’ve already mentioned Tesla, and it would be 100% mean-spirited to bang on about how tragically it’s been performing of late, and the horrifying 44% slump it’s had so far for December, and how its major shareholders have taken to publicly scolding CEO Elon Musk, who is apparently too busy running Twitter polls to quantify precisely how deeply unpopular he is, in between hanging out with Vladimir Putin’s PR/Propaganda Girl and Trump son-in-law and newly-minted Saudi-backed billionaire Jared Kushner.

So we won’t mention any of that at all, and perhaps just point out that two of the top performing stocks in the US overnight were Big Money casino operators Wynn Resorts (WYNN:NASDAQ) and Las Vegas Sands (LVS:NYSE). #ComeInSpinner

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei is 0.72% lower, largely because the latest update to an app called Hato Dentaku – aka, “pigeon calculator” – has every single person in Japan who regularly does mathematics in something of a tizzy.

The app itself is very simple: It’s a bog-standard calculator, except every time you press on a number, it coos like a pigeon. #HellYeahJapan #PleaseNeverChange

The update, however, includes two new features – it’s available in English (the menu items in the app, not the cooing of the pigeons), and there’s a frankly unnerving “sexy” option which, when activated, has the flying rodents cooing sexually suggestively.

The end result at the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been a scene reminiscent of a cross between Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and a spooneristically titled “art film” by lesser-known director Alfred Hitchbird.

(Shoot me an email if that’s a bit too obtuse… but trust me, it’s hilarious).

Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong is getting back into the swing of things post-Christmas, ringing the bells to the tune of +2.2% before lunch, while Shanghai is lagging behind, down 0.34% in early trade.

In crypto, trading volume dipped significantly over the Christmas period, which bodes well for the Vitamin D levels for many crypto enthusiasts. The majors are mostly down-ish for the past 24 hours, and the mass firings of crypto staff continues apace as the industry struggles with the news that even the infinite money-making machine they’ve been building has its limits.

There’s more to it than that – and you can read all about it at Mooners and Shakers.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for December 28 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

In Small Caps news, copper player Austral Resources (ASX:AR1) is up 22.2% so far this morning on no news.

Earlier this month Austral secured funding as it hits steady state production at the Mt Kelly plant and  fast track the Lady Colleen scoping study.

The funding is coming through a 1-2 combo of initiatives, the first of which will see global mining services provider Thiess on board with a restructured debt payment scheme, easing the pressure on Austral while Thiess continues to work at the Anthill Mine.

AR1 has also managed to twist the arm of 2.9% stakeholder, the Harvey Family Office, for a $12.77 million debt facility to keep things cranking along, as Austral ramps up production to 1,000 tonne per month at approximately A$12,000 per tonne (spot price of US$3.78lb on 20 December 2022) generating cashflow of approximately A$12 million per month.

The Harvey Family Office has set an interest rate on the debt facility at near credit-card level of 15%pa, with a 12-month term limit. Nice little earner.

Energy Transition Minerals (ASX:ETM) is up 16.3% on no news. Earlier this month it put in an amended application for its exploitation licence for the Kvanefjeld rare earth element project in Greenland.

The amended licence, if approved, would be basically the same as ETM’s previous “We wanna take all of whatever we can find” application, except under the new application, the company would instead be treating any uranium it finds as an impurity, which will be “safely removed and stored as tailings”.

Which, you have to admit, sounds more than a little bit like the Greenland government regulators looked over the application and possibly suggested they were cool with it, except for the whole but about the uranium leaving the country.

And rounding out the newsmakers this morning, Brightstar (ASX:BTR) is up another 16.6% following the pre-Christmas announcement that it’s going to merge with Kingwest (ASX:KWR).

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the most-worst performing ASX small cap stocks for December 28 [intraday]:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

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