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Good morning everyone, and welcome to 15 April, 2024 – an important date in the history of telling long-winded, meandering stories, which bleed into each other in unusual, and often tenuous, ways – only to end in a highly unsatisfying manner.

As it was on this day in the year 1250 that a bloke called Kubla was named, by the Mongol Great Council no less, as the Great Khan – one of the two most important Khans in the history of the universe.

The other one is this:

 

 

But I digress… because the emergence of Kubla as Great Khan led to him doing what all great Khans did – slaughtering many people, brawling with family members and inventing stuff like throat singing, and a method of cooking horse meat by laying strips of it between a different horse (one that was still functional) and the saddle.

The horses would then be ridden vast distances, causing enough heat and horse sweat to both season and hot-steam poach the meat until it was ready to eat.

Kubla Khan, it should be noted, spent a disproportionate quantity of his youth studying, rather than going out a-murderin’ and a-pillagin’ with his grandfather, Genghis. It was Kubla’s love of books that engendered in him a fascination with modern Han culture, which explains why he bears a striking resemblance to an overweight, if slightly less-hairy, Chewbacca.

Kubla Khan had been dead for many centuries when a young poet by the name of Samuel Coleridge “had a vision” and penned a poem about him, which kicks off like this:

 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

    Down to a sunless sea.

 

It drones on for ages after that, but the gist of it is that I reckon Coleridge had been hitting his favourite cocktail a bit too hard, when that poem came hurtling out of his brain.

Coleridge’s favourite drug was opium, but he preferred not to smoke it, as was the fashion at the time. Instead, Coleridge got his opium in the form of laudanum, described as “tincture of opium in alcohol”, which he drank by the pint like total bad-ass.

I’m going to rabbit hop through the next few links here, because this is rapidly turning into War & Peace… but it was that mention of Xanadu that planted the seed of an idea in the minds of two men: Richard Christian Danus and Marc Reid Rubel.

Those two looked at Coleridge’s vision of what leisure time might have been like for a 13th Century Mongol Great Khan, and then wrote a space musical, because it was the 1970s by now, and LSD was everywhere.

That story got turned into a cinematic musical, called Xanadu, which was released in 1980 with Australia’s Very Own Olivia Newton-John in the starring role, alongside a 600-year-old man called Gene Kelly who was quite a dancer all the way up to when he turned 590.

Gene Kelly wasn’t the only misplaced dinosaur Australia’s Very Own Olivia Newton-John would start alongside in cinematic musical, as she shared the screen with Stockard Channing, a powerhouse of a woman who managed to play a sassy 17-year-old teen, despite being twice that age in real life.

Channing’s character in Grease, whose name was Rizzo for some inadequately explained reason, provided the beating heart of the film’s major subplot: What it was like to a bit of a slut in the late 1970s version of 1950s America.

She revealed – and I clearly remember being outraged when I saw this scene, even though I had zero idea of what any of it meant, because I was 6 years old – that she believed she was pregnant.

The father was one of the members of John Travolta’s gang, a fella by the of Kenickie, who endears himself to the audience very early in the film by singing the quiet bits out loud, straight up asking Travolta’s character Danny if the sex he’d had with Sandy was down the assaulty end of the lovemaking scale.

The is she/isn’t she pregnant to Kenickie question is answered during the closing musical number of the show, when Rizzo breaks the news to Kenickie that she was not carrying his greasy little foetus in her belly.

Rizzo presumably found out she was’t pregnant the way most women find out that they’re not, by getting her period.

It’s very much mixed news for the noted rape-enthusiast Kenickie – on the bad side, it means he’s unlikely to be getting any nookie from Rizzo that night.

But on the plus side, it meant that he didn’t need to follow through with his plan to push Rizzo out of the ferris wheel they were sitting at the top of, when Rizzo made her big reveal.

By now, though, Australia’s very own Olivia Newton-John and that Travolta fellow were ready to wrap things up for the film – and, after getting into a souped-up American convertible automobile, they drove up into the sky, and flew away.

It’s one of the most glorious metaphors in Western cinematic history, representing both Jim Jacobs’ and Warren Casey’s total inability to write an ending for their stage musical that served as the inspiration for the film.

Much like I have been unable to write a coherent end to this story today – so let’s just drive a stake through its heart here together, so you can get on with your day and I can catch a quick snooze under my desk before the rest of the Stockhead team arrive for work.

To get you up and running, the team’s brought us some crackerjack content… including Eddy’s thorough unpacking of momentum trading guru William J. O’Neil’s oddly-named CANSLIM method.

And resident expert Tim Boreham’s gotten himself a bit excited over Bcal getting its breast test to market.

On top of all that, I’ve also been typing my fingers to the bone to get all the data and digits down below, so you know what’s been going on since Friday arvo.

 

COMMODITY/FOREX/CRYPTO MARKET PRICES

Gold: US$2,343.12 (-1.39%)

Silver: US$27.86 (-2.09%)

Nickel (3mth): US$17,797.00/t (-0.08%)

Copper (3mth): US$9,457.50/t (+1.24%)

Oil (WTI): US$85.66 (+0.75%)

Oil (Brent): US$90.45 (+0.79%)

Iron 62pc Fe: US$106.50/t (+1.28%)

AUD/USD: 0.6476 (+0.07%)

Bitcoin: US$64,449.20 (+0.28%)

 

WHAT GOT YOU TALKING

Did you spend all last week with your head in a bucket? I know I did. But that doesn’t mean you have to miss all the action from the week that just was. I know I didn’t, because I wrote this irresponsibly long Weekly Wrap on Friday.

 

 

FRIDAY’S ASX SMALL CAP LEADERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks:

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

Wordpress Table Plugin

 

Friday’s Small Cap Winners included:

Defence manufacturer HighCom (ASX:HCL) received a new order of ballistic products from a military customer worth $4.7m. Good news for HCL, which suffered a $13.4m loss in the December half “mainly due to the company not securing several large international orders in the Middle East”.

NewPeak Metals (ASX:NPM) finalised the sale of its share in a Finland gold project to a soon-to-be-listed Canadian company. NPM to receive CAD$500,000 cash, CAD$1m in shares of the listed company, and a milestone payment of CAD$1.5m in cash or shares on reporting of a 500,000oz gold resource.

Estrella Resources (ASX:ESR) was also on the move, after announcing it had uncovered a manganese host rock over 27km of strike at the Lautém project in Timor-Leste.

The company says that it has managed to secure a site in the city of Dili for its team to work with the samples that are being collected in the field, in a small office that has a sample preparation area established.

Meanwhile, larger gold stocks surged alongside a new record high spot price, led by RED 5 (ASX:RED), Regis (ASX:RRL), Resolute (ASX:RSG), and Bellevue (ASX:BGL).

And robot tradie builder FBR (ASX:FBR) says its ordinary shares have commenced trading on the OTCQB Venture Market under the ticker “FBRKF”. The OTCQB Venture Market is a US trading platform operated by OTC Markets Group in New York. FBR says the listing will increase exposure to, and generate increased interest from, US domiciled retail and institutional investors in its shares.

 

FRIDAY’S ASX SMALL CAP LAGGARDS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks:

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

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TRADING HALTS 

Alvo Minerals (ASX:ALV) – pending an announcement regarding a capital raising.

New World Resources (ASX:NWC) – pending the release of an announcement in relation to a capital raising.

Amplia (ASX:ATX) – halt requested to allow Amplia to undertake an entitlement offer process.

Titanium Sands (ASX:TSL) – pending an announcement regarding a material capital raising.

Kin Mining (ASX:KIN) – pending the release of an update regarding a potential transaction between Kin Mining and PNX Metals.

PNX Metals (ASX:PNX) – pending the release of an update regarding a potential transaction between PNX Metals and Kin Mining.

Genex Power (ASX:GNX) – pending a material announcement regarding a non-binding, indicative and conditional proposal that Genex received from Electric Power Development Co.

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