Good morning everyone, and welcome to 5 February, 2024 – an important date on the calendar for an eclectic variety of reasons.

For starters, it was on this day in 1920 that the first ever successful flight from London to South Africa departed – which is only really kind-of interesting because it took the two daring aviators 46 gruelling days, and three different aircraft, to reach their destination.

The two airmen were Pierre van Ryneveld and Quintin Brand took off from London with stars in their eyes, and hope in their hearts – fiercely determined to be the first to make the journey by air, which would (symbolically, at least) mark the opening of the air route and link the two nations together.

In December 1919, the British Air Ministry announced that all the (literal) groundwork for the journey had been completed, which involved an exhaustive surveying of the route and the construction of lots of air strips along the way.

The following month, in a typically tabloidy effort to drum up some headlines, The Times of London newspaper announced that it would pay a £10,000 purse – a vast sum of money back then – to whoever was first to make the flight.

The race was on, and within a month the team of captains S Cockerell and FC Broome piled into a Vickers Vimy to make the journey, much to the anger of the alarmingly-named Prime Minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, who was outraged at the idea that the first to make the flight weren’t his own countrymen.

So Smuts forced his government to shell out for a brand new Vickers Vimy – costing £4,500 – and with appallingly little preparation, Ryneveld and Brand took off in hot pursuit, vowing to risk their lives in a very real way by flying at night to try to make up time.

 

 

It was never going to be a quick journey. The three-seater, open cockpit Vicker Vimy was powered by a couple of large, extremely noisy Rolls Royce engines that were capable of getting the aircraft up to a blistering top speed of 161kph – but not for very long.

Fully juiced, the pilots were working with an aircraft that could maybe travel 1400km in a single session.

London to Cape Town is a 9,670km flight. There would need to be stops along that way. Lots of them.

Pushing the aircraft to its limits, Ryneveld and Brand developed engine trouble while crossing the Mediterranean in foul weather that slowed progress to an absolute crawl.

After 11 hours in the air, in the dead of night, they were forced to make a perilous night landing in what is now South Sudan, despite a lack of any airstrip. They managed to pilot the plane to the ground, and then directly into a pile of rocks, all but destroying it.

Some panicked communications from Jan Smuts to the British air force ended with the loan of a second Vickers Vimy to the pair, so they could continue the journey – and they once again took off in pursuit of Cockerell and Broome.

The English pair made the pursuit a lot easier by binning their plane during takeoff from an airstrip in Tanzania, destroying the plane and leaving them to finish the journey by car.

The pressure was off, leaving Ryneveld and Brand to take a more leisurely pace, which they enjoyed until leaving on the final leg of their journey, flying from Bulawayo where hundreds of spectators gathered to watch the pair get their plane about five feet off the ground and fly at top speed into a grove of trees.

Smuts, again, came to the rescue, sending a De Havilland DH9 aircraft that had been a thank-you gift from Britain to South Africa after WWI – and it was in that place, a month and a half after leaving London, that Ryneveld and Brand completed their journey – utterly dismayed to learn that their luggage had accidentally been sent to a different airport altogether.

The lesson here is about perseverance, and the importance of having rich, powerful friends to bail you out when things go bad.

But, in the absence of that, then being armed with good information means that you’re far less likely to need a friend like Jan Smuts.

That’s why Christian’s been hard at work stealing my headlines to put together his look at what’s happening on the market this week, and there’s probably something else important but I’ve forgotten who’s doing what this week and I’m too afraid to ask.

So, allow me to dazzle you with a baffling array of words and numbers, while I make a hasty getaway before somebody more senior than me realises I’ve got no idea what I’m doing, and starts to get really shouty.

 

COMMODITY/FOREX/CRYPTO MARKET PRICES

Gold: US$2,039.56 (-0.75%)

Silver: US$22.655 (-2.14%)

Nickel (3mth): US$15,984.00/t (-0.18%)

Copper (3mth): US$8,271.61/t (+1.02%)

Oil (WTI): US$72.28 (-2.09%)

Oil (Brent): US$77.30 (-1.78%)

Iron 62pc Fe: US$135.55/t (+0.38%)

AUD/USD: 0.6513 (-0.37%)

Bitcoin: US$43,040.90 (-0.33%)

 

WHAT GOT YOU TALKING

Rueben Adams has done what Reubs does best – by getting to the bottom of how the phrase “50g bag of dicks” ended up buried deep in the explanation of sampling techniques in an ASX announcement from Great Boulder Resources.

 

 

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:

In very, very late mail on Friday afternoon, Bougainville Copper (ASX:BOC) went from zero to hero, climbing better than 128% in less than 90 minutes, and only stopping there because the bell rang and everybody had to go home – which was amazing to watch, but really irritating because it meant that huge slabs of our market wrap needed to be re-written in a terrible hurry, and really… who wants to be panic-working at 4:45pm on a Friday?

The astonishing run happened on news that the company has been awarded a five-year extension to its EL01 exploration licence for the Panguna project in Central Bougainville.

This is huge news for BOC, and caps a horrifying five-year wait to see how the chips were going to fall, after the Autonomous Bougainville Government basically said “nope – not yours” to BOC over Panguna, and the political and legal fighting began.

Mako Gold (ASX:MKG) was shining happily and making great headway on news that rock chip sampling at the Tchaga North prospect within its Napié project in Côte d’Ivoire has discovered gold-mineralised areas with top assays of up to 79.5g/t gold.

Delorean (ASX:DEL) was moving upwards for the second time last week, up another 25% on Friday to take the company past +66.6% for the year so far – the only news we’ve had from them is the quarterly that dropped earlier in the week.

Metallica Minerals (ASX:MLM) and Freedom Care Group (ASX:FCG) are on the move for reasons known only to them, and Yandal Resources (ASX:YRL) has jumped a Richie Benaud-pleasing 22.22%, on news that the company has received firm commitments for 31.2 million shares at $0.08 a pop, set to raise A$2.5 million before costs, with the money earmarked to accelerate exploration.

Most of the afternoon’s big winners were little companies making decent jumps on no news – including HitIQ (ASX:HIQ) , Dubber Corp (ASX:DUB) and Gold Hydrogen (ASX:GHY), with the latter possibly getting some belated love from the investor prezzo it dropped on Thursday morning.

 

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:

Wordpress Table Plugin

 

TRADING HALTS

M3 Mining (ASX:M3M) – pending an announcement pertaining to a material capital raising.

Sultan Resources (ASX:SLZ) – pending an announcement by the company in relation to a capital raisin.

Aurum Resources (ASX:AUE) – for the purposes of considering, planning and executing a capital raising.

European Lithium (ASX:EUR) –  pending an announcement in connection with an update on a NASDAQ merger transaction, the timing of the special meeting of Sizzle shareholders and an update on the potential investments from strategic parties.

Capstone Copper (ASX:CSC) – pending an announcement in connection with a Canadian “bought deal” capital raising of common shares.

Credit Intelligence (ASX:CI1) – pending an announcement in relation to receipt of a Writ of Summons via e-mail from Mr. Ka Sek Wong, a former director and a current substantial holder of the company.

 

 

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