Rise and Shine: Everything you need to know before the ASX opens

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Monday, 23 October – a date on the calendar that proved to be quite momentous for music lovers, in 1998 and then again in 2001.

In 1998, seminal ex-Disney starlet Britney Spears released … Baby One More Time, gifting the world the beginnings of what future scholars will undoubtedly be describing as “the beginning of the end of America”.

The horrifying earworm would propel Spears well past ‘everyday popstar’ levels of fame, well out into the stratospheric levels where life becomes a non-stop cavalcade of hysteria. Seemingly ill-equipped to deal with it all, Spears slowly lost her mind.

Fans will tell you “she’s back, and feeling heaps better!” these days, but is she?

Is she really?

Anyway – three years later, some yobbo named “Steve” invented a gadget called an “iPod”, which was an incredible piece of tech that killed the Compact Disc industry stone-cold dead, while allowing music lovers to have their entire collection of albums stolen at the same time.

The lesson in those two things is that nobody (probably) really knew the outcome of those two events before it all kicked off and turned the world into what it is today – but I suspect that in at least one of the examples, a small measure of forethought and reasoning would have been a tip off that disaster lurked around the corner.

It would have saved us all from being enslaved by the iPhone.

That’s why it’s important to do as much critical thinking as you can before any big decision, which is hard to do without the right info at your fingertips.

Lucky for you, while your investment decisions today aren’t all the likely to turn out to be a window into planet-breaking levels of weird behaviour, they’re still important enough for the team here to have spent hours gathering the best information we can find, to help you make the right decisions with your trading.

So… you should probably read Eddy Sunarto’s excellent Hot Money Monday, and the effervescent Christian Edwards’ look at the week that just happened, and a myopic gawp at what could be right around the corner.

And, as always, here’s all the fiddly data and digits to get you up to speed this morning as well.

COMMODITY/FOREX/CRYPTO MARKET PRICES

Gold: US$1,945.45 (+1.85%)

Silver: US$23.37 (+2.08%)

Nickel (3mth): US$18,347.50/t (+0.35%)

Copper (3mth): US$7,879.61/t (-0.61%)

Oil (WTI): US$88.30 (-0.93%)

Oil (Brent): US$92.51 (-0.55%)

Iron 62pc Fe: US$119.01/t (-0.58%)

AUD/USD: 0.6314 (-0.03%)

Bitcoin: US$29,880 (-0.80%)

WHAT GOT YOU TALKING

Quarterlies are upon us again… and one of our regular wrap ups of how things are progressing caught a bit of attention on Friday afternoon…

It’s a wrap for Q3 2023, and here are some of the latest highlights from a few #ASX juniors on their activities for the three months to the end of September. https://t.co/P4c35BhdB3

— Stockhead (@StockheadAU) October 20, 2023

MONDAY’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:

Monday’s Small Caps highlights were:

Despite a dismal day overall for the ASX, there were some standouts on Friday among the small cappers – some of them without any earth-shattering news behind them (other than a handful of AGM announcements, which are about as earth-shattering a nerf ball).

Top of the table was Balkan Mining and Minerals (ASX:BMM), which popped more than 19% for the day through the simple expedience of telling the market that the drills are spinning again at the company’s Gorge lithium project.

BMM announced on Wednesday that it had intersected visible spodumene at the Nelson pegmatite in the very first drill hole from the Gorge lithium project, adding that it’s “only the start of our drilling activity targeting pegmatite occurrences which have been identified from field work”.

Nyrada (ASX:NYR) and BCAL Diagnostics (ASX:BDX) both added around 19% despite having little to say other than sending out invites to their upcoming AGMs.

And Tesoro Gold (ASX:TSO) continued on its merry way into the happier end of market movements, putting another 14.5% on top of its recent against-the-grain gains, thanks to the company defining a solid new gold discovery at Drone Hill, west of the Ternera gold deposit in Tesoro’s El Zorro gold project in Chile.

MONDAY’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:

TRADING HALTS

Lincoln Minerals (ASX:LML) – Pending an announcement in connection with a capital raising.

Calidus Resources (ASX:CAI) – Pending an announcement in relation to a significant transaction in relation to Pirra Lithium.

Atlantic Lithium (ASX:A11) – Pending the release of an announcement regarding permitting of the Ewoyaa lithium project.

Latin Resources (ASX:LRS) – Pending the release of an announcement in relation to a

capital raising.

Chimeric Therapeutics (ASX:CHM) – Pending an announcement in relation to new data for Phase 1A CLTX CAR T brain cancer clinical trial.

Kingsrose Mining (ASX:KRM) – Pending the release of an announcement of drilling results from the Company’s Råna Project.