Good morning everyone, and welcome to Thursday, October 3, 2024 – an important date in the history of being, like, super weird.

That’s because it was on this day in 1849 that American writer Edgar Allen Poe was found lying in a gutter in Baltimore, utterly delirious and babbling like a lunatic.

It remains unclear what had caused his breakdown, but if his body of writing work is anything to go by, there were almost certainly a significant number of screws loose in Poe’s noggin.

According to historians, Poe is considered “the first well-known American writer to earn a living by writing alone, which resulted in a financially difficult life and career” – a theme that I, and many of my colleagues, know all too well.

Poe died in hospital a few days after he was found on the street, wearing someone else’s clothes, with his death attributed to “congestion of the brain”, which is mid-19th Century doctor-speak for a range of maladies, including alcoholism, syphilis and rabies.

After his death, a rival of Poe’s called Rufus Wilmot Griswold penned a scathing obituary under a false name, like a total flog.

In it, he accused Poe of being a crazy person who “walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned)”.

Joke’s on him, though – Poe is widely remembered as a tortured genius, despite an eight-year campaign by Griswold to drag his name into the mud.

Luckily for you, you won’t actually have to catch a hideous disease in your nether regions in order to get your hands on good pre-market info today.

That’s because – as always – we’ve worked super-hard to gather together lots of fiddly little things below, so you don’t need to go ferreting all over the internet for your ASX info this morning.

 

COMMODITY/FOREX/CRYPTO MARKET PRICES

Gold: US$2,651.40/oz (-0.44%)

Silver: US$31.75/oz (+1.11%)

Nickel (3mth): US$17,514/t (+3.05%)

Copper (3mth): US$10,059/t (+0.81%)

Zinc: US$3,179/t (+1.13%)

Oil (WTI): US$72.17/bbl (+3.34%)

Oil (Brent): US$75.77/bbl (+2.99%)

AUD/USD: 0.689 (+0.18%)

Bitcoin: US$60,971 (-3.93%)

 

WHAT GOT YOU TALKING

Tim Boreham’s Health Check column has been a great addition to Stockhead‘s regulars, singling out biotech and healthcare movers and shake-outs from morning trade. Look out for it around midday, Monday to Thursday.

 

YESTERDAY’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

 

Yesterday’s Small Cap Winners included:

Hydration solutions company The Hydration Pharmaceuticals Company (ASX:HPC) is crushing it today with a triple-digit gain after announcing that it has completed the sale of its non-US assets. HPC entered into a deal to sell its intellectual property to Prestige Consumer Healthcare, which includes the rights to certain technologies. HPC received about US$9.45 million  from this sale.

Askari Metals (ASX:AS2) was up after a strategic review of its Mt Maguire gold project in WA’s Pilbara identified extensive gold mineralisation over a prospective 8km strike length of untested shear zones. Historical results include high-grade intercepts of 2m at 12.14g/t gold from 35m as well as broader gold intercepts such as 31m at 0.84g/t from 20m, including 1m @ 6.74g/t from 25m.

archTIS (ASX:AR9), a global provider of data-centric security solutions for the secure collaboration of sensitive information rallied today Somewhat topical, as its share price move is based on a military/defence angle, with the company announcing the signing of a $2.3 million contract to expand NC Protect licenses with the Australian Department of Defence.

This follows on from the $700K services contract awarded in June 2024 and, says the company, establishes its NC Protect product as the data-centric security option of choice for Defence SharePoint on-premises deployments.

Reward Minerals (ASX:RWD) has finally cut a slice into Kalium Lakes’ (ASX:KLL) failed Beyondie project, purchasing the project’s sulphate of potash (SOP) plant for $2.13m, so it can take it apart and build a new facility for its Carnarvon potash project.

After announcing the deal on Monday the company surged on the release of an investor presentation this morning. RWD had previously announced intentions to purchase the Beyondie project from collapsed miner Kalium Lakes in November last year, yet in a failed attempt to raise $22.7m for the transaction those plans fell through.

Now, it’s ended up with Beyondie’s SOP plant instead for a tenth of the cost, planning to reconstitute the infrastructure from the remote inland development close to the WA coast. That compares to the astonishing $466m of sunk investment that went into the project on its opening in 2021, before operational failures across the board and substantial cost blowouts forced its closure not even a year later and Kalium Lakes went down along with close to $80m of taxpayer funding.

BPM Minerals (ASX:BPM) is continuing its run up the charts as it raises $1.675m to drive exploration efforts at its Claw project where it will focus on follow up exploration of its 30m thick Louie gold discovery that grades at 1.84g/t. The explorer’s hunting ground is just south of Capricorn Metals (ASX:CMM) 3.24Moz Mt Gibson gold project, which is on track to become one of WA’s next big gold mines. It’s also waiting on whitecoats (lab jockeys) to assay 40 AC drill holes it completed across 2129m, while gearing up for a a planned 2500m RC drill campaign that’s pegged to kick off towards the end of the year.

Digging for red metal in one of the world’s richest copper regions – Chile’s Coquimbo – surface trenching at Culpeo Minerals (ASX:CPO)’s El Quillay South prospect at its Fortuna project have turned up thick intersections of copper including a best sample of 46m at 0.9% CuEq.

There’s a bunch of world-class copper mines in the country – the largest producer in the world. Coquimbo alone, located around 400km north of the capital Santiago, boasts major mines such as the 350,000tpa Los Pelambres, owned by Antofagasta – about the same output as BHP’s (ASX:BHP) entire South Australian copper division. The El Quillay structure has now been mapped over a strike length of >3km, with historic sampling returning copper mineralisation with widths of up to 43.1m at 1% copper and 1.31g/t gold.

Trigg Minerals (ASX:TMG) has triggered targets for drilling across the historical Taylors Arm antimony (Sb) project – which is known for the highest grades of the stuff ever discovered in Australia (63% Sb) and is in the vicinity of Larvotto Resources’ (ASX:LRV) well-known Hillgrove antimony deposit.

The company has gained a lot of interest over its recent antimony acquisitions across the Taylors Arm portfolio and the nearby Spartan project in NSW. That’s because antimony is in high demand after becoming another victim of China’s export restriction roulette and forcing the rest of the globe to shore up supply chains of the stuff elsewhere.

Usually produced as a by-product, prices of the material used in high tech applications are now pushing past the US$25,000/t mark, allowing miners to now consider antimony as a primary source of income from a projects. That’s exactly what TMG is looking at doing with its acquisitions and has just generated additional targets to 71 historically producing ultra-high grade antimony workings and mines. The explorer is now going over all the data with a fine-toothed comb to generate high-priority targets.

YESTERDAY’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

Shares in antibody drug developer Patrys (ASX:PAB) lost half their value after the company cancelled its lead drug program PAT-DX1 as a result of manufacturing “challenges”.

The company said while the drug material met manufacturing standards, it did so with a lower margin than previously and thus was deemed unsafe to use in human trials.

The company adds that given its experience with “potential product deterioration” when PAT-DX1 is stored long term, “the risk of potential safety issues from using this batch of PAT-DX1 is not acceptable.”

 

TRADING HALTS

Australian Pacific Coal (ASX:AQC) – Proposed cap raising

Frontier Energy (ASX:FHE) – Discussions regarding tranche two of placement

Live Verdure (ASX:LV1) – Proposed cap raising

White Cliff Minerals (ASX:WCN) – Pending an announcement

 

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Pan Asia Metals, Future Battery Minerals, Argent Minerals, Culpeo Minerals, Trigg Minerals, Strickland Metals, and Brightstar Resources, Western Yilgarn and White Cliff Minerals are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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