Top 10 at 11: Military body armour is the hot ticket item on the ASX this morning

Good morning, and welcome to Stockhead’s Top 10 at shortly-before-11-ish, which is meant to highlight the best (and sometimes worst) performing ASX stocks in morning trade using live data, to provide a short, sharp update to help frame the trading day by showing the biggest movers in percentage terms that have made announcements.

The market opens at 10am (eastern time) and the data is taken at 10:15am, once every ASX stock has started trading.

Briefly, here’s what’s been happening already this morning: Wall Street fell sharply overnight, giving rise to fears of another bloodletting on the ASX this morning. However, US index futures rebounded in after hours trading, giving local investors a solid footing to mount a recovery on the ASX.

So far, so good – the ASX 200 is down slightly, but holding ground around break even over the opening 30 minutes of the session, with the banks leading the way in early trade.

WINNERS

Stocks highlighted in yellow have made market-moving announcements (click headings to sort).

Security	Description	Last	%	Volume	MktCap
MHI	Merchant House	0.06	50.0	126,401	$3,770,660
HLX	Helix Resources	0.003	20.0	6,543,396	$8,160,484
ME1	Melodiol Glb Health	0.0015	50.0	716,084	$789,420
RIL	Redivium Limited	0.003	50.0	322,000	$5,461,710
KPO	Kalina Power Limited	0.004	33.3	1,000,000	$7,459,182
MOM	Moab Minerals Ltd	0.004	33.3	1,367,654	$2,381,443
MSG	Mcs Services Limited	0.004	33.3	275,000	$594,299
OAR	OAR Resources Ltd	0.002	33.3	349,068	$4,833,150
TGH	Terragen	0.026	30.0	1,130,280	$7,381,623
HCL	Highcom Ltd	0.175	25.0	1,196,197	$14,375,574

HighCom (ASX:HCL) was climbing on Tuesday, off the back of a double dose of good news for the company. Tuesday saw the announcement of a $2.5 million order for the company’s ballistic armour from an undisclosed military customer, which followed a similar announcement yesterday of an $8.9 million order from a similarly undisclosed buyer.

Merchant House (ASX:MHI) was also up Tuesday morning after delivering a note to investors which is actually a bit of a bummer. The company has decided to jettison its American Merchant Inc textile factory in the US, because it’s currently losing around $3.7 million every year. Once the land and assets have been sold, Merchant House says it will explore options to delist from the ASX altogether.

A noteworthy mention this morning is the presence of BetaShares Crypto Innovators ETF (ASX:CRYP) on the winners list, up 17% on Tuesday after the crypto market had a shockingly bad weekend which saw steep losses almost across the board for the major cryptocurrencies and altcoins.

And because there’s not a whole lot of news to write about in here today, the one stock losing ground due to an announcement this morning was Audinate (ASX:AD8) , which revealed that it’s had a bumper end to FY24 with revenue increasing nicely, however the outlook for FY25 isn’t looking quite so rosy, with significant market headwinds likely to put a strain on the company’s bottom line over the next 12 months.

LAGGARDS

Stocks highlighted in red have made market-moving announcements (click headings to sort).

Code	Company	Price	%	Volume	Market Cap
NES	Nelson Resources.	0.002	-33.3	1,039,999	$1,840,783
AD8	Audinate Group Ltd	9.01	-32.4	1,570,108	$1,107,009,696
NRZ	Neurizer Ltd	0.003	-25.0	65,727	$7,609,723
RNE	Renu Energy Ltd	0.003	-25.0	1,003	$2,904,536
PSL	Paterson Resources	0.02	-23.1	10,000	$11,856,985
EMP	Emperor Energy Ltd	0.007	-22.2	60,000	$3,451,183
BCT	Bluechiip Limited	0.004	-20.0	700,000	$5,910,198
FME	Future Metals NL	0.016	-20.0	300,444	$11,500,810
FRS	Forrestaniaresources	0.022	-18.5	83,624	$4,368,215
LCY	Legacy Iron Ore	0.014	-17.6	885,262	$131,130,320