Weekly ASX Small Cap Wrap: ASX takes direction from Wall Street gains

Australian stocks are set to snap a multi-week stay in the red sea after the local bourse took its cue from Wall Street. It closed higher after the US Senate reached a deal to avoid defaulting on debts.

The short-term raise in debt ceiling will extend through to December.

Miners and tech companies led the way today, but the big winner this week is Energy, with the Energy Index climbing 4.5% for the week to date.

The benchmark ASX200 is up 1.82% for this week to 7,316.3 points.
 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for October 1 – October 8 [intraday]:

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Jade Gas Holdings (ASX:JGH) +995%

Australia’s latest gas play is also the market’s biggest gainer this week. The near 10-bagger, formerly High Grade Metals, relisted on the ASX with a coalbed methane project in Mongolia.

While the TTM CBM project has a defined coal resource, its claim to fame is that it is surrounded by Elixir Energy’s Nomgon IX CBM project where drilling has intersected coals despite not having a defined coal resource.

TTM CBM also has gross best case prospective resource of 1Tcf of gas.

YPB Group (ASX:YPB) +100%

The product authentication company made gains this week after announcing it’s secured a commercial trial in the Southeast Asian market for MotifMicro1 (MM1) — its anti-counterfeit solution that can be read by a smartphone.

Its Malaysian client, Holographic Label Sdn. Bhd, has been in the security printing industry for over 20 years.

The agreement “provides a framework for HLSB to order MM1 from YPB, pursuant to purchase orders. HLSB placed its first order for US$4,000 of MM1”, YPB said.

Sunstone Metals (ASX:STM) +82%

Big porphyry discoveries are always welcome as Sunstone Metals demonstrated this week after making a monster intersection from a depth of just 11m at its El Palmar project in Ecuador.

Assaying of the intersection returned 480.85m at 0.41g/t gold and 0.15% copper (0.66g/t gold equivalent) from 11.3m, including 163.55m at 0.71g/t gold and 0.20% copper (1.05g/t gold equivalent) from 52.35m.

While porphyries typically have low grades, this is offset by their easy-mining large volumes.
 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for October 1 – October 8 [intraday]:

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FYI Resources (ASX:FYI) -45%

Shares in FYI continued sinking this week after last week’s fall.

The company had reached a binding agreement with Alcoa that would see the mining giant take up more than 50% of the joint venture high purity alumina refining project.

Sensera (ASX:SE1) -35%

Investors punished the company after it revealed today that key customer NanoDX had decided to go with a different design that did not use Sensera’s MicroElectroMechanical Systems for its rapid COVID testing.

This comes after testing to interface MEMs structures into a nanowire-based technology solution found that it did not scale up to high-volume manufacturing.