Weekly ASX Small Cap Wrap: It’s a bright, shiny time

After last week’s rather dreary news, Australians cheered the rescue of little Cleo, and lithium believers had their faith rewarded as sentiment for the battery metal continued to improve.

Lithium plays dominated the news (negatively in one notable instance) with at least one explorer becoming a 10-bagger on the back of sentiment and its securing approval to start exploration drilling.

While you were watching the Melbourne Cup the ASX retreated, the RBA hinted an interest rate hike could be coming sooner than 2024, and engineering service provider RemSense Technologies (ASX:REM) had a sizzling debut, gaining 165%.

The RBA said that a rate hike in 2023 was now plausible but it said a hike in 2022 – which some economists have begun to predict in the last month – was unlikely.

The ASX rose 0.48% on Thursday to reach its highest point in the week, despite the US Federal Reserve unveiling a tapering of stimulus, notwithstanding it promised to be patient on raising interest rates.

And the ASX (ASX:ASX) revealed a whopping $20.3 billion in capital had been raised in October 2021, up 166% on 12 months ago. It also reported a 15% rise in the average number of trades and that the value of securities held in CHESS was 27% higher.

Markets are poised to close higher this week with the ASX200 currently up 1.95% from Monday’s open to 7,466.7 points.
 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for October 29 – November 5 [intraday]:

Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:

Prime Media Group (ASX:PRT) +87%

Shares in the communications company soared after it agreed to sell its business and assets to Seven West Media for $131.9m.

Major shareholders with 43.5% of Prime’s shares have already confirmed that they will vote in favour of the transaction.

Cannindah Resources (ASX:CAE) +85%

The company raised $1.5m through a placement of shares priced at 31c to existing major shareholder Paul Weel.

Cannindah is also continuing its diamond drilling program at the Mt Cannindah gold-copper project.

Marquee Resources (ASX:MQR) +71%

Marquee has added couple of North American lithium and copper-gold projects to its portfolio.

The ‘Kibby Basin’ lithium project in Nevada is ~50km from Ioneer’s (ASX:INR) advanced Rhyolite Ridge lithium boron project, and 60km from Marquee’s existing ‘Clayton Valley’ lithium project.

It also picked up the historical Lone Star copper-gold mine in Washington State, which comes with a non-JORC resource of ~200,000oz gold and ~15,000 tonnes copper. A 5,000m drilling campaign begins here on 15 November.

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for October 29 – November 5 [intraday]:

Swipe or scroll to reveal full table. Click headings to sort:

4DS Memory (ASX:4DS) -47%

Shares in the company dived after testing of its Third Non-Platform Lot and Second Platform Lot wafers found that the endurance of the Third Non-Platform Lot memory cells had potentially degraded compared to the Second Non-Platform Lot performance reported in February.