Sharing is hard and sharing in markets is harder. In fact now I pause a moment ‘sharemarkets’ is probably not a good name, actually.

There’s lots of other people involved and other people are generally difficult. Which is just another reason why we had another volatile week on the bourse.

Lots of people got more worried about central bank rate hikes and China’s just delightful approach to Covid-lockdowns, so despite what have been some upbeat earnings (FFS, lookit the FAANG’s) lot’s of people have found it hard not to dote over the vagaries of war, pestilence, inflation and Elon Musk.

Despite a retreat to last month’s lows, the American markets have stubbornly – some might suggest pigheadedly – refused to bend to the bare facts of this week and climbed right out of that hole. The more pragmatic, less super-powerish European, Japanese, Chinese and Australian markets have all fallen.

At home, sharp falls in IT, resources and health stocks took the ASX200 lower, despite a solid last few days. The ASX Emerging Companies (XEC) Index has trimmed the losses of a tough week to just 4.5%.

AMP Capital’s Emir of Economics, Dr Shane Oliver says yes, tough times, but on the whole we’re doing pretty well.

“While the pullback in commodity prices from overbought levels in the short-term may weigh, Australian shares are likely to continue to outperform over the medium-term as the commodity super-cycle continues and as higher bond yields (compared to the pre-covid era) weigh on tech stocks.”

Dr Oliver says global bond yields may’ve also pulled back a bit from the nutty highs of late, but not here. Here they’ve kept climbing.

And, yes. There is a commodity super-cycle going on.

With a great many resources companies and not a great lot of tech names, Aussie markets are quietly giving it to the rest of the world (RoW). Yes, the main indices are dead flat, squashed and of the general height, shape and appearance of a pancake and/or pikelet for the trading year to date, but that doesn’t mean we can’t thumb our noses at everyone else while then opportunity presents itself.

European markets are down 12%. Wall Street 10%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng has been totally traumatised, (I know I have and I was only watching) and in Japan equities have shed 7%, but it’s the Yen which might be better off skipping 2022 altogether.

Shall we do the commodities? I’ll just cut and paste from every week since Ukraine: Oil rose and fell and rose. Base metals and iron ore prices fell, then spiked, then fell.

 

How did this week’s IPOs perform?

Listing on Tuesday like it’s been doing this stuff its whole life, fresh debut Lithium Plus Minerals (ASX:LPM) listed today after IPOing at $10m at $0.25 – and its share price has gone nuts.

The company nabbed a cornerstone investment from Suzhou CATH Energy Technologies, a subsidiary of CATL which is the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer.

LPM is focused on exploring its 19 granted exploration licences and three exploration licences under application in the Bynoe and Arunta regions in the Northern Territory.

Not at all hurting is the fact that its flagship Bynoe project is adjacent and along strike to Core Lithium’s (ASX:CXO) Finniss lithium mine which has which has a current mineral resource estimate of 14.7 Mt at 1.32% Li2O.

Several of the key Bynoe prospects are directly along strike from Core’s BP33 deposit, where recent core drilling returned crackerjack high-grade spodumene-rich, rather fab intersections – including this stonker – 57.35m at 1.83% Li2O and 51.0m at 1.63% Li2O.

Spodumene has also been rather toppy on global markets. It was trading at an average price of $US3,263 at the start of April. That’s a gain of 504% over the past year.

Also listing, but not quite with the same panache was Halo Technologies (ASX:HAL), which traded lower after debuting this week. The global-focused financial research and trader services business says it intends to head off internationally and buddy up with like-minded trading platforms using it’s more than $36 million IPO kitty. At 58 cents it’s lost almost half its value.

And Maronan Metals (ASX:MMA) started trading on the ASX on Friday after its $15m IPO.

The company is a spin-out of Red Metals (ASX:RDM) and is focused on its namesake lead-silver-copper-gold project in Queensland, which has an existing 2 million tonne lead, 105Moz silver, 170,000t copper and 300,00oz gold resource.

It is in the mineral-rich Carpentaria Province, which hosts multiple Tier 1 lead-zinc-silver mines like Mount Isa, George Fisher, Century, Cannington, Dugald River and significant copper deposits including Mount Isa, Ernest Henry, Osborne, and Eloise.

MMA plans to drill for additional shallow, copper-gold and lead-silver mineralisation as well as the potentially larger, higher-grade copper-gold and lead-zinc-silver extensions at depth in the September quarter.

 

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for April 25 – 29:

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Plucky WA explorer BMG Resources (ASX:BMG) just kept surging this week following some cracking results out at Abercrombie.

BMG hit thick, high-grade gold in drilling at ‘Capital’ — part of the ‘Abercrombie’ project — including a cherry on top – 31m at 6.18g/t gold. This was part of a broader 77m intersection grading ~3g/t from 116m.

So far, drilling has more than doubled the mineralised envelope at Capital to 550m long and 520m deep, while the deposit remains open in multiple directions.

 

ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for April 25 – 29:

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There wasn’t too much solace this week for investors of Solis Minerals (ASX:SLM), who were really looking for more this week. The digger fell on Thursday by around 30% following the release of assay results from the copper mineralised system at its Mostazal copper project in Chile.

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