As I put these gnawed and bloody fingertips to the keys on this penultimate Friday of CY21 trade, our utterly unreliable measurement of corporate progress, the S&P/ASX200 is about 0.6%, or 42 points higher.

What does it mean?

It’s been a week where these numbers, while certainly pregnant with some kind of profound, underlying significance, come to nought beyond the fact the top 200 index is virtually unchanged over the last five drawn-out sessions of volatile trade.

Where am I?

The squeeze is back on the BNPL crowd as US regulators helped inspire an overnight tech sell-off stateside, while gold futures jumped 2% to US$1,798.20 an ounce and iron ore added US$5.00 or 4.6%.

Whose portfolio is this?

In short, it’s been exactly the kind of senseless, tepid, tediously monochromatic and creatively etiolated week of trade that highlights just how effervescent, accurate and exciting it is to be a small cap investor in a big pond.

Now. Back to business…

How did this week’s IPOs perform?

It’s been another busy one in IPO land, but the locals are showing signs of fatigue.

It seems like all the really good drugs, the highs are getting lower and the buzz is getting briefer.

Of note however, Avada Group founder Dan Crowley propped up the Wallabies World Cup winning front row in ‘91 and now he’s (insert appropriate prop joke here…) on the ASX.

Crowley’s AVADA Group (ASX:AVD) manages traffic (not a metaphor), raising some $32.5m at $1 a pop, giving it an implied market cap of well over $70m.

AVD has all the right clients – state and local governments, federally funded contractors and major utilities, infrastructure, construction, telecommunications and other industrial sector contractors. With an hour to play, AVD shares are trading at 93 cents.

It raised $32.5m at $1 per share in its IPO and will have an implied market cap of $73m on listing.
Cloud-based corporate and mid-tier enterprise marketing solutions IPO of the week?

Well, it was all XPON Technologies (ASX:XPN) closing its first day of trade at 24.5c, an almost 25% improvement on the post $12.5m at 20c per share Wednesday kick off.

XPN is “uniquely positioned at the intersection of converging trends,” … trends involving data privacy, adtech, martech, AI, machine learning and marketing technology, CEO Matt Forman said.

There was also a CX stack, some agile delivery talk, lots of unlocking value and stuff about hyper-growth.
But really, that all got lost in the forecast that martech in Australia and Europe alone will be worth more than $200 billion by 2025.

Thursday featured a property firm IPO double-header on the local index with a combined cap raise in the realm of $700m.

Qualitas Ltd (ASX:QAL) doesn’t invest in real estate per se, but instead snaps up the rich debt available in Australia’s real estate loans market.

Over at property developer Winton Land (ASX:WTN) the focus is on the retirement village sector, particularly over in the land of the long white hair, where the company has a development pipeline of more than 7000 residential dwellings.

WTN raised $350m at $3.89 per share in its IPO giving it an implied market cap of ~$1.15bn. Shares are flat on Friday at $3.76. QAL raised $335m at $2.50 and after climbing 4% on debut is 0.2% higher on Friday at $2.60.

ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS

Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for December 13 – December 17 [intraday]:

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ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS

Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for December 13 – December 17 [intraday]:

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