Thirty growth-focused small caps are gathering at the Gold Coast Investment Showcase 2018 this week to present their stories to investors.

It’s great timing too.

The ASX Small Ordinaries index hit a near ten-year high of 2,922 today.

Here are some of the conference’s Day Two highlights so far:

SelfWealth managing director Andrew Ward said his business told investors “our main Intellectual Property is the wisdom of the crowd”.

The company (ASX:SWF) listed in November 2017 at a 20c issue price, offering a fixed fee brokerage platform and social network which lets users see insights from other Selfwealth members’ investment returns. The share price went as low as 12c in January but is up 16% over the past two months, now sitting at 14.5c.

Mr Ward said the biggest strength of the platform going forward is it provides its 50,000 user base with stock sentiment insights because its network can reveal how bullish investor are on companies.

“What are they [investors] thinking into the future? That’s a greater indication of how a stock will do,” he said.

Galena Mining is up 190% since listing on the ASX last September, with the lead miner sitting at 14c this morning.

Chief executive Ed Turner was emphatic “lead is not dead”, saying that a review of the London Metal Exchange shows not enough new lead explorers have launched in recent years, which has put lead prices on an upwards trend.

“World consumption of lead is up 57% over the last 15 years,” Mr Turner said.

There is still a strong reliance on lead batteries and lithium options are still only emerging, meaning there’s still room to grow in the lead battery sector, he said.

Galena’s (ASX:G1A) project is the Abra Lead-Silver site in Western Australia, with a pre-feasibility study due for completion around September. When it starts producing, Galena will become the fifth or sixth biggest lead producer in the world, Turner said.

Meanwhile, Meteoric Resources managing director Andrew Tunks says investors should strap themselves in for plenty of driling action from the cobalt miner.

Weather conditions are currently great for exploration at Meteoric’s (ASX:MEI) Ontario cobalt project, with plenty of drilling news in the pipeline, Mr Tunks said.

Biotech businesses will dominate today’s proceedings, with company bosses discussing how their plans will deliver long-term upside potential.

Cancer drug developer Kazia Therapeutics championed its novel approach as a biotech company in the business of finding and holding undervalued drug development projects.

The company (ASX:KZA) currently has one brain cancer drug, GDC-0084 in phase one clinical trials and ovarian cancer drug Cantrixil in development, currently in phase one trials.

Kazia boss James Garner said the strength of the business was that it is “not anchored to one particular piece of research”, but instead searches for the “best drugs we can find where, for whatever reason they are not being done best by their parent companies.”

Neuroscientific Biopharma non-executive chairman Brian Leedman championed the Alzheimer’s-fighting drug the company is getting set to trial could be “the greatest drug of all time”.

“There can’t be a bigger prize than finding a treatment for dementia.”

The Perth business (ASX:NSB) has raised $6m in an oversubscribed initial public offer and plans to list on the ASX in the middle of next month. Leedman said the business was optimistic its drug, which has so far only be tested in rats, that it can regenerate neurons and then capture the attention of buyers.

“As we go through the clinical trial program, we will get the attention of big pharma, and they will buy us,” Mr Leedman said.