The float raised US$86 billion, more than any exchange has ever handled in one go, and the stock ran to US$225 inside the first week. Elon became the world’s first trillionaire on the way through. A title he held for about a month and a half…

Down our end of town, a brain-tech IPO listed on Thursday and had doubled by Friday, oil punched back through $100 a barrel after Houthi drones hit two Saudi tankers, uranium is finally getting some love, and Wesfarmers put $1.4 billion behind lithium.

We’ve been busy behind the scenes gearing up for a big second half. More on that shortly.

Let’s get to it.

• Three new names join the Equities Club books in August

• Evion's Madagascar mining permit lands, nearly four years on

• Oil breaks US$100 after two Saudi tankers are hit

• Brain-tech IPO Ceretas more than doubles on debut

• Wesfarmers backs lithium with a $1.4 billion expansion at Mount Holland

• Uranium at US$86 a pound as reactor pipeline grows and supply stays flat

• MRD hands its new CTO 24 million ambitious performance rights

• ECT runs 30%, then halts with an acquisition due Monday

• Twiggy becomes the biggest shareholder of the West's biggest tungsten producer

• The US House passes a US$1.15 trillion defence bill tying itself to Israel

• BHL reopens the Sister Rose tunnel, drilling now set for spring

Three New Names Land in Our Portfolio in August

Volumes have been thin since early June, and the Middle East has given anyone still on the fence a reason to stay there a few more weeks.

We said a couple of weeks back that a big month was coming. This is it.

We’ve spent that stretch in front of more management teams than we saw in the whole of last year, and the answer to almost every one was no from us. Plenty of them were good companies too.

We back a handful of names a year, and each has to be cheap and early enough today to still have multi-bag potential in front of it.

Three cleared it. One’s a gold play with ounces already in the ground. One’s a microcap plugged straight into the American data centre build. The third is a uranium explorer chasing something big enough to matter.

All three land in August. The full write-up goes out the morning each one does, and it goes to subscribers first, so get on the list.

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Four Years, One Signature, and US$263 Million

Evion Group (ASX: EVG) spent last week in a halt, waiting on Madagascar. Tuesday morning it turned up: mining permits granted.

The feasibility study for Maniry, Evion's graphite mine down in the south of the country, came out in November 2022. Everything was there. The reserve, the mine plan, the economics, all of it worked out in detail. The only thing missing was the piece of paper that lets you dig.

Then Madagascar rewrote its mining code and changed governments, and Evion's application went to the back of a queue behind a new administration. That's where it sat for the better part of four years.

Long enough that David Round, finance director when the study went out, is managing director now.

We’d wager a fair few meetings across Europe ended the same way over that stretch: “lovely the project, come back when you’ve got the permit”. Round now gets to walk into the next one with it in his hand.

Which is where this gets interesting, because Europe never stopped circling. The EU named Maniry a Strategic Project and started paying out a €3 million grant, and Evion has funding applications sitting with the European Investment Bank and Germany's KfW. It's all a lot of attention for a mine nobody was allowed to build.

The study values Maniry at US$263 million before tax across a 21-year life, with Stage 1 costing US$79.2 million to build and returning that in 3.8 years. None of those numbers moved while the paperwork sat idling.

Offtakes come next, where a buyer commits to tonnes still in the ground. A bank will also lend against that.

The market spent the week selling everything though, EVG included, down to 2.3 cents and a market cap near $18 million.

A permitted project carrying a US$263 million valuation, inside a company worth $18 million.

We hold it, and we reckon the hard part’s behind them.

Two Tankers and One Hundred Dollar Oil

We said last week oil could be heading to US$100. It took four days.

On Wednesday the Houthis put drones and missiles into two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. They’d declared a blockade on Saudi shipping days earlier and claimed the ships broke it.

Brent crude went through US$100 a barrel the following day for the first time since May, closing at US$100.69, while West Texas settled at US$92.19. Oil has now run more than 30% in three weeks.

Trump said that if the Houthis do it again the US will hold Iran responsible, on the grounds the Houthis are Tehran's proxy, and hours later he told Axios he was weighing a “massive attack” on Iran.

American strikes have now run 12 nights straight, and this was the week it showed up on the screens, with the S&P 500 heading for its worst session in a month and the US 10-year yield pushing above 4.7%.

Diesel runs every drill rig a small-cap has in the ground, along with the trucks carting supplies and crew out to them, so anyone drilling through the back half of the year is spending more than budgeted.

It gets worse when you go to raise, because higher oil feeds inflation, inflation keeps rates where they are, and investors get a lot more careful about what they’ll back.

You'll feel it at the servo first, though the bigger drag is that nobody can say whether this stops at the Red Sea or spreads across the Gulf, and small-cap raises get harder while that question is open.

Ceretas Doubles While Everything Else Sags

One thing worked this week, and it was a Brisbane brain-tech that listed on Thursday.

Ceretas (ASX: CTS) came on at 25c and closed the week at 51c. Co-founder Ryan Laws told the AFR they'd been bombarded with interest, and most of the pre-IPO holders topped up, so there wasn't much stock going around on debut.

The tech comes out of the Queensland Brain Institute at UQ, where roughly $20 million of research funding sits behind firing low-intensity focused ultrasound through the skull. It works two ways.

The first is the neural circuits behind memory and the behavioural symptoms of dementia, which is where most of the $8 million raise will end up. It pays for a Phase 2 trial called CERE-CALM, running up to 66 patients with two-thirds on the treatment and the rest on a placebo.

The second is opening the blood-brain barrier, the idea being you could clear out the proteins that build up an Alzheimer's brain and get other drugs in while you're there. That one is still preclinical.

What’s behind all of it is a Phase 1 trial from 2024 that ran on 12 patients and came back safe and well tolerated, with early signs the behavioural symptoms improved.

UQ has form here. EM Vision and ResApp both came out of the university, and Pfizer paid around $180 million for ResApp in 2022 after it opened at half that.

The 66 patients being tested soon will tell you whether Thursday's buyers were early or just quick. We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Wesfarmers Bets $1.4 Billion That Lithium is Back

Eighteen months ago Albemarle shut the Kemerton refinery and hundreds of people lost their jobs, with spodumene down at US$575 a tonne and mines around the state going into care and maintenance.

On Wednesday Wesfarmers and its Chilean partner SQM signed off on a $1.4 billion expansion at Mount Holland, 500km east of Perth, with each side tipping in up to $715 million to double concentrate output from 380,000 tonnes a year to 760,000. Construction starts late next year and the first tonnes land in 2030.

Spodumene is the mineral that gets crushed and refined into battery-grade lithium, and it has run back towards US$3,000 a tonne before settling near US$2,000, which is comfortably above what it costs to dig up.

We started writing about the turn back in November, when Pilbara tripled off its lows and Barrenjoey put a US$3,250 spodumene forecast on 2026. Wesfarmers has now put $1.4 billion behind the same idea.

Plenty of people still say the oversupply's coming, and there was more of that talk this week, with Jefferies analyst Michael Simotas asking whether roughly $3 billion of total spend at Mount Holland earns Wesfarmers an acceptable return.

Wesfarmers can afford to be wrong until 2030. A junior can’t be wrong too far past its next raise, which is the whole difference between the two ends of this market.

Uranium at US$86 and a Gap That Keeps Widening

Spot uranium now sits at US$86 a pound. Demand climbs every year and supply sits about where it did a decade ago.

There are 440 reactors running around the world getting through roughly 152 million pounds a year, and they'll pay whatever it takes to keep going. Fuel is a rounding error next to the cost of running a plant, and an idle reactor costs an operator far more than an expensive pound of uranium ever will.

Another 79 reactors are under construction. Add the 120 planned and the 326 proposed and global capacity more than doubles from here.

Germany switched off its last three reactors in 2023 and the argument about whether that was clever hasn't quietened down since. Plenty of countries that spent the past 20 years backing away from nuclear are now edging back towards it.

Data centres have made the case stronger for them. An AI facility wants the same steady draw every hour of every day, and nuclear does it better than almost anything.

Supply is another story, and part of it is a Cold War hangover. From 1993 to 2013 the Americans fuelled their reactors with uranium pulled out of old Soviet warheads, bought and blended down under a deal literally called Megatons to Megawatts. For 20 years, roughly one in every 10 American light bulbs ran on bombs that used to be pointed at them.

Cheap Russian fuel kept new mines off the drawing board for two decades, and a mine takes a decade or more from discovery to first production. The holes in today's supply were dug back then.

Paladin Energy (ASX: PDN) managing director Paul Hemburrow told analysts this week that utilities are already chasing supply out into the 2030s with nobody able to tell them where it comes from.

We’re uranium bulls, though only for projects with the scale to be worth the wait. Plenty more from us here.

The Pay Packet That Tells You What Mount Ridley is Building

Most executive appointments get a glance and a scroll, and Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) put one out on Wednesday that we nearly treated the same way. Then we got to the rights table on page two.

Chris Larder takes over as chief technology officer after running the metallurgy at Grass Patch since April, and he now owns the entire processing route for the heavy rare earth, scandium and gallium deposit sitting 25km north of Esperance.

Larder has spent 30 years inside Western Australian processing plants, including Alcoa's Wagerup refinery, which makes gallium, and Lynas' operation at Mt Weld. Those are the only two plants in the state already handling what MRD has in the ground.

The board then granted him 24 million performance rights, and a performance right converts into a share only if its condition is met:

• 2 million at a 6 cent share price

• 3 million on filing a patent over MRD’s own process technology

• 4 million when a pilot plant makes rare earth oxide at 99% purity

• 10 million at 15 cents, once the patent and pilot conditions are done

• 5 million when MRD sells or licenses that technology for at least $10 million

One of the brokers in our July piece backed MRD and liked the size of the clay-hosted deposit, with the caveat that the beneficiation and separation work still had to be solved. Larder now gets paid when he solves it, and paid again when a buyer hands over $10 million or more for it.

MRD is worth about $36 million today. Clear those hurdles and it should be worth a whole lot more than that.

ECT Runs 30%, Then Goes Dark

In February we published the Broker Black Book, and one of the anonymous brokers gave us Environmental Clean Technologies (ASX: ECT) as his pick of the year, at 11.5 cents and a $48 million market cap.

It went quiet for months, then ran 30% this week, so we dug his notes back out.

ECT bought a company called Terrajoule in December, and with it an exclusive licence to a Rice University method for destroying PFAS in contaminated soil.

PFAS turns up in firefighting foam and in the waterproofing on your jacket, and the carbon-fluorine bond holding it together is the strongest in organic chemistry. Nothing in the environment breaks it down (hence, the name forever chemicals).

Most treatments today just dig up the dirt and move it somewhere else. The chemicals ride along unchanged, so the paddock they left is clean and the paddock they arrive at is the new problem.

The Rice method runs a short, high-power electric pulse through contaminated soil, heating it past 1,000 degrees in seconds and snapping those bonds apart. Lab work has come back above 96% defluorination.

Robert Bilott sits on ECT’s advisory board. He’s the lawyer who took on DuPont in 1998 after a farmer walked into his office with videotapes of his cattle dying beside a contaminated creek, then spent 20 years pulling billions out of DuPont and 3M over PFAS. Mark Ruffalo played him in a film.

After 20 years of these cases, Bilott knows just about everyone sitting on poisoned ground. Since December, he’s been advising the company selling the clean-up.

ECT ran 30% this week before going into a halt on Thursday, answering an ASX price query and preparing an announcement about a potential acquisition. Trading resumes Monday unless it lands sooner.

When ECT bought Terrajoule it told the market that was the first acquisition of several. Monday tells us whether they meant it.

Twiggy Buys the Tungsten

On Monday, Andrew Forrest bought Oaktree Capital’s entire 16.8% stake in EQ Resources (ASX: EQR), a block worth roughly $190 million, making him the biggest shareholder of the largest tungsten producer in the Western world.

The stock jumped 34% to 30 cents, its best day since February 2025.

Tungsten hardens drill bits, machine tools, armour-piercing rounds and the tooling that makes semiconductors. China supplies most of the world’s and added it to its export control list last year, mid trade fight with the US. The price has run more than 200% since January.

Oaktree, a private equity firm, backed EQR in 2023 when tungsten was going cheap, funding the Barruecopardo mine in Spain and the Mt Carbine expansion in North Queensland. Private equity always sells eventually, and Twiggy took the whole block in a single trade.

Half the market follows Twiggy into whatever he buys, and the juniors sitting on tungsten and rare earths outside Chinese hands spent the week getting looks they weren’t getting a month ago.

Four Votes Carry a US$1.15 Trillion Defence Bill

The US House passed its 2027 defence bill on Wednesday by four votes, 216 to 212, authorising US$1.15 trillion of military spending.

Buried in it is Section 219, which hands a single Pentagon official the job of coordinating defence research and industrial work between the US and Israel.

The two countries already build hardware together, from Iron Dome through to counter-drone gear, and the provision would make that faster and harder to unwind. It drew objections from Democrats and a few Republicans.

Approving the spending is step one, and a second bill later in the year hands the money over. Before any of that, the House version has to be squared with a Senate version Democrats blocked last week. This bill has become law 65 years running, so it will probably get there, just not this month.

KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) sits at the far end of that pipe, making the airframes and sub-assemblies that Elbit Systems and UVision bolt into finished drones.

KTK gets paid by the contractors who hold the government contracts, so it earns off every drone shipped with its parts inside. Getting onto one of those approved supplier lists takes between one and three years, and KTK is already on them.

The company took a production and engineering facility in Los Angeles in June and applied for a licence to move parts from its Netherlands plant into the US for assembly, because American buyers want product arriving from an American address.

Black Horse Digging in at Sister Rose

We have been waiting a while for Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) to get moving, and this week gave us something to hold onto.

The company is reopening an old tunnel into the hillside at Sister Rose, and despite a wet stretch of weather it has the entrance dug out, made safe and lined so the walls stay put. That job should be finished in three to four weeks.

What they’re after is the old mine shaft sitting behind it. Find that and you know where the historic workings actually run underground, which puts the drill holes where they’ll count.

Rain has cost them time on that front, with the rig pulled off site while access tracks are rebuilt and drilling now pushed to September or October. The tracks are getting an upgrade so the wet does not stop them again.

BHL sits in our portfolio and we’re happy to wait, because of what’s underneath.

Mt Egerton produced 1.29 million ounces at roughly 12 grams per tonne before flooding forced it shut more than a century ago. The gold never ran out. The water just came in faster than the old pumps could shift it, and the miners walked off ground that was still paying.

The ground below those workings has never been drilled, and that’s the part BHL is chasing. The water might’ve won a century ago, but the pumps have come a long way since.

The Week Ahead

The next few weeks are as full as any we’ve had this year. Three new companies join the portfolio shortly, and we’re looking forward to walking you through why each one made it.

We’ll be watching the Gulf same as everyone, hoping the tankers keep sailing and the whole thing calms down. Oil at US$100 makes life harder for every explorer we cover, and cheaper fuel plus a ceasefire would suit us all.

On uranium, we’ve said our piece above, and one of our three August additions is our way of backing it.

The data centre money is the one we keep coming back to. The Americans are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the things, and so far the ASX small-cap end has barely seen a cent of it. Money that big always finds its way downhill eventually, and we plan to be there when it does.

Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 4,500,000 EVG shares, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, 187,500 shares of BHL at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, BHL, MRD and EVG at the time of writing.

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The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

And plenty of mornings paid off. A graphite plant in India banking sales. The EU signing on. A fluorspar project picked up in Nevada.

The one piece still missing was sitting on a desk in Madagascar's capital.

The wait started in November 2022, when Evion published the feasibility study for its Maniry graphite mine in southern Madagascar. The study gave Maniry a 21-year life and a value of US$263 million before tax. All it needed was a permit.

Then Madagascar rewrote its mining code and changed governments, and Evion’s application went to the back of the queue.

Nearly four years of mornings.

This morning, it appeared: Mining Permits Granted.

The Mines Ministry of Madagascar has signed off on Evion’s mining permits over Maniry. The final rubber stamp, a government decree, lands this week.

Maniry is the first critical minerals project permitted under Madagascar’s new mining code. No ASX company has been granted a graphite mining licence anywhere in the world for years.

That leaves a project worth US$263 million on paper sitting inside a company the market values at $19 million.

The EU has already named Maniry a Strategic Project, with grant money flowing and financing talks running with two of Europe’s development banks (more on that later).

David Round was the finance director when the study went out, and now he’s managing director. Today he called the grant “a transformational milestone for Maniry and for Evion”.

We’ll have David on camera in the coming days to walk through what comes next.

Let’s dig in.

What Evion Can Now Do at Maniry

Evion has held exploration ground at Maniry for years, which is the permit that lets you look. What Madagascar signed off on this morning is the one that lets you dig it up and sell it.

The grant covers every area in the feasibility study. They hold three tenements outright across 112.5 square kilometres, and Madagascar will merge them into a single mining permit, with the paperwork due this week.

This is decades of legal right to mine, on ground where the economics were worked out in detail years ago.

And what comes out of the ground is flake graphite concentrate. Meaning the ore gets crushed and the graphite separated out (it’s the same stuff as pencil lead, only this quality ends up inside the battery of every electric car on the road).

It’s also the feedstock Evion’s own plant in India turns into higher-value product, but we’ll get to that.

A permitted flake graphite mine is rare on the ASX. Syrah Resources is the only one mining natural graphite at scale, and nearly every other graphite name is still waiting on a permit or the money to build.

Evion just cleared the hurdle most of the sector is stuck behind.

Now for the numbers, straight from the 2022 definitive feasibility study:

• An initial mine life of 21 years, with an 18-year ore reserve behind it

• Stage 1 production of around 39,000 tonnes of graphite concentrate a year, growing to 60,000 tonnes from year four

• A Stage 1 capital cost of US$79.2 million

• A net present value of US$263 million before tax

• An after-tax internal rate of return of 32.65%, with the build paid back in 3.8 years

Net present value takes all the cash a project should generate over its life and squashes it into one number in today's dollars. That's the US$263 million, and it's what we meant by "on paper" up top. This permit is what starts turning paper into a mine.

The internal rate of return works like the yearly return the project earns on the money spent building it. At 32.65% after tax, Maniry pays back its build in under four years and keeps earning for another 17.

The study has Maniry producing concentrate at roughly US$640 a tonne and selling it at an average of US$1,448 a tonne.

Better than double the cost of production, on every tonne, for two decades.

Madagascar is the second-biggest graphite producer on earth behind China, with a workforce that's been mining graphite for generations (longer than most ASX companies have existed).

The India Plant Already Banking Sales

Most graphite miners sell their concentrate at market price and watch a processor somewhere else turn it into a product worth multiples more. Evion owns the somewhere else.

The company has the deposit at one end of the chain and half a processing operation at the other (the fancy term is vertical integration), and the processing piece is already banking sales.

Panthera (PGT), Evion's 50/50 joint venture near Pune in India, has been producing and selling expandable graphite into the US and Europe since March 2025, including a $1.5 million order to a US buyer in December and further orders since.

So while Maniry is still years from first production, PGT brings in cash. The company earns while it builds, which is not a sentence you get to write about many $19 million companies.

Expandable graphite holds its price at over US$3,000 a tonne because so few plants outside China can make it. Concentrate sells for less than half of that. Every step down the chain makes the same tonne of Maniry graphite worth more, and Evion keeps the margin most miners hand to someone else. And if the concentrate price sags, the downstream margin is still there.

In Germany, a scoping study has mapped a third step, a battery anode plant that would turn Maniry graphite into the material inside lithium-ion batteries.

China controls more than 70% of natural graphite supply and nearly all of the processing, and Evion’s chain has no Chinese partners anywhere in it. Buyers across the US and Europe are actively hunting for alternatives, and companies offering a full non-Chinese chain are scarce on any exchange.

Today’s grant puts a permitted, long-life mine behind everything downstream.

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The Money Talks Can Now Move

For four years, Evion has likely been making the same pitch to battery makers across Europe and development banks in Frankfurt and Luxembourg.

The pitch is a good one. A 21-year mine with double the margin on every tonne, in a country that’s been mining graphite for a century.

We’d wager a lot of those meetings ended the same way. Call us when you’ve got the permit.

At the next meeting, the permit is sitting on the table.

The buyers haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve been waiting on the same signature.

In December 2025 the EU named Evion a preferred supplier of graphite concentrate and started putting the company in front of European battery makers and industrial buyers.

Maniry is the only African graphite project the EU recognises as a Strategic Project under its Critical Raw Materials Act.

Europe wants a battery supply chain that runs outside China, and it has picked Maniry to help build it.

The next step with those buyers is an offtake, where a customer commits to buy tonnes before they’re dug. It’s the piece financiers want most, because a mine with contracted buyers means a bank can lend against it.

Evion has funding applications in with the European Investment Bank and Germany’s KfW, two banks Europe uses to get critical minerals projects built. An EU grant of up to €3 million has started flowing, with the first payment received.

Debt from banks like these would spare holders the alternative every small-cap dreads, funding a whole mine build through dilution at low prices.

Madagascar’s new president used to govern the region around Maniry and has pushed its development for years, and Evion has signed community agreements (the CSR mining contracts in today’s announcement) putting money into local development.

From here the board’s job is getting to a final investment decision, the yes that starts construction. Stage 1 costs US$79.2 million.

Between the EU, two of its banks and a grant already paying out, Evion walks toward that decision with more doors open than most $19 million companies ever see.

What We’re Watching Next

• The government decree which lands this week

• The new combined mining permit number.

• The community fund deposit (the FMISC in today’s announcement), with the amount confirmed over the coming month and likely payable before 31 October 2026.

• Offtake and financing news as the EIB and KfW talks move toward a final investment decision.

• Results from Carp in Nevada, where the sampling and survey work never stopped while Madagascar deliberated.

  ---

Four Years of Mornings

The feasibility study was published in November 2022. The permits arrived in July 2026. In between sat a rewritten mining code, a new government, a full technical review and a lot of patient work from David Round and his team.

Plenty of juniors would have walked. Evion kept Panthera shipping while it waited, and this morning Madagascar handed over the permits.

What’s left is some company. A permitted 21-year mine in the world’s second-biggest graphite producing country. The EU’s only endorsed African graphite supplier. A processing plant in India already banking revenue. A fluorspar project in Nevada on top. All of it under one ticker at 2.6 cents.

Tomorrow morning the ritual is the same. Coffee in one hand, announcements open in the other.

Only now they’re the announcements of a company with a mine to build.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 4,500,000 EVG shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by EVG at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

We’ll be up with the sparrows to watch Messi have one last crack at it. At 39, most of us are managing a mortgage and a dodgy hamstring. He’s carrying a nation. (Which can’t be good for your back)

The market spent the week doing some gambling of its own.

The US bombed Iran every night this week and oil marched toward US$90, our portfolio delivered on the resource front, biotech ran hard against a red week, and the chip selloff rolled on while the money behind AI and drones rolled in.

Let’s get to it.

• The Middle East reignites and oil could be heading to US$100 a barrel next

• Evion halts ahead of a make-or-break Maniry milestone

• Fortuna lands a top-six rutile resource, nine months after we backed it

• Biotech bucks a red week with three of the top small-cap movers

• US$1.3 trillion wiped off chips, and the AI money keeps pouring in

• Drone warfare rewrites the rules as defence billions pile up

• AZ9 drills nearly 12% copper, its best hole of the year

• A Chinese giant pays double the market price for a slice of Tartana

• Janus doubles on a big fortnight of US orders

• Mount Ridley grows its scandium without turning a drill

The Middle East Reignites, and Oil Follows

Fill up the car this weekend and you’re paying, again, for a war half a world away. Brent closed Friday at US$88 a barrel (up 19% since the fighting restarted) and servos never need long to pass that on.

The peace deal signed in June bought the region about a month of quiet. Now the US is bombing Iran nightly again and Iran’s back peppering missiles around the Gulf. Overnight, Iranian missiles killed two American soldiers in Jordan, and the US was bombing again within hours.

Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is running at about a third of peacetime levels, and on the worst days only a handful of tankers make the trip.

Trump reimposed his naval blockade and briefly declared America “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT”, with a 20% toll on every cargo passing through (which lasted all of 24 hours).

For the ancient history buffs among us, it has shades of Xerxes, the Persian king who sentenced the sea to 300 lashes after a storm wrecked one of his bridges and his plans to invade Greece. His army duly flogged the water and the water took its punishment and carried on doing as it pleased.

You suspect Trump knows the feeling.1

Despite the uptick, oil at US$88 is still a market betting the ships come back, because they always have. Tankers kept sailing through the 80s while Iran and Iraq shot at them, and when this war first kicked off in March, the panic faded within weeks. A Strait running at a third of its normal traffic says this bet is still live.

If the blockade holds, Commonwealth Bank’s Vivek Dhar has oil past US$100 within 10 days, and closer to US$150 across the hardest-hit parts of Asia if real shortfalls land.

Higher oil bleeds into everything. Petrol, freight, inflation, and eventually the rate cuts a lot of us have been banking on.

The record highs the ASX 200 hit in early March feel long gone now, and a year on the index is up less than 1%. Small-caps are caught in the middle.

Money is still finding drill results and discoveries, but the market is holding its breath, and the window that’s rewarded good news all year gets a little narrower every week the Strait stays quiet.

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Evion Halts Ahead of a Maniry Milestone

Evion Group (ASX: EVG), one of our portfolio companies, went into a trading halt on Friday, pending news on its Maniry graphite tenements in southern Madagascar.

Trading is frozen until Tuesday or an announcement drops, whichever comes first.

Maniry has been years in the making. The 2022 definitive feasibility study laid out a project producing up to 60,000 tonnes of graphite concentrate a year over a 21-year mine life, with a pre-tax NPV of US$263 million and payback under four years.

Last year Brussels handed it Strategic Project status under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, making Maniry the only project in Madagascar to get the nod and the only graphite project outside Europe the EU has recognised as a preferred source of supply.

So Europe is openly shopping for graphite that doesn't pass through Chinese hands, and of every graphite project on earth outside its own borders, it pointed at this one.

The one document still missing is the mining licence. If that lands this week, it’s the milestone EVG has been building toward for years. A granted licence is what opens up the serious conversations around financing, offtake and actually building the thing.

Add it to your watch list now.

Fortuna Lands a Top-Six Rutile Resource

Nine months ago we added Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) to the portfolio, right as it picked up its ground in Malawi. This week it came up for air and announced one of the six biggest rutile deposits on the planet.

The drilling behind it was done with hand augers (basically a giant corkscrew and a strong back). The holes averaged 8.4 metres, and most stopped at the water table, so the workers downed tools with rutile still running under their feet.

Explorers can spend years chasing a maiden resource, and plenty run out of money before they find one. So it’s notable FUN got there in nine months, with hand tools no less.

Those holes added up to a maiden resource at the Mkanda project of 298 million tonnes at 0.87% rutile, for 2.6 million tonnes of contained rutile. That, on the company’s own ranking, is top six in the world.

The aircore rigs that arrived last week drill more than three times deeper, so whatever’s sitting below the water table will get added to the resource, and maybe inch Mkanda closer to the podium.

Rutile is the preferred feedstock for titanium, and demand for the metal is set to climb hard as humanoid robots scale into mass production.

A bulk sample came back at 96.6% TiO2, cleaner than product the established producers have shipped for decades, so buyers can skip a refining step on the way to the finished metal.

Next door, Sovereign Metals sits on the same geology and trades near $330 million. FUN, now with its maiden resource in hand, sits at around $33 million.

A JORC resource is also the trigger that lets funds model the project properly, and lets management open offtake talks and development studies.

Biotech Bucks a Red Week

Every Melbourne Cup, someone backs a roughie because they like the name, and every few years the bloody thing salutes.

Biotech runs at the same odds, with a lot more riding on the win. You’re backing trial data that’s years from revenue, and the companies are having a crack at some of the hardest problems in medicine.

This week, three got up. Most of the market finished the week in the red, and the sector still landed three of the ten best moves under $100 million.

A broker in our Broker Book tipped this a few weeks back, calling ASX biotech overdue some love after a long spell out of favour.

The Americans moved first in this space (they usually do). Their small-cap biotech benchmark has run about 70% in a year on takeovers and IPO windows swinging back open, and that money tends to arrive here about a year later.

Argenica Therapeutics (ASX: AGN) ran all week, from 12.5 cents to 16 cents. Argenica is developing a drug that aims to limit brain damage after a stroke, a hard problem to crack and a huge market if the data holds up.

OncoSil Medical (ASX: OSL) moved from 1.32 cents to 1.45 cents. OncoSil makes a targeted radiation device implanted straight into pancreatic tumours, going after a cancer with grim odds and few good treatment options.

Emyria (ASX: EMD) was the pick of them, jumping from 38 cents to 49 cents. Emyria runs clinics delivering MDMA and psilocybin therapy for PTSD and depression.

Ten years ago that pill meant a strip search at the festival gates. Now it comes with a script and a follow-up appointment.

Chips Sell Off, But the Money’s Still Pouring In

Some nervous punters have spent the past few weeks sprinting for the casino exits. Since the end of June, something like US$1.3 trillion in semiconductor value has gone, with Intel alone down more than 20% and the big chip indices off double digits.

The worry is that AI spending has run too hot, too fast.

The house sees it differently, with hyperscaler capital spending on AI jumping 67% to around US$650 billion, and this week TSMC, the Taiwanese giant that manufactures advanced chips for just about everyone (Nvidia and Apple included), committed another US$100 billion to expand its US production.

TSMC sees every order book on the planet before the market does, and it's still pouring concrete. Nobody builds a bigger casino unless they’re confident the punters will return.

Every sector that runs this hard eventually stops for a breather, and to us that's all that this selloff is.

We’ve backed Adisyn (ASX: AI1) as our play on where this is all heading. Copper is the wiring inside every advanced chip, and it’s hitting its physical limits as transistors shrink below two nanometres.

AI1 is developing graphene interconnects to get past that wall, growing graphene onto chips at temperatures low enough for a factory to use.

Drone Warfare Rewrites the Rules

General Sherman once famously said war “is all hell”,2 and he’d seen the worst of the American Civil War. Even he’d struggle to comprehend what soldiers face today.

The drone has done what the machine gun did in 1914, when a century of battlefield tactics met a weapon that killed at industrial scale.

This week The AFR underlined Sherman’s bleak words from a training camp in Poland, where Australians are helping prepare Ukrainian troops for the front.

One Australian drone operator there said 85% of front-line deaths now come from drone strikes. And that around 30% of the soldiers who finish the course will be killed, or wounded too badly to fight, within months.

The men learn anyway.

Drones can now leapfrog five or six lines of defence and hit a brigade's headquarters 100km behind the front. The golden hour, the window medics once had to get a wounded soldier off the field, is gone, because the sky is never clear.

Soldiers are taught instead to keep a wounded mate alive in a trench for days, waiting for a gap that might never come.

One Australian commander summed up the grim logic: teach them to survive so they can keep killing Russians.

Europe is rearming. The first two weeks of July alone brought five of the continent's largest ever defence packages, including a NATO-wide US$40 billion counter-drone push and a German order for 50,000 AI-guided attack drones.

One drone maker raised US$1.2 billion on its own.

That capital takes time to reach the companies actually building the hardware.

KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) is our picks-and-shovels way in. KTK makes the airframes and sub-assemblies bolted inside drones from Tier-1 names like Elbit and UVision.

It’s already an approved supplier pushing into the US. At just under $40 million, it’s a rare small-cap with revenue coming through the door while the sector’s spending wave is still building.

AZ9 Drills its Best Copper Hole Yet

Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9) drilled the best copper hole of its year at the Red Hill project in Mongolia, and the grade could be mistaken for a typo.

Hole MU2605 returned 1.6 metres at 11.94% copper, with gold and silver riding alongside it. Most copper mines in the world make good money on ore grading under 1%, so a number starting with 11 turns heads. (just ask Spinal Tap)

That hit sits inside a broader copper zone, and another hole added 18 metres at just over 1% copper.

Red Hill now stretches close to 550 metres of strike and remains open to the west, east and down-dip, growing with almost every batch of assays AZ9 has reported this year.

More results land over the coming weeks, and metallurgical testwork kicks off this quarter as the company starts mapping a path toward development.

AZ9’s market cap sits under $20 million, and more than $4 million of that is cash in the bank. So the market is pricing Red Hill, and everything else the company owns, at around $15 million, while copper trades above US$13,000 a tonne off last month’s record highs.

A Chinese Giant Pays Up for Tartana

Tartana Minerals (ASX: TAT) was trading at 2 cents last week when a Chinese group agreed to pay 5.3 cents a share for a stake. We read the announcement twice to make sure we had those numbers the right way around.

Xingye, a subsidiary of Inner Mongolia Xingye Silver and Tin, is putting in $5.18 million at two-and-a-half times the market price.

The deal takes Xingye to just under 20% across two tranches, and it comes with the right to appoint directors and send in its own geologists. This is a buyer planning to roll up its sleeves and work the ground itself.

That ground sits in the Chillagoe region of Far North Queensland, prospective for copper, gold, silver, zinc and tin, with the silver projects Nightflower and Montalbion the main game.

The market nudged TAT up about 25%, to roughly half what Xingye just agreed to pay. So a silver and tin operator says the shares are worth 5.3 cents, and the screen says about half that. One of them is wrong.

Due diligence starts now, and FIRB still needs to approve the second tranche. The whole thing is due to be wrapped by mid-November.

Janus Doubles on a Big Fortnight of Orders

No company under $100 million did better on the ASX this week than Janus Electric (ASX: JNS), which doubled from 14.5 cents to 29 cents to top the board at the small end of town.

Janus converts diesel prime movers into electric trucks with a swappable battery. The driver pulls in, trades the flat battery for a charged one and gets back on the road, the same way you’d swap a gas bottle at the servo, while everyone else’s electric truck sits at a charger for hours.

A trading halt usually means a nervous couple of days for holders. Janus called two in a week, and both times came back with news worth the wait.

It came out of Monday’s halt with a US order worth around A$10 million, went back in on Wednesday, then out again Thursday with a A$45 million order on top.

That A$45 million deal signed up four new California fleet operators for 67 truck conversions, taking the US order book from four conversions at the start of the week to 87 and the North American book to 112.

California is practically paying its truckers to convert, with grants worth roughly US$166,000 per truck dragging the net cost close to zero for operators who qualify.

Not a bad week at all for holders.

Mount Ridley Grows Its Scandium Off Old Hits

Now for Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD), one of our portfolio companies.

MRD ran this whole thing off historical pulps already sitting in storage. It re-assayed the old samples for scandium and the Block 2 footprint grew in every direction.

The best hits came back at 19m at 127.68 ppm and 24m at 114.54 ppm Sc₂O₃, both well above the current 86.9 ppm resource average.

Doing it that way costs a fraction of a fresh drill program, which is the part that caught our eye. For a small explorer watching its cash, stretching old samples this far is a tidy result.

A new scandium resource estimate is the next cab off the rank, and Phase 2 re-assay work is already running on the pulps still to be tested.

Worth remembering the estimate still has to be signed off, and even then it lands as an inferred resource, the softest classification going. Treat the upside as potential until the numbers are locked.

For the wider picture, Money of Mine put out a podcast on the looming scandium squeeze as the West hunts for supply outside China. Worth a listen.

What We’re Watching

Monday morning belongs to Messi, though EVG might grab the encore. The halt runs until Tuesday at the latest, but halts can have a habit of ending early, so we'll be keeping one eye on the football and one on the announcements page.

Then it's conference season. First up is the Noosa Mining Investor Conference, July 22-24 at Peppers Noosa Resort on the Sunshine Coast, with around 74 ASX-listed companies presenting.

Noosa's one of the better rooms for finding juniors before the crowd does, and there's something about giving 74 small-cap MDs a stage and a room full of investors that always shakes news loose. We'll be listening for who's drilling and what they have to say (or not say).

On commodities, gold and uranium are still the two we keep coming back to.

Tech will probably keep wobbling from here, and we're fine with that. The selloff hasn't changed what the hyperscalers are spending or what TSMC is building.

And the Middle East stays at the top of the list. It escalated again overnight, and a ceasefire looks further away than it did on Friday. We’re still hoping for one.

Till next week.

This morning, that punt coughed up the richest interval of AZ9's 2026 program, 1.6 metres of massive sulphide grading 11.94% copper, with gold and silver riding along.

Most of the world’s copper mines make good money on ore grading under 1%, so a number starting with 11 gets the calculator out every time (and a geologist or two double-checking the lab hasn’t slipped a decimal point).

Skinny bands like this one work as signposts, and Red Hill’s copper has grown richer with every step west the drills have taken. This hole, punched 124 metres west of the drilling before it, says to keep heading west.

Red Hill now runs close to 550 metres end to end, growing longer with every batch of assays this year, and is still open along strike and down-dip.

North of the copper sits a gold corridor, and the drilling pulled 6 metres at 4.18 g/t from less than 19 metres down.

Chasing gold that shallow is about the cheapest exploration going, and any future pit would barely need to scratch the surface before it’s in ore.

The remaining assays land over the coming weeks, and metallurgical testwork starts this quarter. This is the first step towards developing Red Hill alongside AZ9’s Oval copper-nickel discovery nearby.

Each batch of assays has now made Red Hill bigger or richer, and the share price has spent the same stretch drifting the other way.

Strip out the $4.5 million in cash from the $13.5 million market cap, and at 1.7c the market is paying roughly $10 million for two copper discoveries in Mongolia.

With results still rolling in for weeks yet, it’s going to get plenty of chances to change its mind.

Today’s Results

AZ9 dropped the results of five new holes and four of them hit. Between the copper down south and the shallow gold up north, nearly every hole they’ve dug this year has added metal somewhere on the map.

The pick of today’s bunch is MU2605, where the headline 1.6 metres sits inside a hole that ran copper most of the way down. Seven metres at 0.80% from 75 metres, then another 14.2 metres at 0.55% leading straight into the massive sulphide itself.

It’s confirmation after AZ9’s geologist had eyeballed this core back in June and logged it as visually copper-rich.

A word of caution though, 1.6 metres is skinny, and spectacular grades over skinny intervals can shrink in the wash. The next round of holes needs to show how far that rich zone runs.

Even so, a grade like that only turns up in serious systems, and it suggests Red Hill could be hiding something special.

Another hole (MU2604) brought the width, 18 metres at over 1% copper from 74 metres down, with gold and silver through it and a zone of serious zinc buried inside.

The gold corridor got a nudge too, with MU2606 pushing the zone east to match up with a hit from last year's drilling about 50 metres away. It finished in copper as well, so there's something to chase northwards.

MU2608 added copper at the western end, and MU2607, drilled near the eastern licence boundary, came up largely empty (most programs have one).

Add it up and four from five is a scorecard most juniors would frame and hang in the boardroom.

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Metallurgy and the Test That Can Make a Mine

Assays from the remaining Phase 1 holes are due over the coming weeks, so the news flow will keep rolling on. Drilling is a summer sport in Mongolia, and they’re right in the middle of theirs.

Metallurgical testwork kicks off this quarter, and the recovery rate it spits out is the number we’re most keen to see. The lab will take a chunk of Red Hill rock, crush it, and measure how much of the copper can be recovered into something a smelter will pay for.

A deposit can carry all the grade in the world, but if the copper won’t separate from the rock cheaply, none of it matters.

Last year AZ9 ran the same testwork at Oval, its copper-nickel discovery eight kilometres up the road, and the copper came back at recoveries up to 95%, which is right up with the best in the business.

Pull that off again at Red Hill and suddenly AZ9 has two discoveries close enough to share the same plant and equipment.

All of this is happening with copper above US$6/lb or US$13,000 a tonne, fresh off record highs last month.

The big miners are scrambling for new supply and finding very little of it, so every decent copper discovery gets a much longer look than it did a few years back.

AZ9 is drilling one out at the right time.

From here the team feeds today’s results back into the targeting work and lines up the next round of holes.

With the system open along strike and at depth, the hardest part will be choosing where to put the rig first.

Our Take into the Back End of 2026

There’s been almost a dozen announcements on this ground since last October, and the project has come out of nearly every one bigger or richer.

Runs on the board like that usually earn a junior a re-rate, and AZ9 is still waiting on theirs.

The market values the company at $13.5 million with a third of that sitting in cash, and the longer the drills keep delivering, the harder those two numbers are to square.

Red Hill is still an exploration story and skinny high-grade hits need follow-up before anyone gets carried away. If the next batches join those rich zones together with some proper width though, AZ9 is holding two copper discoveries in one district at a valuation that assumes neither of them works.

Between now and the back end of 2026 there's a steady drip of catalysts, the remaining Phase 1 assays from Red Hill and a second prospect called Copper Ridge, the first met numbers, and a fresh round of targeting off today's results.

Cheap gets fixed eventually, and the assays keep arriving.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,150,000 AZ9 shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AZ9 at the time of writing.

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Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) just proved up one of its own.

FUN’s maiden resource, announced this morning, puts its Mkanda project in central Malawi at 298 million tonnes at 0.87% rutile, for 2.6 million tonnes of contained rutile.

On the company’s own ranking, that lands it top six on the planet.

The headline number uses a 0.7% cut-off grade, meaning only ground above that grade gets counted. Lower the bar to 0.5% and Mkanda already holds 4.43 million tonnes of contained rutile.

And FUN got all of it on hand augers alone, shallow holes averaging 8.4 metres that mostly stopped at the water table with the rutile still running underneath them.

The aircore rigs that arrived last week drill more than three times deeper.

Funds that won’t touch an explorer without a JORC resource can now run Mkanda through their models. And the company can start the studies that work out what a mine here would actually cost to build and earn.

At 10.5 cents a share, the company carries a market cap of around $33 million, with a very handy $15 million in the bank, most of it from WndrCo, the Silicon Valley fund that bought close to a fifth of the company in June.

Inside a Top-Six Resource (So Far)

Mkanda covers 658 square kilometres of the Lilongwe Plain in central Malawi, flat farming country where tropical weathering has spent a few million years quietly doing FUN's prep work.

The rain and heat broke down the rock and washed the light minerals away, and the heavy minerals (the rutile), stayed put and piled up near surface.

Within the headline number sits a higher-grade heart of 159 million tonnes at 0.98% rutile, above the average grade Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM)carries at the biggest rutile deposit in the world next door.

FUN now has both the tonnes and the grade, which is a rare thing to see in a maiden resource.

The rutile itself came back at 96.6% TiO₂ from a bulk sample earlier this month, which is higher than product the established producers have shipped for decades.

Buyers pay a premium for rutile that clean because it skips a whole refining step on the way to becoming titanium.

There’s 3.55 million tonnes of contained graphite sitting alongside it at 1.19% too, a second product that could pay its own way once the metallurgy is sorted.

Then there’s Kahuna, a prospect in the central part of the project that sits outside the resource entirely and has already returned 10 metres at 1.43% rutile. Those numbers get folded into the next update.

Digging it all up means a loader and a truck rather than explosives and a crusher, since the rutile sits in soft, weathered dirt. Mining rarely comes cheaper.

The deeper rigs that started turning last week are pointed straight at making it bigger. A maiden number this size off drilling this shallow tells you most of the deposit is still in the ground, waiting to be counted.

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The Sovereign Comparison

You can’t talk about FUN without talking about Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM), the neighbour to the north.

Sovereign owns Kasiya, has Rio Tinto on its register with just under 20%, and has pushed the project all the way through a Definitive Feasibility Study. It’s a $330 million company.

FUN is worth $33 million, and on the face of it that ten-to-one gap looks absurd for two outfits sitting on the same weathered belt. The picture gets more nuanced once you dig in, but the case for FUN being underpriced still holds.

Kasiya carries roughly 20 million tonnes of contained rutile against Mkanda’s 2.6 million, so on raw size the deposit up the road is far bigger and much better understood. A bankable study and years of drilling will do that.

The gap tells a different story once you price the rutile itself. Strip out the cash each company holds and look at what the market pays per tonne of contained rutile in the ground.

Sovereign sits at roughly $15.6 million for every million tonnes. FUN comes in near $7.7 million on the same measure, for a deposit on the same belt.

Some of that discount is fair, since Sovereign has a finished feasibility study and Mkanda has a maiden resource off shallow holes.

What the discount ignores is everything Mkanda hasn’t drilled yet.

Then we move onto rutile equivalent, which rolls the graphite credit into a single number so you can line deposits up on one measure. Mkanda comes in at 1.57%, a touch above the 1.51% Sovereign booked in its reserve.

So FUN is cheaper per tonne and carrying slightly better grade on top.

In the year after its first proper drill results, Sovereign grew from a small explorer into a company worth more than $150 million. By the time SVM released its first resource, the market capitalisation had hit $321 million.

FUN is walking the same road, on the same ground, with a maiden resource already in hand, at a sliver of that valuation, just $33 million.

FUN's ground sits about 20 kilometres from Lilongwe and close to the Nacala rail corridor, a line running to a deep-water port in Mozambique that's the target of a $7 billion Japanese-government-backed upgrade.

It's the same track Sovereign is counting on to move Kasiya's product to market, already in place, already being spent on.

Why The World Needs More Rutile

Natural rutile is the scarce end of the titanium world. Most titanium feed comes from ilmenite, a lower-grade mineral that has to be chemically upgraded before it’s any use.

High-grade natural rutile like Mkanda’s skips that step and goes almost straight into the process, which is why it commands a premium and why fresh supply is so sought after.

Rutile sells for anywhere from US$1,100 to US$1,700 a tonne today, and the supply side is heading the wrong way. The old mines that have carried the market for decades are running down, and there aren’t many new ones coming through to replace them.

Titanium goes into jet engines and defence hardware, and it’s turning up more and more in robotics, where its blend of light weight and strength is tough to beat.

Tesla alone wants to build a million Optimus robots a year, and every machine that walks off a line adds another draw on the same tight pool of metal.

The US imports every gram of its titanium sponge and more than 70% of it came from Japan in 2025. Japan’s producers need a steady feed of natural rutile to keep their plants running.

China now sits on around 70% of global sponge production, which is a reliance Washington is scrambling to unwind.

The whole titanium market is tipped to grow from around US$30 billion in 2025 to US$54 billion by 2034. The West is hunting for high-grade supply outside Chinese control, and a deposit near surface in a stable corner of Africa fits the brief.

From Here

The aircore rigs run through to September, chasing the rutile below the hand-auger holes, and assays from them land right through the back half of the year.

Kahuna folds into the next resource update. Then before Christmas the rigs get their first look at Kampini, FUN's second project 40 kilometres south, which has never been drilled.

Get those right and the 2.6 million tonnes becomes a starting point.

The usual maiden-resource caveats apply here, with the estimate sitting in the lowest JORC confidence category and the metallurgy still being proven. Malawi’s approval timelines are unproven too, and Sovereign will be the first to take a rutile mine through them.

We backed FUN at 4 cents because it was drilling the right ground next to the right neighbour. That neighbour spent years and a lot of money to build a 20 million tonne resource.

FUN just booked its first 2.6 million with hand tools and sits at a $33 million market cap. Sovereign is worth ten times that, one belt over.

The drills will spend the rest of the year working on the difference.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consult your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,554,000 FUN shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

Worth it though. We think it’s one of the better pieces we’ve put out this year. If you haven’t read it yet, start there:

The rest of the week didn’t slow down for us either. KTK managed two announcements in four days, and Fortuna’s rigs started chasing the Mkanda rutile deeper than any hole on the project has gone before.

Up at the big end of town, Genesis lobbed $5.6 billion at a gold miner that had already promised itself to someone else. Nothing says bull market quite like a bidding war.

What caught our eye this week:

• The broker piece: over a dozen brokers, 20-plus small-cap picks for the second half

• KTK signs a satellite partner and files for its US export route, all in one week

• Fortuna kicks off aircore drilling at Mkanda

• Genesis gatecrashes the Vault-Regis merger with a $5.6 billion bid

• The banks keep lifting their gold forecasts

• Australia opens uranium exports to India, and the sector rips

• A biotech doubles as it trades a drug for a clean balance sheet

The Broker Book, One More Time

Yes, we mentioned it 30 seconds ago. We're mentioning it again, because it took weeks of chasing busy people who'd rather be trading, and we want it read.

Copper came up more than anything else, with four separate brokers backing it. Smelters are so short of ore that some are now paying miners for it, and there hasn’t been a major discovery in a decade.

Gold and critical metals weren’t far behind, and defence and drones had their backers too.

The deepest answer we got was on drones. That broker’s view is the executive orders and budget lines haven’t turned into contracts yet, and once the battlefield data from Ukraine sorts the platforms that worked from the ones that fell over, the money will flow to the proven makers.

A few brokers wandered into biotech, where big pharma’s patent cliff has the giants out shopping for pipelines. And the most left-field pick of the lot arrived after deadline, from a broker apologising for being late. We’ll let you judge whether it was worth the wait.

Over 20 small-caps all up, with the reasoning behind every one: Over a Dozen Brokers Told Us Their Top Picks

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KTEK Laying Foundation to Launch

There were two announcements out of KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) this week, and for a company that’s been listed all of eight weeks, they’re running at a fair clip.

Monday’s was the satellite deal. Over-Sat is an Israeli company that builds SATCOM terminals, which is the kit that keeps a vessel or a drone connected to a satellite while it’s moving. Its gear is already out at sea on an unmanned Elbit vessel used by multiple navies.

Over-Sat and KTK have signed a Letter of Intent that puts KTK first in line to manufacture parts for those terminals. It’s the same work KTK already does for drone makers like Elbit and UVision, applied to satellite terminals, and it gives the company a fifth product line to sell.

Because it’s an LOI, the work gets agreed order by order, and revenue shows up as those orders are executed.

Thursday’s news was the export licence. KTK has applied to the Dutch regulator for permission to ship parts from its Netherlands facility to the Los Angeles site it secured last month. With both in place, KTK can build parts in Europe, then assemble and deliver them to American customers from an American address, which is how American defence buyers prefer to be supplied.

KTEK’s prospectus set aside two years and around $3 million to get the US expansion moving. The LA facility arrived in month one and the licence application in month three.

The Dutch regulator’s standard processing window is eight weeks, so we could know the answer on the licence before the first quarterly is even due.

We love a management team that treats its prospectus like a to-do list, and this one is running well ahead of its own schedule.

We added KTK to the portfolio at 20 cents and it’s now sitting just over 30, up 50% since listing.

Fortuna Brings in the Bigger Rig

Our portfolio company Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) has started a 5,000 metre aircore drilling program at its Mkanda rutile project in Malawi.

Every hole at Mkanda so far has been drilled by hand auger, which is what it sounds like, a crew physically twisting a drill into soft ground. It’s the right tool when you’re covering a lot of ground on a small budget, and found the high-grade rutile sitting near surface across the project.

The rutile sits in saprolite, soft weathered rock that keeps going well past the reach of a hand auger, and an aircore rig can chase it down to around 20 metres. FUN is about to find out whether the grades near surface hold once the holes get deeper.

Sovereign Metals answered that same question at Kasiya, 20 kilometres away on the same geology. Its resource sat at roughly 644 million tonnes until aircore drilling tested deeper, and it came out the other side at 1,800 million tonnes.

FUN’s maiden inferred resource is due within weeks, built entirely off the hand auger data already in hand. The aircore results won’t make it into that first number, but they’ll feed the updates that follow, and that’s where the depth gets added if it’s there.

Rutile is also one of the purest natural sources of titanium, which is the metal robotics and humanoid makers reach for when they want strength without weight. A bigger Mkanda gives FUN a mining story and a tech story to tell off the same deposit.

The Gold Bidding War is on

On Monday, Genesis Minerals (ASX: GMD) walked in uninvited with a $5.6 billion offer for Vault Minerals, cash and shares combined.

Vault had already agreed to an all-share merger with Regis Resources back in May. Genesis looked at that deal and simply outbid it.

Vault’s the gold producer formed in 2024 when Red 5 and Silver Lake Resources merged. Its crown jewel is King of the Hills, a long-life operation in WA’s Leonora region currently going through a mill expansion.

Genesis’s Tower Hill project sits just 35 kilometres up the road from that mill.

If Genesis owns both, it can bin the processing plant it was planning to build for Tower Hill and truck the ore to Vault’s instead, keeping roughly $500 million of capex in its pocket.

Genesis is offering 0.7629 of its shares plus 47.5 cents cash for every Vault share, which works out to $5.274 a share.

That’s 15.7% above where Vault was trading before any takeover talk hit the price, and 14.5% better than the Regis deal, which was all scrip with no cash sweetener.

Vault’s board wasted no time calling it a superior proposal, triggering Regis’ matching right under the scheme deed it signed in May. That window runs until Monday.

Regis can now match the terms, walk away, or come back with something better.

Genesis is paying a premium, and paying a chunk of it in cash, for gold production with the metal already sitting at US$4,100.

A board doesn’t spend $5.6 billion buying ounces at these prices unless it believes those prices are staying.

Bank of America sees $5,000 once the Fed’s done tightening. JPMorgan’s at $4,545. Goldman’s calling $4,900 by December. ANZ pushed its $6,000 call out to mid-2027 but hasn’t dropped it.

We’ve been bullish gold for a while now, and it’s nice to have a $5.6 billion second opinion.

India Comes Knocking for Our Uranium

Indian PM Narendra Modi rolled into Melbourne this week, hightailing it to Marvel Stadium and pulling a Thursday night crowd that would make some AFL teams jealous.

It came alongside Australia and India signing an arrangement that opens up long-term Australian uranium exports to India.

The two countries have technically had a nuclear cooperation agreement since 2015, but barely any uranium ever moved under it, mostly over fears the material could find its way into weapons (India still hasn’t signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Thursday’s signing clears that logjam, with exports locked to exclusively peaceful purposes.

India is the world’s most populous country and it wants to lift its nuclear capacity from around 8 gigawatts today to 100 by 2047, with 11 new reactors already under construction. That’s a twelve-fold build-out, and it needs fuel India doesn’t dig up at home.

Modi framed the deal as fresh momentum for India’s clean energy objectives.

Once the world’s most populous nation calls nuclear clean energy, it gets much easier for the next country to say the same, and every country that does is another buyer lining up for uranium.

We expect uranium demand to keep rising from here, and Australia holds the world’s largest known deposits of it.

(For now, Australia will happily sell you uranium, sail it around in submarines under AUKUS, and still won’t let anyone use it to power a home in Australia. Make of that what you will.)

Friday was a sea of green for ASX uranium names, with Deep Yellow (ASX: DYL), Bannerman (ASX: BMN), Boss Energy (ASX: BOE) and Paladin (ASX: PDN) adding around $500 million in value between them.

No volumes, pricing or timing have been disclosed yet, so the commercial deals still have to be written. But the door India has been pushing on for a decade is now open, and money that hasn't thought about uranium in years is thinking about it again.

We’ll have a lot more on uranium in the coming weeks.

RGT Doubles on a Debt-for-Drug Swap

Argent BioPharma (ASX: RGT) had the run of the week, up 106% from a 3.5c open on Monday to a 7.2c close on Friday.

The trigger was a licensing deal for CannEpil, its lead drug for drug-resistant epilepsy. Roughly a third of epilepsy patients don't respond to existing medication, so there's a big patient group out there waiting for something that works.

Argent has licensed the global rights to US-listed Splash Beverage Group (yes, an American beverage company mid-pivot into cannabinoid medicine, we checked twice). And the US$5.5 million upfront payment never touches a bank account. It gets paid by wiping out US$5.5 million of Argent's secured convertible debt to Mercer.

So Argent comes out the other side with its main liability gone, and it still owns the drug and the IP, still does the manufacturing for Splash, and clips a 15% royalty on future sales.

Anyone who's held a micro-cap with convertible debt hanging over it knows how heavy that overhang gets. Argent just removed its one without issuing a single new share, and the register spent the week repricing accordingly.

The deal still needs board and shareholder approvals and the Mercer debt exchange to complete, after which Splash takes CannEpil into the US clinical and FDA process.

The Week Ahead

The small-cap scene has been quiet lately, between June tax-loss selling and half the market taking the first week of July off. We reckon that’s about to change.

Conference season is only weeks away. Noosa Mining kicks things off, then Diggers and Dealers, and small-caps love timing their news for the big events, when the whole industry is in one room and paying attention. Expect the announcements to start flowing.

Biotech is picking up pace too, with deals starting to land. The US has been running a biotech bull for a while now, and we expect it to wash up on the ASX through the second half of 2026.

Closer to home, we’ve got a big month lined up, with new additions to the portfolio on the way. As always, subscribe to be the first to know.

Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,554,000 FUN shares, 500,000 KTK shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK and FUN at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

We spent the past few weeks trying to get inside that circle. Coffees in Perth, working the phones to Sydney, and chasing a long tail of emails, texts and WhatsApp messages, all with one question:

“What are you backing for the second half of 2026, and why?”

The replies ranged from a single line to a full essay. A few never replied at all. Over a dozen came through in the end, with over 20 small-cap stocks worth watching.

Every one of them did it on the condition we kept their names out of it. That’s the deal that gets you the honest version, the pick they’d give a mate over a beer rather than the one they’d put in a client note.

Here’s what came back.

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The Drone Reckoning is Coming

The broker who went deepest for us believes defence and drones are still early, and that most of what we’ve seen so far, the executive orders and budget lines, hasn’t turned into contracts and revenue yet.

The US and the Gulf states now have battlefield data from Ukraine and the US-Iran conflict, and they’re working out which drone platforms performed and which ones fell over.

Once that shakes out, the money and the political backing flow to the makers that proved themselves.

Trump's June 2025 executive order set out to build a domestic drone industry, and the Pentagon's 2027 budget request asks for more than US$70 billion for drones and counter-drone systems, its biggest ask on record.

One autonomous-warfare program alone jumps from US$226 million to a requested US$54.6 billion (not a typo).

His bigger point is that the commercial market ends up dwarfing the defence one, the same way jet and cabin technology built for World War II seeded the post-war aviation boom.

Drone deliveries exist in the US already. Wing and Amazon run them in a handful of suburbs, each operating on a special exemption from the rule that a drone must stay within sight of its pilot.

The FAA is close to scrapping that rule. Once operators can fly beyond the horizon without queueing for a waiver, then deliveries, crop surveys, mine mapping and pipeline checks via drone all get to scale properly.

The names mentioned:

• KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) (one of ours): Makes sub-assemblies for military and commercial drone platforms. It supplies the builders, so it grows as the whole sector scales and no single drone's battlefield result makes or breaks it.

• Boresight (ASX: BST): Runs counter-drone testing for militaries and manufacturers, riding the western spend on knocking drones out of the sky.

• Hydrix (ASX: HYD): Counter-drone. Just won a binding $1.2m contract with munitions group NIOA to build the payloads that bring down small drones. The broker did a site visit and came away impressed.

Copper’s Tight and Everyone Can Feel it

Four separate brokers came back with copper, which is about as close to consensus as this crowd gets.

Miners dig up ore and pay smelters a fee to turn it into metal. Right now there’s so little ore going around that smelters have cut the fee to zero, and some have gone further and are paying miners for the ore.

They wear the loss because a cold furnace costs more to restart than a loss-making one costs to run, and the gold and sulphuric acid that come out alongside the copper cover some of the bills.

Two of the world’s biggest copper mines went down within months of each other recently. Grasberg in Indonesia declared force majeure after a mud rush tore through its underground operations, and Kamoa-Kakula in the Congo spent months recovering from flooding.

All while demand from power grids and AI data centres kept climbing.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs says grid and power build-out alone drives more than 60% of copper demand growth between now and 2030.

One of them added that there hasn’t been a major copper discovery in a decade, while data centres and the EV build-out keep pushing demand the other way.

Copper hit fresh records above US$14,000 a tonne in May before easing back.

Four brokers, four different copper plays:

• White Cliff Minerals (ASX: WCN). Copper, Canada: A hole in the Northwest Territories came back grading almost 7% copper over 20 metres, with a slice inside it near a fifth pure copper, a number you rarely see in a drill result.

• Tarrina Resources (ASX: TR8). Copper-gold, SA: Chasing an iron-oxide-copper-gold target beside Havilah’s Kalkaroo, the deposit style that builds giant mines, and the ground Sandfire paid $240 million to earn into.

• Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9). Copper, Mongolia: Two copper discoveries side by side, one on a granted mining licence, gold, nickel and PGE alongside. Lab work has de-risked it, and the broker reckons the discovery hole still isn't priced in.

• Great Bear (ASX: GBL). Copper-gold-silver-uranium, Canada: An IOCG project in the Northwest Territories with permitted, walk-up drill targets near historic mines. The draw is the board, chaired by Ray Shorrocks, former chair of Bellevue Gold.

The Metals the West Can’t Get

One broker called critical metals the biggest theme of his lifetime.

The West has woken up to how much of what runs modern life (chips, magnets, guided weapons, EV motors etc.) comes out of China, and it’s now scrambling to lock in supply from anywhere else.

Gallium is the sharpest example. It makes modern chips and radar work, and there's no swapping it for something cheaper.

Close to none of it currently reaches the US, which is a problem when SpaceX, Tesla, Raytheon and Nvidia are all scaling up products that need it.

China produces about 94% of the world’s gallium, the US leans on China for roughly 95% of what it uses, and Beijing banned exports to America in late 2024. That ban is paused until late November this year, though the licensing and the military-use block stay in place.

Gallium is never mined on its own, it comes out as a by-product of zinc and aluminium, so you can’t just switch on new supply when the price runs.

The same shortage runs through rare earths, the elements inside the magnets that drive EV motors, wind turbines and missiles. Neodymium and praseodymium carry most of the money, plus a smaller group of heavy rare earths that are scarcer again.

China refines most of the world’s supply, so the West is paying up for projects in friendly countries with the grade to back them. A bit of scandium or gallium in the same dirt helps too, since by-product credits can carry a marginal project into the money.

One gallium play, three rare earths plays, all aimed at the same shortage:

• G50 Corp (ASX: G50). Gallium, USA: The most advanced US gallium play on the ASX. The broker reckons cheap processing matters more than grade, and the deciding metallurgy is due around Christmas.

• Eclipse Metals (ASX: EPM). Rare earths, Greenland: 208Mt at 0.7% oxides with gallium and scandium credits and a deep-water port. Cheap next to Nasdaq neighbour Critical Metals, but mostly low-confidence tonnes and pre-feasibility.

• Oceana Metals (ASX: OCN). Rare earths: Brazil. Early-stage, but the grade stacks up and first holes are due around August. A driller with the story still to prove.

• Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD). Heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium, WA: A big clay-hosted deposit, but the metal needs beneficiation and separation work to unlock, and that isn’t solved yet.

Gold Keeps Doing Gold Things

The broker on gold built his case around who’s buying.

Central banks took in a net 244 tonnes over the first quarter, and a recent World Gold Council survey found 45% of them plan to add more before the year is out. China alone has now bought gold for 18 straight months.

Gold pays no interest, so it competes with things that do. When rate cuts finally arrive and bond yields fall, that competition weakens and gold gets easier to own.

He puts the pullback from January's highs above US$5,400 an ounce down to oil-driven inflation pushing rate cuts back, more a speed bump than a turn. Goldman still has gold at US$5,400 by year-end.

His name, plus two more from a second broker who came back with gold:

• Brightstar Resources (ASX: BTR). Gold, WA: An emerging producer-developer with about 4Moz across Laverton, Menzies and Sandstone, already pouring gold and building a bigger plant at Laverton.

• High-Tech Metals (ASX: HTM). Gold, WA: Bonanza grades at its Wagtail deposit, including 1m at 171 g/t inside a broader 6m at around 29 g/t, and the metallurgy shows the gold is easy to extract. A toll-treatment MOU with Wiluna, a mining contractor lined up, and about $11m cash against a $24m market cap.

• Nordic Resources (ASX: NNL). Gold-copper, Finland: Kopsa holds just over 1Moz and counting, with a new high-grade zone driving the growth. Remaining assays land by end of July, with an updated resource due in the second half.

The Frontier Trade

Two brokers pointed at the tech end, from different angles.

One is watching the far edge. Quantum encryption and orbital data centres were among the ideas he rattled off, and his bet is that money rotates from commodities into tech and rewards whoever gets there first. It’s early and speculative, and he knows it.

Global data centres chewed through around 460 terawatt-hours of power this year, more electricity than Australia uses, and one forecast has that near 1,280 by 2030.

The five biggest tech companies spent north of US$400 billion last year on the data centres and chips behind AI, and are tipped to lift that by three-quarters again.

The grid can’t keep up, so more of them are bolting their own gas power on site.

Only one of the two gave us a name:

• Top End Energy (ASX: TEE). Lining up "powered land" in the US, development-ready sites with the gas and connections a data centre needs. Working toward a re-listing, so it's a position play: on the ground in the right market early.

Biotech Catches a Bid

Biotech got a run from a few brokers, and the case starts in the US.

Big pharma is staring down a patent cliff, with more than US$300 billion of branded drug revenue losing protection by the end of the decade. The standard fix for this is to go shopping for someone else’s pipeline.

The big players are sitting on an estimated US$1.3 trillion in firepower, and they’re spending it. Deals hit US$106 billion in the first half of 2026, the busiest run since before COVID, with the likes of Lilly, Merck and Gilead paying up for late-stage assets, often at 30 to 50% premiums.

The flow-on reaches small biotech across the board, because every buyout re-rates the ones still standing. The US biotech index has bounced hard off its 2025 lows and the IPO window has cracked open again.

The broker’s read is that the Aussie names lag the US by about six months, so the move here is still in front of us.

A second broker added a different angle on the same sector: medtech has been oversold. Plenty of ASX medtechs kept hitting commercialisation milestones while their share prices went the other way, and they said the gap closes this year.

Six names came up between them:

• Nyrada (ASX: NYR). Biotech: Mid-stage trial on a drug to protect the heart while surgeons clear a blocked artery, the mechanism already validated in a big pharma kidney trial.

• HeraMED (ASX: HMD). Health tech: Remote pregnancy-monitoring software into US hospitals, with a tie-up with device giant Philips.

• Island Pharmaceuticals (ASX: ILA). Biotech: Lead drug Galidesivir is a broad-spectrum antiviral aimed at Ebola and Marburg, moving through an FDA pathway with the US Army. Fully funded after a $9m placement at 35c, with Marburg trial data due in the second half.

• Ceretas (ASX: CTS). Biotech: A fresh float, listing this month. Ultrasound technology licensed from the University of Queensland targets Alzheimer's by briefly opening the blood-brain barrier to clear the proteins behind the disease and let drugs through. Run by Tony Keating, who sold ResApp Health to Pfizer in 2022, with Phase 2 slated for this year.

• Entropy Neurodynamics (ASX: ENP). Biotech: Psychedelic therapeutics. Its lead drug is IV-infused psilocin, in what the company calls a world-first binge eating disorder trial with Swinburne University. The IV route lets clinicians control how deep the experience goes and how long it runs, which oral psilocybin can't do.

• Memphasys Ltd (ASX: MEM). Medtech: Landed global regulatory approvals and multiple major contracts in the past nine months, beating its $2m FY26 contract target. The broker expects revenue to triple next financial year.

The Late Mail

One broker replied after the deadline, apologising for the delay. He needn’t have. His pick was the most left-field of the lot, and we love left-field.

This broker’s view is vanadium re-rates later this year. It hardens steel and also fills flow batteries, which are the shipping-container-sized units that store power for the grid.

For years the price has sat in the gutter around US$5 a pound. Then the US government signed a US$125 million defence contract with Brazilian producer Largo at close to US$20 a pound (four times the market price), because it wanted the supply locked up.

Years of cheap vanadium have flattened the companies that mine it as their main business, since most of the world’s supply arrives as a leftover from Chinese and Russian steelmaking. Bushveld Minerals collapsed into business rescue (South Africa’s version of administration), and Glencore’s South African operations and Largo in Brazil are hanging on.

So supply is shrinking while the Pentagon pays more to jump the queue.

His own caution was that a sharp price move needs Chinese steel demand to stabilise, and depends on how fast flow-battery demand scales.

His pick:

• Vanadium Resources (ASX: VR8). Vanadium, South Africa: Sits in the Bushveld complex, home to most of the world's vanadium, with a mining licence, a completed DFS and what he calls the highest grade in the world. A binding version of its US Vanadium offtake is the catalyst.

The Names, in Short

• KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK). Defence and drones. Sub-assemblies for military and commercial drone platforms. One of ours.

• Boresight (ASX: BST). Defence, counter-drone. Testing for counter-drone systems and militaries.

• Hydrix (ASX: HYD). Counter-drone. A $1.2m payload contract with munitions group NIOA. Cheap on revenue, per the broker.

• White Cliff Minerals (ASX: WCN). Copper, Canada. High-grade Danvers drilling in the Northwest Territories, three rigs turning, about $10m cash.

• Tarrina Resources (ASX: TR8). Copper-gold, SA. An iron-oxide-copper-gold target beside Havilah’s Kalkaroo.

• Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9). Copper, Mongolia. Adjacent discoveries with de-risked recoveries, plus gold, nickel and PGE. One of ours.

• Great Bear (ASX: GBL). Copper-gold-silver-uranium, Canada. An IOCG project in the Northwest Territories, board chaired by Ray Shorrocks.

• G50 Corp (ASX: G50). Gallium, USA. The most advanced US gallium play on the ASX, deciding metallurgy due around Christmas.

• Eclipse Metals (ASX: EPM). Rare earths, Greenland. 208Mt at 0.7% oxides with gallium and scandium credits and a deep-water port.

• Oceana Metals (ASX: OCN). Rare earths, Brazil. A high-grade find, first holes due around August.

• Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD). Heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium, WA. Clay-hosted, with the processing still to solve. One of ours.

• Brightstar Resources (ASX: BTR). Gold, WA. Around 4Moz across Laverton, Menzies and Sandstone, already producing and building a bigger Laverton plant.

• High-Tech Metals (ASX: HTM). Gold, WA. Bonanza Wagtail grades, $11m cash, $24m market cap.

• Nordic Resources (ASX: NNL). Gold-copper, Finland. 1Moz and growing at Kopsa, assays due end of July.

• Top End Energy (ASX: TEE). US powered land for AI data centres, site qualification under way in Texas. Working toward a re-listing. One of ours.

• Vanadium Resources (ASX: VR8). Vanadium, South Africa. Mining licence, completed DFS, US supply chain strategy.

• Nyrada (ASX: NYR). Biotech. A mid-stage heart-protection trial.

• HeraMED (ASX: HMD). Health tech. Pregnancy-monitoring software into US hospitals, with a Philips tie-up.

• Island Pharmaceuticals (ASX: ILA). Biotech. Antivirals for Ebola and Marburg, fully funded, trial data due 2H.

• Ceretas (ASX: CTS). Biotech. Ultrasound tech for Alzheimer’s, listing this month, ex-ResApp CEO at the helm.

• Entropy Neurodynamics (ASX: ENP). Biotech. IV psilocin in a binge eating disorder trial with Swinburne.

• Memphasys (ASX: MEM). Medtech. Approvals and contracts landed, revenue tipped to triple next FY.

The Part Where We Remind You Nothing’s Guaranteed

Brokers get things wrong. So do we, and so do small-caps, regularly and sometimes spectacularly. Some of the people who shared these names hold the stock, which you’d want to know before acting on anything here.

A name passed over a quiet coffee carries the same odds as one printed in a client note.

A drill comes up empty, or the shortage everyone’s counting on takes an extra year to bite. Any name on this list can halve while the story stays intact.

Treat this as a look at what the people moving real money are thinking heading into the back half, then do your own homework on anything that catches your eye.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 600,000 TEE shares, 1,150,000 AZ9 shares and 2,083,333 performance rights in MRD at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AZ9, MRD and KTK at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

Which brings us to Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD), a Western Australian minnow sitting on one of the biggest scandium resources on the planet.

The JORC number only went on that scandium in January, and at 2.2 cents and a market cap under $30 million, the story is still in its opening pages. Today's news is the first move to do something with all that metal.

MRD has brought in the CSIRO to work out how you turn scandium in the ground into something an aerospace or defence buyer would pay for.

The program starts small and cheap, the right way for a tiny explorer to test a big idea without betting the balance sheet.

The Deal and What It’s Worth

The whole program costs $104,000, less than plenty of companies spend on a single drill hole, and MRD only covers part of it.

The CSIRO chips in up to $50,000 through its Kick-Start program, which co-funds projects with small Australian companies, and Mount Ridley pays the balance.

What the money buys is the CSIRO's researchers working on Mount Ridley's scandium, and a report the company owns outright at the end.

CSIRO's team will map who holds the patents in scandium alloys, work out who supplies the metal and powder around the world, flag a couple of applications worth chasing, and take stock of the extraction and processing tech that's starting to emerge.

If it turns up a market worth the trouble, stage two is where the alloy building would start.

The project runs out of Lab22, the CSIRO’s metal additive manufacturing facility. Additive manufacturing is the industrial name for 3D printing with metal, building a part up layer by layer instead of cutting it from a solid block.

It’s how aerospace and defence groups make parts lighter and stronger than anything you can machine.

Those same groups qualify an alloy first, then buy the metal behind it for years, sometimes decades. Get across the patents and applications before anyone else bothers, and your metal can end up being the one in the alloy.

And the report belongs to Mount Ridley, in a corner of the market almost nobody has staked out.

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Who the CSIRO is

Most retail investors don’t think much about the CSIRO when they weigh up a small-cap.

It's Australia's national science agency, and it has a long habit of turning lab work into money. The famous one is WiFi. CSIRO scientists cracked fast indoor wireless networking in the 1990s, patented it, and went on to collect around $430 million licensing it to more than 20 of the world's largest tech companies.

The example miners will know is Titomic (ASX: TTT), which built its aerospace and defence printing business on cold-spray titanium technology licensed from the CSIRO, and still runs Kick-Start projects with them today.

A slice of that outfit is now on Mount Ridley’s payroll, for about the price of a Hilux.

What Sits Underneath it

The Grass Patch Complex, around 25 kilometres north of Esperance in Western Australia, hosts a JORC inferred resource of 367.98 million tonnes at 57.2ppm scandium, for roughly 18,555 tonnes of contained scandium metal.

The entire world produces somewhere between 15 and 25 tonnes of scandium a year. Take the top of that range and MRD is sitting on more than 700 years of global production, in farming country a half-hour drive from a deep-water port.

The scandium sits in the same weathered profile as the company's heavy rare earth and gallium resources, so the same dig and the same plant could one day pull three critical minerals out together.

The current resource only counts the old drill samples that were assayed for scandium, and that's a fraction of what Mount Ridley has in storage. The company kept a stack of historical sample pulps, the pulverised leftovers from years of drilling, that were never tested for scandium at all.

Those are now going back through the lab. Re-assaying pulps is about the cheapest way there is to grow a resource.

If the scandium shows up the way management expects, the resource can step up without a rig leaving the yard.

Why They’re Doing it in Stages

We've watched plenty of small explorers announce grand downstream ambitions and burn half their cash on consultants before finding out whether anyone wanted the product. MRD is running this the other way around.

Spending capital on a scandium product before anyone knows the market or the patent gaps would be reckless, so Mount Ridley is paying a small bill to draw the map first.

The company can't fund a full alloy development program yet, and doesn't need to. It needs proof there's a business at the end of this before committing to anything larger, and it’ll cost $104,000 to find out.

Aerospace, defence and robotics are the sectors in the frame, with the long-term aim being owned alloys, then partnerships and licensing income off the back of them.

That sort of thing takes years, and plenty has to go right along the way.

The Scandium Squeeze

The 25-odd tonnes the world produces each year comes almost entirely as a by-product of nickel, titanium or rare earth mining.

A small amount of scandium turns ordinary aluminium into a lightweight alloy that holds its strength under heat and welds cleanly, which is why aerospace and defence buyers keep asking for more of it.

China controls something like 80 to 85% of global scandium supply, and it has been tightening export controls since early 2025.

Western governments and defence contractors have spent the time since scrambling for supply they can rely on, and no company has ridden that scramble harder than Sunrise Energy Metals (ASX: SRL).

Sunrise is turning its Syerston project in New South Wales into what would be the largest primary scandium mine outside China, and has already signed a multi-year supply option with Lockheed Martin.

SRL now carries a market cap north of $2 billion, after a rise of more than 2,000% over the past year.

Sunrise sits well ahead of Mount Ridley, with a finished feasibility study and a defence customer signed up, so the comparison only stretches so far. What it shows is the price the market puts on a Western scandium story once it starts to work.

Sunrise trades above $2 billion. Mount Ridley, with 18,555 tonnes of it in the ground, trades under $30 million.

Where it Leaves Things

For $104,000, Mount Ridley has put its scandium in front of the country’s best materials scientists and keeps every page of what comes back.

There's no revenue in it, and on its own it won't grow the resource, though the pulp re-assays could do that separately. What it buys is a first look at where MRD's scandium could actually end up, and who'd be paying for it.

The market has just handed Sunrise billions on that promise. At 2.2 cents, Mount Ridley isn’t priced for any of it yet.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club has 2,083,333 performance rights in MRD. Equities Club has been engaged by MRD at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

Back to the day job, which had a better week than the national side.

An explorer put its ore through a plant, and the concentrate came out cleaner than some of the world’s biggest producers. High grade copper results land in Mongolia. A gold explorer puts a diamond rig into a historic million ounce gold mine.

We saw big investments in drones and chips this week, a small-cap expands its contract with a major, and a biotech that’s one to watch.

Here’s what caught our eye this week:

• The world’s cleanest rutile from a bulk sample lands for Fortuna

• Evion lands in Nevada fluorspar and turns a graphite profit

• Drilling gets to untested depths for Black Horse

• Gold’s worst quarter since 2013, central banks keep buying

• Sulphides hit in NSW for Exultant Mining

• Britain puts £5 billion into drones, ditches its next destroyers

• Chip spending blows past a trillion dollars

• Swift TV keeps winning repeat Chevron orders

• Syntara, a biotech in the right space waiting on big results

But First, We've Been Picking Brokers' Brains

We’ve hit the phones, sent emails and had coffees with brokers all around Australia the past couple of weeks.

The ask was simple: tell us what you think will do well in the second half of 2026.

We've pulled it all together: the sectors they like, and the small-caps they're backing.

We'll have it all in an article this week, subscribe now to be first to know.

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FUN’s Rutile Comes in Cleaner Than the Producers

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) ran its first bulk sample through a plant this week, and pulled out rutile grading 96.66% titanium dioxide.

That's cleaner than the rutile the established producers have been shipping for years. The stock finished the week up 11%.

Rutile is the cleanest natural source of titanium, which is pretty much the whole pitch. Every bit of waste left in it is something a buyer has to refine out down the line, so the cleaner it comes, the more they pay.

At that grade, Fortuna’s out in front.

Sierra Rutile has been loading ships out of Sierra Leone at 96.3%. Base's Kwale mine in Kenya came in at 96.2% before it wound down. Both fed the world's pigment plants and titanium mills for years. Sovereign's Kasiya pilot, off the giant deposit up the road, came in at 95.7%.

Fortuna cleared the lot on its first pass.

Hand-pick the best pieces off a site and you can flatter almost any deposit, which is why nobody gets too excited by a headline number from rock chips.

Fortuna crushed 5.4 tonnes of ground and ran the lot through the plant, waste and all, and 96.66% is the grade that came out.

The concentrate is headed for titanium sponge makers, the high-value end of the chain that feeds aerospace-grade metal.

A maiden resource lands within weeks, the first number on how much of it is actually down there.

Check out the full write-up on the result here.

Evion’s Big Week: Nevada Boots and a Downstream Push

The world’s biggest economy can’t supply its own fluorspar. This week a tiny ASX company went after that problem out in the Nevada desert.

Evion Group (ASX: EVG) had a second story running in India too, and the stock finished up just over 13%.

Monday put boots on the ground at Carp, the historic fluorspar mine in Nevada that EVG optioned in May.

A field crew is sampling a north-west corridor beside the old pits, with a magnetic survey to follow and drilling once the targets firm up.

Carp shipped fluorspar to Kaiser Steel for 13 years at around 69% purity before cheap imports shut it in 1971. Verified sampling has since pulled grades as high as 88.15% CaF2 out of the same pits.

At 69% it goes to steelmakers as a flux, the cheap end of the market. As the number climbs it heads toward acid-grade, the premium tier that feeds batteries, chips, refrigerants and nuclear fuel.

America imports every tonne of fluorspar it burns through, and the Pentagon recently put US$168.9 million into a single fluorspar supply contract. A high-grade deposit on home soil is just what Washington has started writing cheques for.

You can find our write-up here.

Evion’s Indian graphite arm, Panthera Graphite Technologies, is already turning a profit, and Thursday’s announcement set out how it plans to scale.

Positive EBITDA in FY2026 gives it the base to push expandable graphite into AI data centres, defence and battery safety, the markets where fire protection and thermal management earn premium prices.

A profitable graphite business in India and a high-grade fluorspar project in Nevada give Evion two levers into the same story: the West scrambling for critical minerals it can source outside China.

AZ9 Hits Thick, High-Grade Copper in Mongolia

Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9) drilled the best hole in its life at Red Hill this week.

A survey had lit up copper sitting at depth under Red Hill in Mongolia. Azzuro drilled straight at it and pulled up more than 21 metres of copper-rich sulphide grading 1.70% copper.

Plenty of copper explorers report grades under 1% and call it a good day.

Tucked inside that run was an 8-metre core going 3.27% copper, near enough double the headline again.

The hole carries gold, silver and a bit of zinc alongside the copper. In a producing mine those get sold too, and rolling them into copper terms lifts the grade to 2.84% copper-equivalent.

The copper also sits closer to the surface than Azzuro expected, and the shallower ground carries the better grade. Shallow copper is cheap to mine, so higher grade up top is about the best result they could ask for.

Assays on nine more holes are due this month, and the rest of the 2026 program is funded, so the rig keeps turning without a cap in hand.

Copper is near record highs, with data centres, grids and EVs all pulling on the same tonnes while a new mine still takes the better part of two decades to build.

Azzuro is worth about $15 million. It just drilled a copper hole a company 20 times its size would be happy to put its name on. Nine more holes are at the lab.

Our full write up can be found here.

BHL Goes Deep at Mt Egerton

In 1906 the water won.

Mt Egerton had produced 1.29 million ounces of gold at around 12 grams a tonne when the workings flooded. The pumps couldn’t hold it back, so the miners walked out and left the gold sitting under the water line.

This week, 120 years on, Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) put a diamond rig on the ground to go and get it.

The rig is on site, with the deeper holes, around 500 metres each, due to start turning within 10 days.

More than 90% of the drilling at Mt Egerton has stopped above 150 metres, so the deep ground has barely been touched. These are the first holes going after the gold down where the pumps gave up.

Victorian goldfields tend to get richer the deeper you chase them. Fosterville was a tired little mine nobody rated until someone drilled beneath the old workings and hit the Swan zone, which turned it into one of the richest gold mines on earth. Mt Egerton sits in the same corridor, and no one has properly drilled it deep.

Black Horse is also reopening the Sister Rose adit, a tunnel sealed for more than a century. Getting back inside lets them map where the old workings run, so they can aim the drill at the right ground.

The early holes came back with only anomalous gold, so keep the expectations in check. This is a deep test of ground no one has drilled, which is where the risk and the reward both sit.

BHL is our 2025 Small-Cap of the Year. It trades at 19 cents, under its 20 cent listing price, with the drills now heading for ground the old timers never reached.

For anyone wanting exposure to a Victorian gold play with a million-ounce history, that entry point does some of the work for you.

Gold’s Pullback has Big Buyers Stacking

Gold just had its worst quarter since 2013, down 15% to around US$4,175 an ounce. In January it was scraping US$5,600.

Step back though and it's still up about 23% on a year ago, which tells you how hard it ran before this.

The tourists are heading for the exits, spooked by a Middle East war that has markets betting on higher-for-longer rates, which pulls money out of bullion.

We read the drop as a correction inside a bull market, one that shakes out the punters who piled in near the top and resets the base for the next leg.

Not long ago the queues ran around the block outside ABC Bullion in Sydney, people happy to wait hours for a bar. Money like that comes and goes with the headlines.

The people who run central bank reserves move slower. A survey of them landed this week from OMFIF, a London think tank that tracks how they invest, and most see gold between US$5,000 and US$6,000 over the coming year.

The World Gold Council found a record 45% of them plan to add to their holdings over the next 12 months.

They buy on a ten-year view, and they're still buying now.

We covered the investment bank targets last week, most sitting well above where gold trades today. Put those next to a pullback that's already done most of its damage, and it's a backdrop we're comfortable holding through.

The crowd that queued for bars not long ago is now halfway out the door. The buyers who move this market count in tonnes and decades, and a record share of them are lining up to buy more.

Sulphide in Two of Three for 10X

The first holes are in the ground at Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X), and the early signs are promising.

Two of the three came up carrying the copper, zinc and lead 10X was chasing at its Balerion prospect, part of the Peak View project in southern NSW.

The second hole was the pick, a thicker, more continuous run of sulphide than the first, with a coarse banded zone the geologists were happy to see.

These are visual reads off the core, not lab numbers, so how rich it is comes down to assays, still pending on all three holes.

The team were able to tidy up the targeting and trimmed the program with five holes remaining. Those five are the ones that count, aimed down-dip of old high-grade hits into ground no modern rig has reached.

10X is one of ours, trading at 18.5 cents for around a $7 million market cap.

You can find our full write up here.

Drone Spending Keeps Climbing

Ukraine is now burning through around 9,000 drones a day.

That number is rewriting how rich countries think about hardware, and this week Britain put a price on it. Its long-delayed Defence Investment Plan landed with drones taking £5 billion over four years, the most the country has ever committed to them.

To pay for it, the Royal Navy is walking away from its next line of destroyers. They're giving up warships they've sailed for a century, all for machines that cost a few thousand quid and often don't make it home.

The safest way to play a boom like this is to build the part every drone needs, whoever’s name ends up on the side. That’s the well-worn picks and shovels mantra, while everyone else pans for gold.

It’s what KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) does, making the airframes and sub-assemblies that go inside drones for the tier-one defence contractors.

Private money is moving just as fast as the governments. German drone maker Quantum Systems raised US$1.2 billion this week, with Blackstone and Airbus writing cheques, doubling its valuation to US$8 billion in a single round.

KTK locked in a Los Angeles facility last month, putting its production inside the world's largest defence market, and its order pipeline into tier-one contractors has filled out since.

When the whole world is buying drones, you want to be the one selling the parts.

Chips Blow Through the Trillion-Dollar Mark

The world is spending an absolute fortune building computer chips right now.

South Korea just committed more than US$576 billion to it, with Samsung and SK Hynix each building two new chip factories. Taiwan’s TSMC, the company that makes the chips inside your iPhone and Nvidia’s AI hardware, is putting US$165 billion into Arizona alone, the biggest foreign investment America has ever seen.

Every dollar of it traces back to AI. Chip sales pass US$1 trillion this year for the first time, and some believe they’re headed toward US$1.5 trillion as the AI race eats every chip it can get.

(We paid $900 for a 4TB hard drive at JB this week. You can thank the AI build-out for that too.)

But there’s a problem sitting inside every one of those chips, and no amount of money makes it go away.

A chip works by moving electrical signals through unbelievably tiny wiring, and that wiring is copper. As chips keep shrinking, the copper has been squeezed about as thin as copper can physically go. Push much further and it stops doing its job.

So the industry needs something to replace the copper, and it agrees on what that something is: graphene. That’s where Adisyn (ASX: AI1) comes in.

Last month it grew graphene at under 300°C, cool enough that a finished chip survives the process, verified by the University of New South Wales. And it holds the patented chemistry to grow that graphene inside the machines chipmakers already use.

A trillion dollars a year of chips is about to run into the limits of copper. Adisyn is one small ASX company holding a patented way around it.

Deals Are Landing For This Small-Cap

If you’re stuck on a mining camp hours from anywhere, or out on an oil rig off the coast, you can’t just flick on Kayo and watch the footy. The internet out there won’t carry it.

Swift TV (ASX: STV) has built a whole business on fixing that. Its low-bandwidth tech and on-site servers get Netflix, Kayo and the rest streaming in the places normal broadband can’t reach, from mining villages and offshore rigs to aged care homes.

And once a screen goes in, it keeps paying. Swift runs it as a subscription, so the TV on the wall of a Chevron camp earns month after month.

The customer list runs to Chevron, Shell and Australia’s largest private aged care provider, and the board has some pedigree, with Argonaut co-founder Charles Fear as chairman.

Chevron came back for more this week, ordering another 1,900 devices to roll the platform out across its Barrow Island and Wheatstone Offshore accommodation sites.

The order follows more than 2,000 devices already installed at Wheatstone’s onshore village, lifting the installed base across Chevron sites to around 3,900. Last month the same relationship delivered a five-year subscription contract worth a minimum of $2.9 million.

A $9 million company keeps landing repeat orders from one of the biggest energy companies on the planet, and barely anyone has noticed.

Big Pharma Keeps Paying Up to Fix One Blood Cancer

Myelofibrosis is a rare cancer of the bone marrow, and it’s become one of the most fought-over targets in the drug world. Over time the marrow turns to scar tissue and the body stops making blood properly, leaving patients exhausted with swollen spleens.

The drug most patients get put on is ruxolitinib, and it works for a while. The trouble is that somewhere between half and three-quarters stop responding within a few years, and when they do they’re nearly out of road.

This week Ipsen, a French drug company, agreed to pay up to US$1.75bn for a private US biotech called Kartos. They’re buying it for a single drug, navtemadlin, designed for the patients ruxolitinib has stopped helping. GSK recently paid up in the same space too, buying into its own myelofibrosis drug.

Syntara (ASX: SNT) is a small Sydney biotech worth less than $50 million. Its lead drug, amsulostat, targets those same patients, the ones who’ve stopped responding to standard treatment.

It takes a different approach to the drugs Ipsen and GSK bought, but it’s chasing the same problem. The US FDA has cleared the design of its next big trial starting in the December quarter.

Syntara shares ran 21% this week before the company called a trading halt on Friday. The halt covers a different Syntara drug entirely, SNT-4728, which is being tested in a sleep disorder that often shows up years before Parkinson’s.

Early results are due next week, with trading set to resume by Tuesday unless the news lands first. We don't own Syntara and it's not a client. Clinical-stage biotech lives and dies on results like these, so expect a big move either way.

The Week Ahead

A new financial year is here and it feels like optimism is starting to creep back into the market. Many brokers are still away, but if you’ve been around the small-cap game long enough, you know a lot of positioning happens now.

We’ll have our piece out on the broker picks for the back half of 2026. Some familiar small-caps named, and some completely left field.

Gold looks to be bouncing and the forecasts into the new year are strong. Defence and tech money keeps flowing. And we’ll be watching the biotech space closely, with trial results due.

Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,554,000 FUN shares, 500,000 KTK shares, 200,000 10X shares, 900,000 AI1 performance rights, 187,500 BHL shares, 4,500,000 EVG shares, and 1,150,000 AZ9 shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AZ9, 10X, BHL, EVG, KTK, FUN and AI1 at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

The standout hole cut 21.45m grading 1.70% copper, 0.85 g/t gold, 16.86 g/t silver and 0.21% zinc from 83.2 metres downhole. Sitting inside that is an 8-metre core running 3.27% copper, 1.04 g/t gold and 18 g/t silver.

It's the type of hole you can build a project around.

Copper is trading near all-time highs because the world decided to electrify everything at once, from power grids to AI data centres, and forgot to build enough mines first.

The shares are trading at 1.8 cents, with roughly $4.5 million in cash in the bank.

Holes like this are how discovery stories start, and this one starts at a $15 million market cap.

The Hole Itself

Red Hill is what geologists call a volcanogenic massive sulphide system, or VMS.

These deposits form on ancient seafloors, where volcanic vents pump metal-rich fluid up into cold ocean water, and the sudden chill drops the copper, gold, silver and zinc out of solution as dense bands of sulphide minerals.

Nature ran the concentrator a few hundred million years early, which is why one VMS hole can carry four metals.

When a drill hits more than 21 metres of it, it points to a large, metal-rich plumbing system underneath.

MU2603, the hole behind those numbers, is the best Azzuro has drilled at Red Hill. It hit the massive sulphide about 75 to 80 metres up-dip of a hole the company drilled during due diligence last year.

The copper grade in the new hole came in well above that earlier intercept, so the grade is holding up, or improving, as they climb into shallower parts of the lens (shallower ground is cheaper to drill and, one day, cheaper to mine).

Plenty of copper explorers report intervals under 1% copper and call it a good day. The hole averaged 1.70% copper across more than 21 metres, with a high-grade guts of 3.27% copper over 8 metres.

The hole carries gold, silver and zinc alongside the copper. Roll those into copper terms at current prices and the headline 1.70% copper lifts to 2.84% copper-equivalent, or CuEq.

The main zone runs 0.85 g/t gold and nearly 17 g/t silver, and the high-grade core lifts to 1.04 g/t gold with 18 g/t silver.

In a producing mine those metals would be sold alongside the copper for next to no extra cost, and the cash they bring in lowers the cost of every tonne of copper out the gate.

A bit of zinc rounds out the hole, giving Azzuro one more metal to sell from the same ground.

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The Ground, and Where This Takes the Project

The copper at Red Hill was first mapped between 1988 and 1991 by a Mongolian government expedition, long before anyone was measuring copper demand in units of data centres.

Later explorers ran mapping, sampling, trenching and some drilling across the ground, and then the place sat waiting for someone with modern gear to return.

That earlier work never became a JORC resource you can lean on today, though it flagged Red Hill as a copper system worth a proper modern look.

Azzuro completed the acquisition of 100% of the project in April this year, and the 2026 program is the first campaign to test the system with modern drilling and proper assay control, backed by downhole geophysics.

MU2603 was drilled to chase a strong reading from an underground survey. Massive sulphide conducts electricity, so that survey can pick it out and draw an X on the map before the drill gets there.

The core landed right where the survey said it would, which means the method works. Azzuro is now pulling its other underground surveys into the same picture to line up the next round of holes.

Azzuro still hasn't mapped the full size of the system, and the survey work keeps turning up targets the drill hasn't reached yet.

North of the main find, a shallow band of gold now stretches across a possible 600-metre run, with two more holes hitting gold near surface.

One returned 9 metres at 0.59 g/t gold from surface, the other 5 metres at 0.63 g/t. That’s a separate, easier-to-reach target sitting above the main game.

Azzuro says the rest of the 2026 program is fully funded, with assays from nine more holes due this month. For a small-cap, drilling through the year without needing to pass the hat around is worth a lot.

The Copper Backdrop

Azzuro picked a good year to hit copper.

The metal is trading around US$6 a pound (close to record territory), after touching US$6.50 earlier in the year. Demand keeps climbing while new supply drags behind.

Wood Mackenzie's head of copper research says grid expansion will pull more copper over the next two decades than electric vehicles or renewables. Every EV and solar panel still plugs into the grid, and the grid is built from copper wire.

Stack the data-centre and AI build-out on top and copper demand now climbs every year, regardless of where the building cycle sits.

New mines take years (sometimes decades) to permit and build, and the easy shallow deposits have largely been found.

Wood Mackenzie estimates the world needs to bring on at least 900,000 tonnes of new copper supply every year, indefinitely, just to stand still.

Global mine production grew about 1% last year while refined demand kept climbing.

Smelters make their money charging miners a fee to turn concentrate into metal.

To underline how tight the market is, there are now more furnaces than there is concentrate to feed them, so smelters have been undercutting each other on that fee just to keep running, and it has collapsed toward zero.

A high-grade discovery in this market is what the majors go hunting for when they need copper faster than they can build new mines. Azzuro is a long way from that conversation, though a hole like MU2603 is how these stories start.

The Bottomline

Azzuro has proved it can pull high-grade copper-gold out of Red Hill, in a market paying up for grade.

Phase 1 is drilled out, and assays from nine more holes land this month, with cash in the bank to pay for them.

True widths of the lens haven’t been locked in yet, and plenty of strong drill holes never become mines, so the usual small-cap caution applies.

But explorers wait whole careers for a hole like MU2603, and most never get one. At 1.8 cents and a $15 million market cap, none of that success is in the price.

What sits in the ground is a high-grade copper-gold system getting bigger with every hole, in the one metal the world can't get enough of.

Keep pulling copper like this out of Red Hill and a $15 million valuation gets hard to justify.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,150,000 of AZ9 at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AZ9 at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No. 519872

That is cleaner than the rutile the world's established producers have been selling for years.

The cleaner it is, the less refining it needs downstream, and the more buyers pay for it.

The market values the whole company at around $27 million, with a maiden resource only weeks away.

Behind that sits roughly $15 million in the bank. A fair chunk of that came from WndrCo, the US tech fund behind SpaceX and Anduril, which is getting upstream of the humanoid wave before it breaks. They paid 11 cents a share to get in.

The stock trades at 9.2 cents today.

Twenty kilometres north, Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM) sits on the same geology. The market values SVM north of $370 million, more than 13 times Fortuna.

Today's grade is the first reason to think that gap should close. The resource weeks away is the next.

The Result: 96.66% TiO₂, and What That Buys Them

Rutile is the cleanest natural source of titanium. Buyers pay for the titanium dioxide locked inside it, so a higher TiO₂ reading and lower impurities mean a product that's worth more and easier to sell.

Sovereign Metals put out a feasibility study on Kasiya, the world-class deposit just up the road, and buried in it is a table of the best rutile on earth. Fortuna's beats the lot.

The table lines up the rutile the market already runs on. Kasiya specs out at 95.7%. Sierra Rutile, which has been shipping out of Sierra Leone since the sixties, sits at 96.3%. Base Resources’ Kwale mine in Kenya comes in at 96.2%.

Fortuna pulled 5.4 tonnes out of its Mkanda ground, ran it through magnetic and electrostatic separation to strip the heavy minerals from the waste, and the concentrate came back at 96.66%.

Which clears every one of them.

Two of the mentioned have fed the world’s pigment plants and titanium mills for decades, and Fortuna’s bulk sample graded cleaner than both of them the first time it put material through a plant.

Then there’s Toho Titanium, one of Japan’s big sponge producers, which ran the ruler over Kasiya’s rutile and cleared it for aerospace, about as high as the bar goes for titanium feedstock.

Fortuna sits on the same geology and graded above the product that passed.

The Demand Story: Titanium and the Humanoid Build-Out

Titanium is what ties a rutile grade in Malawi to the robots coming off production lines in California, and it explains why a fund that usually chases rockets and tech wrote an $8.6 million cheque for an African explorer.

Titanium is light and strong under load, which is where the humanoid build-out hits a wall, because you can't build a machine that walks and lifts all day out of anything heavier. And the cleanest source of it is rutile.

The companies building humanoids are already worth billions.

Apptronik, valued at $5.5 billion, has just opened a 90,000 square foot “data factory” in Austin to train its Apollo robots, with Google DeepMind and Mercedes-Benz among the backers.

Figure AI, last marked at around $39 billion, has its Figure 03 robots sorting parts on BMW’s factory floor in the US.

China's UBTech took $334 million of pre-orders for its U1 companion robot in about four weeks, and Norway's 1X is getting ready to put humanoids into people's homes.

Scale these to the numbers the makers keep quoting (Elon's talking a million a year, and that's just his first factory) and the world needs far more titanium than it pulls out of the ground today.

And the supply is heading the other way. Natural rutile output has fallen by about a third over five years as the old mines run down, and almost nothing new is due before Kasiya comes online. The US imports nearly all the titanium feedstock it runs on.

So demand is climbing while supply shrinks, and the biggest buyers are hunting for a friendly source outside China.

Which runs straight back to FUN’s concentrate in Malawi grading 96.66%.

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What’s Next: A Maiden Resource and the Drill Bit

The big one lands mid-July: Fortuna's maiden resource estimate. It’s the first hard number on how much rutile sits in the ground at Mkanda and at what grade.

It's the first proper measure of whether Mkanda has the scale to sit alongside the tier-one rutile ground up the road. Pulling one together inside 12 months of picking up the project is quick work by anyone's measure.

A 5,000 metre aircore program then runs through the September quarter, chasing the mineralisation deeper and tightening the grid, with a 30-hole core drilling program behind it later in the year.

Graphite testwork is lined up for the same window, and rare earth and monazite analysis runs alongside it, after Sovereign turned up heavy rare earths at Kasiya in January.

Fortuna’s also got its own lab running in Malawi now, which cuts the cost of testing and gets results back faster. Expect a steady flow of announcements through the rest of 2026 and into 2027.

The Bottom Line

Today’s result answers the quality question.

The rutile grades higher than products already selling into the market, and it’s low on the impurities buyers care about.

The resource estimate answers the size question, and that lands in a few weeks.

At $27 million against Sovereign’s $370 million, Fortuna is still priced as the early-stage punt it was 12 months ago, even with a US tech fund on the register at a premium and a benchmark-beating product in hand.

Exploration never comes with guarantees, and a maiden resource can land differently to what the early work suggests. But Fortuna heads into the back half of 2026 in a much stronger spot than it started the year.

The resource is weeks away, drilling results keep coming behind it, and every one of them feeds a titanium squeeze that gets tighter each time another humanoid maker scales up.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consult your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,554,000 FUN shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

At 18c and a market cap around $7 million, the company is hitting visible mineralisation in the ground while the market still has it priced like nothing’s going on. That gap is the whole reason we’re on the register.

A quick refresher for anyone meeting 10X for the first time. It’s a small-cap gold, silver and copper explorer that listed late in 2025, sitting on a pile of old high-grade hits across NSW and WA that nobody had gone back to test with modern gear.

We tipped it as our first pick of 2026, pulled in by the valuation and the quality of the ground. With around $3 million in the bank and only 37 million shares on issue, strip out the cash and you were paying next to nothing for the project.

These first three were the warm-up. The holes 10X really wants are still ahead.

The Ground: High-Grade Hits, Never Followed Up

Balerion has thrown up high-grade metal before, and nobody ever followed it down.

The three holes went into the prospect, part of 10X’s Peak View project, 35km northeast of Cooma in southern NSW and about 100km south of Canberra.

It sits in the Lachlan Fold Belt, the long mineral belt that’s hosted a good chunk of Australia’s gold and base metal mines. The old Big Badja silver mine sits on the project, and Western Mining and Ironbark Zinc both worked the ground back in the 70s.

The historic drilling threw up some standout hits, high-grade silver, lead and copper in one hole, a short, very rich slug of zinc and lead in another.

Nobody had chased those hits down-dip with a modern rig until now.

The Results: Metal in Two of Three Holes

10X put three holes into Balerion for 632.5m. The first two came up with chalcopyrite, sphalerite and galena, the minerals that carry copper, zinc and lead.

These are sulphides, the metal-rich material an explorer hopes to see when the core comes up the hole.

In the first hole, the metal showed up in veins down the length of the drill, the standout a thin but rich streak near 84m, with more scattered deeper down.

The second carried more, and carried it thicker, including a 5.8m zone with narrow bands of solid sulphide and an 8.2m run with copper and zinc through it. Meatier and more continuous hit than the first.

The third tested a separate target to the west and came back barren.

These are visual estimates from the geos logging the core, not lab numbers, and you can’t read grade off a visual log. So the metal’s there and the widths look good.

How rich it is comes down to the assays, which are still pending on all three holes.

The Hole That Got the Geos Talking

The second hole is the one that got the geologists talking. It cut a 4m zone packed with the same copper, zinc and lead minerals, sitting on a boundary between two different formations.

Some of it was disseminated, the metal grains scattered thinly through the stone. The better bit is the coarse, banded sulphide in the same zone, where the minerals clump into thicker streaks.

The scattered grains tell you the system is live, and the banded sulphide is the bit that points toward the heavier, more valuable hits.

Previous explorers logged that same boundary along strike from big slabs of high-grade mineralisation elsewhere on the project. So 10X has drilled into the right neighbourhood, the ground that tends to sit close to the major hits.

Whether it carries grade is still down to the assays, but geologically it’s the result they were after.

The program hit trouble early. Both holes hit heavy water, which slowed things down and pushed 10X off the faster RC drilling onto diamond core. Diamond's slower going, but it brings up a solid cylinder of stone instead of chips, so the geos get a much cleaner read on what's actually down there.

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What's Next: The Five Holes That Count

10X didn't have to update here. Three holes in, assays still out, it could've sat quiet until the lab numbers landed. It's come to market now because the ground's reading well enough that management wants it on the record, with the better targets still ahead.

The first three holes did their job tidying up the targeting. They tested a batch of geophysical signals that 10X had multiple holes pencilled in for, and the results let the company cross several off in one go.

So the program’s been trimmed from 12 holes down to eight, with five still to drill.

Those five are the business end. They're aimed down-dip of the old high-grade hits, chasing the same mineralisation deeper, following it into ground no rig has reached.

That includes the silver-lead-copper intercept and the short, rich zinc slug from the historic work. Those hits have to go somewhere, and the modern geophysics is pointing at where.

Assays from the first three holes are due back over the coming weeks. 10X will keep updating as the lab results land and the rest of the holes get drilled, so the newsflow stays steady from here.

Bottom line

Two of three hit sulphides, and the best of them landed on the geology that sits next to the old high-grade results. For a maiden program drilling blind into ground nobody had tested with modern gear, that's a solid first swing.

At 18c and a $7 million market cap, you’re paying explorer prices for a project already showing metal in the core, five more holes to come and a stack of historic high-grade hits sitting underneath.

The assays turn this from promising to proven, and they're only weeks away. That's what we're watching.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 200,000 10X shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by 10X at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

The project is Carp, in Lincoln County about 140km northeast of Las Vegas. It was a working high-grade fluorspar mine half a century ago, before it went quiet for decades.

EVG picked it up on option in May, stapled on a stack of adjacent ground, and had the old surface sampling independently checked.

That was the groundwork. Today it laid out what happens next.

It's a staged run of work, built to take Carp from a historic mine with strong surface hits to a set of drill-ready targets with a rig turning.

Each step firms up what's actually in the ground, which is the part the market can't price until someone goes and proves it.

Fluorspar feeds batteries, chips, refrigerants and nuclear fuel, and the US military rates it among its highest supply risks in a conflict.

The price has moved to match (more on that later), and America imports every tonne it uses.

EVG is sitting on a high-grade slab of it in the jurisdiction Washington most wants to buy from. Almost none of that is in the share price yet.

The Price and the Calendar First

EVG is trading at 3 cents, the same price the raise that funded the Carp deal was done at.

Right now the market is putting next to nothing on the project itself, the historic mine and every claim staked around it.

Most of that is the time of year. June is a notorious month for selling. Thinly traded small-caps often get sold as 30 June approaches, and stocks that have drifted tend to cop it regardless of what’s happening underneath.

Nothing about Carp has changed in the last month, and now there’s a plan to put value on it over the coming months.

Closing in on What the Old Miners Missed

Carp produced fluorspar once, back in the 1960s, but only from what the old miners could see at surface.

The grades EVG has since pulled from the ground sit higher than anything that mine ever sold, and the best of those came from the pits the old crews never finished.

Something's down there, and the program now running is the hunt for it.

A crew is already on site, collecting rock samples along a corridor on the north-west side of the main claim block. EVG only picked that ground out as a target recently, and it's the cheapest place to start.

Sampling only reads what's lying on the surface, and the deeper question of what sits metres below is the one drilling answers, but drilling is where the money goes, so you want the holes pointed at the right ground before the rig ever turns.

That pointing is the job of a magnetic survey, flown by drone or walked across the ground, reading the structures and how they run at depth.

Fluorspar at Carp sits in faults and folds, so tracing those structures traces the mineral itself, and the data builds into a 3D model that turns open ground into a handful of marked targets.

The mineral is noticeably denser than the limestone around it, so the right survey can pick out buried bodies of it the way you’d feel a brick hidden in a bag of feathers.

The drilling follows in two passes, reconnaissance holes first across the north-west targets, then deeper structural holes back at the old pits to chase the system down.

The rig only turns once the cheaper work has earned it.

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Already a Working Mine

Carp has been a mine before. Between 1958 and 1971 it produced 44,900 tonnes of fluorspar from four shallow pits, crushed and sold straight to Kaiser Steel with no other processing.

Fluorspar is graded by how much calcium fluoride, written CaF₂, is packed into the rock. The higher that number, the purer the material and the more it’s worth.

Carp came out at around 69%, enough to sell as it was. At that purity it goes to steelmakers as a flux, the additive that pulls impurities out of molten metal. A mine ran here for 13 years on that grade.

It closed in 1971 for a reason that had nothing to do with the geology. Cheap imported fluorspar flooded the US market and undercut small American producers, until an operation Carp’s size couldn’t make the sums work.

The mineral stayed in the ground, waiting for the economics to swing back. They have.

Verified results from 2024, signed off in May, came back as high as 88.15% CaF₂ across all four old pits, well north of the 69% the mine once sold at.

As purity climbs like that, the mineralisation stops being simple steel flux and starts heading toward acid-grade fluorspar, the premium tier behind batteries, chips, refrigerants and nuclear fuel.

Carp isn’t there yet, but that climb is the whole point. It’s also where the value sits.

Nevada ranks as the top mining jurisdiction in the world on the Fraser Institute's survey, the gauge explorers use for where it's safe to sink money into the ground.

The Mineral America Forgot to Worry About

For years almost nobody outside the steel industry could tell you what fluorspar did. That changed when the country that fed the world's fluorspar started hoarding it.

China mines and uses more fluorspar than anyone, and for years it sold the surplus on. Then it stopped being a net seller and became a net buyer, and the rest of the world was left scrambling for supply.

(It’s worth knowing there are two grades that matter here, because they sell into different worlds).

The lower grade is called metspar, the stuff steelmakers melt into the furnace as a flux.

The higher grade is acidspar, the pure end that gets turned into the acid behind batteries, chips and refrigerants.

Same mineral, dug from the same ground, but the cleaner it comes out, the more it’s worth.

Both have been climbing. The average the US paid for metspar went from US$151 a tonne in 2021 to US$400 in 2025. Acidspar ran from US$322 to US$470 over the same stretch.

Buyers paying more than double in four years is what a supply squeeze looks like before anyone’s built the new mines to fix it.

The US imports 100% of its fluorspar and has for decades, even with old mines sitting idle across the country.

Fluorspar shows up twice on the US military’s list of nine minerals with the highest shortfall risk in a major conflict, once as metspar and once as acid-grade.

The Defense Logistics Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that stockpiles materials for wartime, recently put US$168.9 million into a fluorspar supply contract. On the military side the mineral runs through armour-grade aluminium and jet fuel catalysts as well.

Carp is one of the few high-grade options in America.

Putting a Number on It

Right now Carp is a hunch with a strong history.

A mine that ran for 13 years, grades that have come back higher than it ever sold, and a read on a system that runs deeper than anyone has tested.

The sampling, the magnetics, the model and the drilling behind them are each there to turn that hunch into a defined deposit, one low-cost step at a time.

The market only ever pays for what it can measure, and every result that comes back gives it more to go on.

America imports every tonne of fluorspar it uses, the price has more than doubled in four years, and Carp is one of the few high-grade options on US soil in the jurisdiction Washington most wants to buy from.

Fluorspar has waited more than 50 years for the world to come back around. Now EVG finds out how much is down there.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 4,500,000 EVG shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by EVG at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

I guess ending 26 years of 4am alarms will do that to a man.

No such luck for us. Our screen, the one that trades, had us hooked all week as usual, and it served up a gold price getting pushed around. Bullion tested US$4,000, dipped under for a moment, then clawed back above it to close out a fourth week in the red.

But no need to panic. Gold’s still up better than 23% on a year ago and the banks haven’t backed off their higher targets (more on that later).

Plenty was still happening down the cheap end. Here’s what caught our eye this week:

• Mount Ridley grows its scandium resource off old samples

• Azzuro wraps its first drilling phase at Red Hill, assays due in July

• Gold wobbles toward US$4,000 but the bull case holds

• Pathkey bolts on an AI chip-design play after buying Chipforge

• Orcoda jumps 179% on a contract win against a falling market

• China hands out a lithium permit and the sector drops

  ---

Mount Ridley Finds Scandium in the Shed

Mount Ridley (ASX: MRD) keeps turning up scandium every time it digs back through its old drill samples.

MRD owns one of the biggest scandium deposits reported anywhere, around 367 million tonnes of it, on its Grass Patch ground near Esperance, with rare earth and gallium in the same ground.

This week it re-assayed another 481 old samples, and the deposit grew in all directions. The standout ran 22 metres at 134 ppm from 33 metres deep, about 46% above the existing resource average of 92 ppm. Other hits came in at 119 ppm and 104 ppm, and a number of holes still had scandium in them where the old drilling stopped.

MRD is doing this off pulps that have sat in the shed for years, with roughly 14,000 still to get through. It’s about the cheapest way to add tonnes there is.

Scandium is a critical mineral almost no one produces outside China and Russia. China put it under export licensing last year and choked the trickle reaching the West, which is why Australia, the US and Europe all want their own supply. It goes into aerospace alloys, fuel cells and 3D printing.

Demand for the metal is tipped to grow around 14.5% a year out to 2031 as those uses scale up. A deposit this size on Australian ground is what will turn the heads of Western buyers.

From here the new numbers feed into an updated resource estimate that could lift the JORC number. A second batch of re-assays is already back and under review, and the company is scoping a follow-up program to test a 13km stretch of untested ground to the south-west.

All of it funded off material MRD already owns.

Azzuro Keeps Hitting Sulphide at Red Hill

Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9), or Asian Battery Metals as most of you know it, has spent the past two months putting holes into Red Hill, its copper-gold project in Mongolia, and pulling up sulphide most of the way down.

Phase one wrapped this week, 15 holes for close to 1,900 metres.

The best hole cut nearly 37 metres of massive sulphide, then deeper down clipped a two-metre vein logged at a visual 33% chalcopyrite.

Five of the six holes chasing the sulphide found it, and the system now runs about 272 metres along strike, still opening up at both ends and at depth. They've been chipping at this thing since last year and every phase makes it look bigger.

Quick caveat on those grades. They're the geologists' eyeball read off the core, and the lab can tell a different story once it weighs in. Visual chalcopyrite has flattered to deceive before, so treat the percentages as a strong hint rather than a banked result until the assays land.

Azzuro’s still a minnow, trading at 1.7c for a market cap near $14 million. It went into the program with $5.2 million in the bank and we’d put it near $4 million now, so there’s cash to keep the rig turning. Which it will, having already moved across to the nearby Copper Ridge target.

A company this size landing thick sulphide while the world can’t get its hands on enough copper can re-rate in a hurry, if the assays back the visuals.

Most of those assays are due in July, with downhole electromagnetic surveys (which pick up conductive sulphide still sitting in the ground) starting shortly.

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Gold Looks Like the Sleeper of the Second Half

Six months ago you couldn't get through a barbecue without someone telling you gold was headed for US$10,000. It's come off the boil a bit lately, back to around US$4,071, and funnily enough that same crowd has gone quiet.

Gold is still up more than 23% on this time last year. Most people fondly remember the record it set in January, so a few months underneath it feels like a collapse when the price has really just had a rest.

We like gold more now that some people have lost interest.

The banks have all trimmed their forecasts since the slide, and every trimmed forecast still sits above where gold trades today.

• Goldman Sachs: US$4,900/oz by year end

• BMO Capital Markets: an average around US$4,625/oz across the second half

• Deutsche Bank: US$4,300/oz in the September quarter, lifting to US$4,800/oz by December

Goldman just cut its forecast and still landed about 20% above where gold sits now.

Central banks have been buying hand over fist for months (China’s been adding to its pile 18 months straight), and they don't lose sleep over what the price does in any given week. That's the floor under all of this.

Sentiment in gold can flip in a hurry though, and the last few months are proof of that.

There are plenty of gold names that ran hard on the way up and now trade at valuations that leave no room for a wobble. The ones worth owning are quality operators still trading at a fair price, and they're out there if you put in the work.

We've got our eye on a couple. More in the coming weeks.

Pathkey Bolts On a Chip-Design Bet

We flagged Pathkey (ASX: PKY) on the 3rd of May as one to keep an eye on, back when it was sitting at 5c. It closed this week at 7.1c, up more than 40%, and we think it's only just booting up.

This week PKY completed its buyout of Chipforge, a Singapore outfit building an AI platform that designs custom computer chips.

Designing custom silicon today takes 12 to 24 months and at least US$5 million a design, and most attempts fail on the first try, with an 86% first-silicon fail rate.

Chipforge’s pitch is that its agentic AI does the heavy lifting between design and verification, cutting that timeline by up to 70%.

Cadence and Synopsys, the two US giants that own chip-design software, are worth around US$190 billion between them and still run on tooling built in the 1980s.

Governments have committed more than US$115 billion to building out their own chip capacity since 2022, and the world is tipped to be short a million chip engineers by 2030. (Finally, a job the robots are creating instead of stealing.)

Chipforge holds an exclusive worldwide licence to chip-design IP from Nanyang Technological University, ranked the number one AI research institution globally.

PKY's pre-revenue and tiny, so plenty can still go wrong. But it's pointed straight at the silicon shortage the whole world is throwing money at, and it's already handed readers 40% since we first flagged it.

Orcoda Runs Against the Tide

The biggest small-cap move of the week came from an unlikely spot, a Brisbane logistics and software business. Orcoda (ASX: ODA) jumped 179% on a new contract.

The deal is with the Wagner Corporation, the Toowoomba clan who built an entire airport on farmland outside town. Orcoda's now running the workforce logistics and facilities management at Wellcamp Business Park, the industrial estate that's grown up next to that airport.

It kicks off in July, worth about $8 million a year, billed monthly on the number of workers housed on site.

Orcoda turned over about $17 million last financial year, so a single deal adding half that again is a proper step up, and it lands just as the company was nursing a hole left by a major customer who deferred work back in FY25.

The contract runs on Contractor360, Orcoda's workforce platform, lately rebuilt as an AI-led system that handles onboarding, rostering, accommodation and site access. Plenty of mining and construction outfits run big crews on remote sites and need similar, so Wellcamp doubles as a shop window for potential customers.

More often than not, the week’s small-cap winners are explorers riding a fresh drill hit. Orcoda got there on a signed contract and recurring revenue, which is a sturdier reason to be up 179%.

China Pulls the Lithium Lever Again

A single permit notice out of China knocked the lithium market this week, and the ASX lithium names wore it with everyone else.

The trigger was CATL’s Jianxiawo mine in Jiangxi, one of the biggest hard-rock lithium deposits going. Around 65,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year comes out of it, roughly 3% of global supply, and it’s sat idle since August last year when its permit lapsed.

That shutdown alone was enough to more than double Chinese lithium futures at one point.

Then this week Jiangxi authorities handed a CATL subsidiary a fresh land-use approval. That's an early tick in a long process, but traders jumped on it as the clearest sign yet the mine is coming back, and Chinese lithium carbonate futures fell about 10% over two sessions to a 10-week low.

Pilbara Minerals (ASX: PLS), Liontown (ASX: LTR) and Mineral Resources (ASX: MIN) all price off that Chinese carbonate number, so the drop washed straight onto our market within the day.

Small explorers feel it more than anyone, because they fund their drilling by raising money, and the price they can raise at tracks the lithium price. Knock 10% off in Jiangxi and a junior in Perth has to hand over more shares to bring in the same cash.

The small caps swing harder than the producers both ways, so weeks like this sting the rebounds fly.

There’s still no telling when the mine actually fires back up, and most analysts see lithium supply staying tight as battery demand climbs.

What it lays bare is how much of lithium’s recovery leans on this one mine staying dark, and how completely Beijing still works the switch, the same lever we’ve watched it pull on gallium, scandium and rare earths.

The Week Ahead

We're glad to see the back of June. It's been a rough month for small-caps, caught between the usual end-of-financial-year selling and the lingering hangover from the May budget and all the noise around tax.

The good news is news flow tends to pick up from mid-to-late July, so our portfolio companies should start dropping announcements, and the ASX should find a pulse again.

Gold looked to settle by Friday, copper held firm, and lithium wore the brunt of a mine that might be coming back to life.

And keep half an eye on the defence names, because the US and Iran are circling each other again, which has a way of putting a bid under that corner of the market.

Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 2,083,333 MRD performance rights and 1,150,000 AZ9 shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AZ9 and MRD at the time of writing.

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Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

Last time the US hosted, back in 1994, the average ticket cost about US$58. This year it’s nearer US$1,600, and seats for next month’s final in New Jersey are changing hands around US$16,000. A few have even been listed north of US$2 million.

Three host nations have poured money into stadiums and transport, betting the crowds pay it all back, and at those prices they probably will.

We’re writing this a little worse for wear. The Socceroos stunned Turkey on Sunday and the whole country was floating, then we got up before dawn to watch the Yanks bring us back to earth. Paraguay’s next on Friday, and we’ll be glued to that one too.

One result can turn a whole country, and markets are no different. A single number or headline and the price swings hard. We know that game well.

Back in small-cap land the news was a bit thin this week. A diamond rig finally turning below a million-ounce Victorian goldfield, a maiden rutile resource taking shape in Malawi, lithium roaring back to life, and the West drawing a line on Chinese rare earths.

Let’s get to it

• BHL puts a diamond drill rig into a historic million-ounce Victorian gold mine

• FUN commissions its own lab in Malawi as a maiden resource bears down

• Lithium claws out of a two-year hole and runs hard

• The G7 sets a deadline to break China’s grip on rare earths

• IVG reckons it can make battery-grade graphite without the acid, and pops 28%

• Billions pour into chips as Apple, Intel and Qualcomm redraw the map

It’s Diamond Drill Time in Victoria

Our 2025 Small-Cap of the Year and portfolio company Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) finally has a diamond drill rig on site, ready to punch below a historic mine that produced more than a million ounces of gold.

This is the program we’ve been waiting for. The rig is at Mt Egerton with roughly 4,000 metres across 10 holes lined up to test the system at depth.

Mt Egerton pulled 1.29 million ounces out of the ground at around 12 grams a tonne before water flooded it and shut the whole thing in 1906.

More than 90% of the drilling since has stopped above 150 metres, so the deep system (the bit that actually counts), has sat there untested for the better part of a century.

Victorian gold has a habit of getting richer the deeper you chase it.

Fosterville’s ultra-high-grade Swan zone, the discovery that turned it into a cash machine, wasn’t found until drilling pushed past historic workings.

Mt Egerton sits in the same structural corridor as Fosterville, Costerfield and Sunday Creek, and every one of them paid out for whoever chased the grade deeper.

Black Horse has also been given access to reopen the old Sister Rose adit, a horizontal tunnel dug into the hillside that miners once used to haul ore out before it was sealed up over a century ago.

Getting back inside lets them map where the historic workings sit underground, so they can aim the drill at the right spot below them rather than guessing.

Early results were modest, with only anomalous gold from the maiden holes. The depth test is the one that counts.

FUN Lab Commissioned, Resource in Sight

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) has commissioned its own laboratory in Lilongwe, Malawi, a sharp move with a maiden resource bearing down.

For anyone new to the story, FUN is chasing rutile in Malawi, the cleanest titanium feedstock going, and titanium is the light, strong metal aerospace and defence keep wanting more of.

Fifteen technicians have been trained to process samples in-house, with duplicates checked against an external lab for quality control.

Running their own assays cuts both the cost and the turnaround time for Fortuna, handy when you’re trying to feed rutile results into a resource and keep the drill bit moving through 2026.

Around 62% of the 6,000-metre hand auger program is now done, the 5,000-metre aircore program kicks off in early July, and the maiden inferred resource estimate lands the same month.

Resource competent person Richard Stockwell has been on the ground auditing both the drilling and the sample processing ahead of that estimate.

Mkanda sits about 20km south of Sovereign Metals’ Kasiya, the largest rutile deposit in the world, and Fortuna is going after rutile, graphite and potential rare earths across the same ground.

A maiden resource is the catalyst we’ve been waiting on as holders, and the company now has around $15 million in the bank after the recent investment from WndrCo, which funds the aircore program testing depth and the more than 600 holes still to report.

Plenty to keep the news flowing through the back half of the year.

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Lithium Bulls Are Back In Charge

Lithium spent two years in the gutter. It has now climbed out, and it is climbing fast.

The metal that gutted portfolios through the downturn is running hard again, and the holders who refused to sell are watching the screen turn green for the first time in a long while.

In China, lithium carbonate is up around 40% this year and roughly 175% on a year ago, sitting near 165,500 yuan a tonne, or about US$24,500.

Grid-scale battery storage is the new driver this cycle, a second engine bolted on next to EVs.

The forecasters who left lithium for dead are now quietly rewriting their numbers upward. Bloomberg has CRU Group, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and Citigroup all seeing stretched supply push prices past recent highs.

CRU sees carbonate averaging around US$33,900 a tonne next quarter, Benchmark reckons it could touch US$30,000 this year, and Citi has flagged about US$37,000 in Q3.

China is heading into its busier buying season, when battery makers step up their ordering. That has calmed earlier fears the market was carrying too much unsold stock, or that restarted Australian mines like Finniss and Bald Hill would flood it with fresh supply.

Some ASX names have already moved. PLS is up 36% this year, Wildcat Resources (WC8) is up 48%, and Galan Lithium (GLN) is up 23%.

Many others remain muted which may represent opportunity for those who want to back the analyst calls above.

The G7 Wants Out of Chinese Rare Earths

For two decades the West outsourced its rare earths problem to China and tried not to think about it. That's ending.

The G7 has agreed to source at least 40% of the materials for high-tech magnets from outside China by 2030, pushing for 50% as soon as they can manage it.

For anyone building a rare earths project somewhere the West trusts, that’s a tidal wave of future demand with their name on it.

China still controls more than 90% of global processing, and these are the materials inside half the things the modern world runs on, from the EVs in the driveway to the guidance systems steering missiles.

The G7 has now said out loud that it wants out, and the manufacturers and defence buyers chasing that target will be forming a queue outside every developer that can deliver before 2030. There aren’t many of them.

Lynas in Australia and MP Materials in the US already have price floors locked in, Lynas’ through a Japanese buyer and MP’s through the Pentagon.

Those deals set a minimum of US$110 a kilogram for the neodymium-praseodymium oxide that goes into magnets, around twice the market price before they were struck.

The US has gone further again with Project Vault, a US$12 billion critical minerals reserve.

A junior sitting on the right ground in a country the West trusts can suddenly raise money without scrapping for every dollar, with offtakers circling years before they normally would.

2030 is brutally tight for projects that mostly haven’t built anything yet. Processing is the part nobody likes to talk about, and most still have to prove they can turn rock into something a magnet maker will actually buy. Plenty will say they can. Only the best will.

InVert Graphite Says No To Acid

Almost nobody outside China has managed to build a battery-grade graphite plant, and the thing standing in the way is a tank of hydrofluoric acid.

Turning raw graphite flake into the material a carmaker will actually buy is the hard, expensive part, and the usual way to do it leans on hydrofluoric acid. It’s nasty stuff to handle, and a permitting nightmare in the West.

China processes roughly 98% of the world’s graphite, and the acid is a big part of why everyone else keeps stalling.

InVert Graphite (ASX: IVG) caught our eye this week, up as high as 57% before closing the week up 28% after announcing it’s acquiring RapidGraphite and a technology called RapidPulse.

RapidPulse is a process developed at Curtin University that the company says can do that conversion in seconds and hit around 99% purity without any acid involved.

Take the acid out and the cost of building one of these plants outside China drops hard.

Carmakers and governments are desperate for graphite from anywhere that isn't China, and a cleaner, cheaper process lowers the bar to handing them one, assuming it holds up once it leaves the lab.

IVG comes with the Morogoro graphite project in Tanzania and a potential route into downstream processing, and has raised A$2.5 million to fund the trials.

It’s early days for IVG and they are not a portfolio company for us, but it's one we'll be keeping an eye on.

Billions for Semiconductors and AI Chips

Intel spent years as American tech's cautionary tale, the giant that passed on the iPhone chip and then watched Nvidia run away with AI. It's clawing its way back now, and this week Apple and the White House gave it another shove.

Trump confirmed this week that Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build chips on American soil.

Intel shares jumped more than 10% on the day and are now up past 240% for the year. The US government is on the register too, after taking a stake back in August.

When Washington starts buying into chipmakers directly, the onshoring push has real teeth.

There are indicators everywhere that the big money is piling into chips, and it shows no sign of slowing.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), one of the biggest names in mobile silicon, is reportedly circling an AI silicon startup for between US$8 and US$10 billion. That's the going rate now for a genuine edge in AI.

We’re not going to pretend the local tiddlers are about to land Apple contracts.

But when the largest companies and governments on the planet are paying up for chips and racing to onshore supply, the ASX small-caps with exposure to that supply chain tend to catch the slipstream. That’s the corner of the market we’re watching closely.

The Week Ahead

We’re into the last full trading week of the financial year, which usually means thin volumes and not much news. June tends to be a soft month anyway, as people crystallise losses and buying dries up while portfolios get a once-over to setup for the second half.

So we’re not expecting much. Maybe a drilling update or two, but nothing major across the portfolio. If commodities take a breather and nothing flares up in the Middle East or the drone and tech space, we’d be happy enough heading into July.

Our eyes will be locked on the Socceroos on Friday. A win or a draw against Paraguay sends Australia through to the Round of 32 in second place, and even a loss leaves the door open as one of the best third-placed teams.

Fingers crossed. Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 187,500 BHL shares, 1,544,000 FUN shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by BHL and FUN at the time of writing.

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The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

Only a few dozen pro football clubs trade publicly on exchanges overseas. The biggest is Manchester United at around AUD$5.9 billion, bigger than plenty of ASX 200 names.

You can also pick up shares in Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Ajax, Celtic and Benfica.

A derby loss, a sacked manager, a marquee signing or a cup exit can all move the price. And every star in this tournament is a club asset on loan to his country for the month. If he comes home with a hamstring, his club wears it.

Share prices moving on a single piece of news. We know that game well.

Back in small-cap land, the news was dropping everywhere. A chip-industry milestone a decade in the making, a drone supplier planting a flag in Los Angeles right as Washington puts more than $50 billion behind drone production, thick copper out of Mongolia, and a maiden resource taking shape in Malawi.

A scandium resource grew off samples that had been sitting in storage for years. And in Canada, a tiny copper hunter pulled grades that sent us back through years of announcements looking for a precedent. We came up empty.

What caught our eye this week:

• AI1 cracks graphene below 300°C, the chip industry’s white whale

• KTK signs lease in US as Washington opens chequebook on drones

• MRD doubles its scandium grades off old drill pulps, no rig required

• AZ9 hits thick, high-grade copper in Mongolia

• FUN advances Mkanda on every front after landing a SpaceX-calibre backer

• WCN drills copper grades we can’t say we’ve seen before

• SpaceX lists and Elon becomes a trillionaire

  ---

AI1 Harpoons the Chip Industry's White Whale

Graphene grows at around 1,000°C. A finished chip starts cooking past about 450°C.

That gap has held up the chip industry’s most wanted breakthrough for a decade.

Every advanced chip, from the processor in your phone to the ones filling AI data centres around the world, runs on copper wiring.

That copper has hit its physical limits as the chips keep shrinking, and graphene is the material everyone agrees should replace it.

But the one material that could save the chip could only be grown at a temperature that destroys it.

Until now.

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) ran its process three times on three separate days, and grew graphene below 300°C every time. No chipmaker will build a billion-dollar production line around a coating that worked one Tuesday and never again.

Then AI1 did the thing most small-caps avoid. It handed the raw data to an outsider and invited him to pull it apart.

That outsider was UNSW’s Associate Professor Rakesh Joshi, who learned graphene working alongside the bloke who won the Nobel Prize for discovering it. Joshi checked every run and dozens of measurement points across each sample, and confirmed the process does what Adisyn says it does.

The machine AI1 uses to lay the graphene down is an ALD system, which is the standard tool inside every leading-edge chip factory on earth. AI1’s invention is the chemistry that makes graphene form at low temperature inside that machine, and it’s patented.

Owning the pizza oven doesn’t mean you can make the pizza. TSMC, Samsung and Intel own the ovens. AI1 owns the recipe.

This is a swing at an industry heading toward US$1 trillion a year.

We first wrote AI1 up for readers in April at 6.8c, and it’s up more than 150% since then. The stated next milestone is a binding deal with one of the giants.

You can read our full breakdown here.

KTK Plants Its Flag in the US

There's a new flag flying in Los Angeles this week, and an Aussie small-cap put it there.

KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) signed a lease on a production and engineering facility in the city and took immediate possession of the warehouse and office space. The US build-out is already underway.

KTEK makes composite airframes and electromechanical assemblies for military and commercial drones, running an asset-light model that keeps the design and engineering in-house and farms out the manufacturing.

It’s one of our portfolio companies, and it already supplies into tier-one defence programs. The LA site is about turning that foothold into a much bigger book of US customers.

The US has lined up around $54 billion to scale up drone production, the biggest push of its kind the country has run. And a lot of American customers want a supplier with production on home soil before they'll hand over an order.

Plenty of US defence work also carries domestic sourcing rules a foreign-only supplier can’t meet. The LA facility clears both hurdles and gives KTEK a second production hub alongside its existing operations in Europe and Israel.

KTEK has been growing its revenue quickly since listing late last year. A base inside the world’s largest defence market, right as that market opens the chequebook on drones, is how a junior supplier turns a few tier-one relationships into many.

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Old Holes, New Scandium for Mount Ridley

Years ago, explorers drilled a few thousand holes into a stretch of ground 25km north of the port at Esperance, hunting nickel and copper. The samples went into storage, and the world moved on.

Nobody tested them for scandium, because back then scandium wasn’t worth the lab fee. It was a niche metal almost nobody chased.

Then China put it under export controls last year, and every aerospace and chip buyer in the West suddenly needed a new supplier for a metal the whole world produces about 25 tonnes of a year.

So Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD), which now holds that ground as its Grass Patch Project, pulled 3,271 of the old samples out of storage and asked them a new question.

This week the answers came back. The current resource centres on a zone called Block 1, averaging 91.8ppm scandium oxide, and the reassays beat it comfortably, with near-surface hits of 9m at 152.89ppm and 20m at 116.39ppm.

The strongest grades sat about 13km southwest of the resource, on ground it doesn’t cover, and they improved the further out the samples came from. The system keeps going past the last hole.

Scandium sells for around US$3,350 a kilogram, and demand already runs at four times world supply.

These are aircore results, so they need proper drilling before anyone banks them. Phase 1 now rolls into the resource model, and Phase 2 is being scoped along that 13km corridor, with roughly 14,000 samples still sitting in storage.

Growing a resource off samples you already own, with no rig and no raise, is about as cheap as exploration gets. It’s one of a few reasons why MRD sits in our portfolio.

We broke down the announcement here.

Azzuro Hits Thick, High-Grade Copper in Mongolia

A 13-metre copper hit at over 2% is a strong result for any explorer, and this week it came from Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9), the portfolio company formerly known as Asian Battery Metals.

The assays landed from its Red Hill project in Mongolia.

Drillhole MU2601 returned 13.1m at 2.58% copper, with 0.96 g/t gold, 22.4 g/t silver and 0.76% zinc on top.

A hit like that at any size gets attention, and for a company carrying a sub-$20 million market cap it’s a result that can rerate a register.

The silver came in well above the earlier holes, adding metal credits to a system already throwing off four payable metals.

Red Hill is a volcanogenic massive sulphide system, which means the metal sits in dense pods of ore, and the pods come in clusters. Find one and the odds are good there's another nearby.

A second hole, MU2605, extended the massive sulphide another 124 metres along strike to the west-northwest, where the copper looks to be getting richer.

AZ9 has now traced the zone over roughly 272 metres of strike, and it’s open at depth and in both directions.

Assays are still pending on six diamond holes and three RC holes, due over the coming weeks, with a 3D gravity survey being modelled to sharpen the next targets.

The first two holes set the bar. Now the lab decides whether the rest clear it. Fingers crossed.

Fortuna Puts Rutile in the Bag

Exploration companies mostly deal in paper. Assay results, targets, estimates of what might be down there.

This week, Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN), our rutile explorer in Malawi, produced something you can hold. A lab in Johannesburg took a 5.4 tonne bulk sample of dirt from FUN's Mkanda project and turned it into 66kg of rutile concentrate.

The grade came in at 1.22% and the ore processes cleanly. Once the final results land later this month, that concentrate becomes the product Fortuna puts in front of downstream buyers.

For anyone new to the story, rutile is the feedstock titanium makers prize most, and titanium goes into everything from jet engines to humanoid robots.

The reason this corner of Malawi first turned heads sits 20km to the north. Sovereign Metals’ Kasiya is the largest rutile deposit in the world, and FUN’s ground shares its geology.

The next step is isolating a premium spec above 95% TiO₂, the standard Kasiya set. Sovereign has already proven its rutile good enough for high-end aerospace work, and Fortuna wants to show it can do the same.

FUN’s drills kept moving all the while. Their 6,000m hand auger program is about 40% done and the 5,000m aircore program kicks off late June.

The maiden Inferred Resource Estimate, the company’s first formal count of what’s actually in the ground, is pencilled in for late June or early July.

All of this comes a week after WndrCo, an early backer of SpaceX and Figma, tipped $8.6 million into FUN for close to a fifth of the company, leaving around $15 million in the bank and keeping them cashed up for a long stretch.

We’ve held FUN since it was a 4c stock, and a backer of that calibre turning up is the strongest sign yet that we read it right.

WCN: Copper Grades We Haven’t Seen Before

White Cliff Minerals (ASX: WCN) is a $50 million small-cap that caught our eye this week on the back of one impressive drill hole.

The standout: 19.81m at 6.64% copper, and inside that sat 3.05m at 17.68% and 1.52m at 21.1% copper. That last one is basically a fifth pure copper down the hole.

We’ve looked at plenty of copper drilling over the years, and grades like that over a near 20-metre interval are not something we can say we’ve seen before.

It’s part of the Danvers prospect at WCN’s Rae copper project up in Nunavut, Canada.

Danvers already carries a historic (non-JORC) resource of 4.16Mt at 2.96% copper, and it sits on the Teshierpi Fault Zone, where the company says there’s around 12km of strike still to test and copper already logged over 4km of it.

The plan is an early direct-ship open pit, meaning ore gets dug and shipped straight to buyers without building a processing plant first. Met work showing copper recoveries above 95% on a simple flotation flowsheet makes that case easier.

A second diamond rig lands this week, with assays running through to July.

SpaceX and the Trillionaire

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday, the day SpaceX went public.

The rocket maker floated on the Nasdaq under SPCX, the biggest sharemarket debut the world has ever seen. It pulled in US$75 billion, close to three times the US$25.6 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, the record that had stood since.

Around 20% of the offer went to retail, far more than you’d normally see, with some punters celebrating an allocation of a single share. For once, the little guy could actually get a look in.

SpaceX is rockets and the Starlink satellite network, plus a slice of Musk’s AI outfit xAI. It’s flown around 650 launches and is the one that turned landing a rocket and reflying it into routine.

The stock was priced at US$135, opened at US$150, ran as high as US$176 intraday, then closed at US$160.95, up roughly 19%.

That handed SpaceX a market cap of US$2.1 trillion, bigger than Musk’s own Tesla.

Convert that to Aussie dollars and it comes to about AUD$3 trillion for one company. Every business listed on the ASX put together is worth about the same.

Which is how Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Between his SpaceX and Tesla holdings, he’s worth around US$1.1 trillion on paper.

Strip it back and SpaceX is really three businesses. Starlink, the satellite network, turns a real profit and grows fast, with the rockets doing alright behind it. xAI, his AI arm, is still burning cash to get going.

Musk built the float around xAI anyway. It’s his shot at OpenAI and Anthropic, with data centres orbiting the planet and a potential market of nearly US$27 trillion.

SpaceX did around US$18 billion in revenue last year and lost almost US$5 billion doing it. But it takes a brave man to bet against Elon, and reusable rockets looked every bit as unlikely right up until they worked.

The talk now is whether he folds SpaceX and Tesla together. Dan Ives at Wedbush thinks they could combine inside a year, and the two are already building a chip plant together in Texas.

Musk has said any tie-up would be a brute to pull off, with both boards needing to sign it off.

The Week Ahead

WCN’s second diamond rig lands in the coming days, with assays running to July.

AZ9 has nine more holes at the lab, and MRD is scoping Phase 2 along that 13km scandium corridor.

FUN puts a number on Mkanda for the first time in late June or early July, and AI1’s next move is a binding deal with one of the chip giants.

That can all keep till Monday, though. This afternoon the Socceroos walk out against Turkey, twenty years on from the golden generation we saw in Germany in 2006.

Aloisiiii, the shirt whipped over the head, Guus working his magic, and half the country up past midnight for Cahill.

Nobody’s giving this lot much of a chance, but nobody gave that mob one either. Get around them.

Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 900,000 AI1 performance rights, 1,544,000 FUN shares, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, 1,150,000 AZ9 shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, AI1, FUN, AZ9 and MRDat the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) just grew its scandium hand out of a storage shed.

MRD’s Grass Patch Project sits about 25km north of the deepwater port at Esperance in WA, and already holds a sizeable scandium resource.

The company dug a batch of old drill samples out of storage and sent them back to the lab to be re-assayed for scandium. Those holes were drilled years ago, back when the ground was being chased for nickel and copper. The scandium in them was never measured at the time.

The numbers came back well above what is already defined. Block 1, the company's central scandium zone, holds 155.2Mt at 91.8ppm Sc₂O₃.

The reassay beat that comfortably, with hits like 9m at 152.89ppm and 20m at 116.39ppm, both near surface.

The hits landed about 13km southwest of the current resource, on ground the resource doesn't cover yet.

For those new to scandium, it goes into aluminium alloys for aircraft, defence platforms, fuel cells and 3D-printed parts, and for years it sat as a niche metal almost nobody chased.

That changed in April 2025, when China put it under export licensing and Western buyers in aerospace and semiconductors had to start finding supply somewhere else.

MRD is a portfolio company of ours and sits at 2.5c with a market cap around $35 million, a small company sitting on a large mineralised system it’s only now starting to map properly.

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What Came Back

Phase 1 of the reassay covered 3,271 old air core pulps from across the Grass Patch Complex.

The scandium was in the samples the whole time. Nobody had thought to look.

When they finally did, the best holes came back well above the Block 1 resource average, and the strongest grades turned up right at the edge of the old drilling, where the resource runs out.

Some of the standout hits:

• 9m at 152.89ppm Sc₂O₃ from 9m

• 13m at 137.61ppm Sc₂O₃ from 6m

• 9m at 132.98ppm Sc₂O₃ from 9m

• 10m at 127.80ppm Sc₂O₃ from 9m

• 20m at 116.39ppm Sc₂O₃ from 15m

Grades are meant to fade as you walk away from a defined resource. You’ve drilled the good bit, the edges thin out, that’s how it usually goes.

At Grass Patch the opposite happened.

The numbers climbed the further out the holes sat, and the best of them landed right at the boundary of where anyone had bothered to drill.

That tells you the resource on the books could be the small end of what’s in the ground, and the company hasn’t found the edge of the system yet.

So for the cost of lab work, MRD has a fistful of near-surface scandium hits and a 13km corridor of untested ground pointing away from the resource. That corridor is where the drill goes next.

The Scandium Story

Scandium is one of those metals almost nobody talks about until they can’t get it.

The entire world produces around only 25 tonnes a year (demand’s already more than four times that). Barely any of it comes from outside China and Russia, and most of what does get made is a by-product of mining something else, so nobody can just turn up supply when it’s needed.

And since that clampdown, the buyers who lean on it, aerospace and the chip makers, can’t count on the supply that used to run through Beijing.

Scandium sits around US$3,350 a kilogram, a different universe to the metals most ASX juniors dig for.

Demand is tipped to grow about 14.5% a year out to 2031, off the back of those same end uses, and there’s next to nothing new being built to supply it.

Mount Ridley says it holds one of the largest scandium resources going, 25km from a deepwater port in WA. That’s a lot of a scarce metal, in a country the West actually wants to buy from, right when that’s the one thing everyone’s chasing.

The Cheapest, Smartest Path MRD Could Ask For

Mount Ridley skipped most of the bill.

For most explorers this size, the cash goes out the door faster than the results come back, and plenty of good ground never gets tested because the money runs dry first.

Here the drilling was already done years ago, and someone else paid for it, the nickel and copper explorers who worked this ground long before MRD arrived.

The holes are in, the samples are on the shelf, and the only real cost left is the lab invoice.

There are roughly 14,000 more pulps still waiting, on top of the 3,271 already run. Each one is a cheap shot at a bigger resource, off holes already drilled and paid for.

And the results come back in weeks, not the months a new drill program usually eats.

For a junior trying to make a dollar stretch, you couldn’t script it much better.

The first batch goes straight into the resource model, with a real shot at lifting parts of the existing resource from Inferred to Indicated.

Phase 2 is being scoped now, pointed squarely at that 13km corridor where the best grades turned up.

The Way Forward

MRD calls itself an explorer, but it’s trying to become a developer, and this nudges it further down that road.

The honest read is that there is still a fair way to go. These are aircore hits inside an Inferred resource, and they need real drilling before anyone banks them. The strike is open and the 13km corridor hasn’t seen a rig yet.

A resource growing off 14,000 pulps already in storage, with no rig and no raise, is about as efficient as a junior gets.

The market still prices MRD like a plain-vanilla explorer, a shallow scandium system 25km from a port, in the one country every Western buyer wants to source from as they back out of China.

The next assays aren’t far off. Keep pulling numbers like these out of storage, with the drill still to come, and a $35 million valuation likely won’t hold.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club has 2,083,333 performance rights in MRD. Equities Club has been engaged by MRD at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) just cracked the code.

It deposited the graphene below 300°C, and it did it run after run. No previous graphene process has worked below the industry's thermal limit, anywhere.

Copper is the wiring buried inside every advanced AI chip on the planet, and it’s hit its physical limits. TSMC, the biggest chipmaker on earth, has already named graphene as the way past it, and Adisyn is the first to deposit graphene at a temperature a chip can survive.

This is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry, and an ASX small-cap just delivered the result that makes Samsung, TSMC and Intel sit up and pay attention.

Adisyn is one of our portfolio holdings. We first wrote it up for readers in April at 6.8c, and it's up more than 150% since then, with the biggest catalysts still in front of it.

Today’s result clears the way for the big one, a commercial deal with one of the global chipmakers, and that’s what management is chasing inside the next 12 months.

AI1 made the breakthrough, then did the thing most small-caps avoid. It handed the raw data to someone independent and let them pull it apart.

That someone trained alongside the man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering graphene.

His name is Associate Professor Rakesh Joshi, who runs the Graphene Research Group at UNSW. He went through Adisyn’s data, across repeat runs and multiple points on the sample, and confirmed it stacks up.

The Man Who Checked the Work

In 2010, two scientists at the University of Manchester won the Nobel Prize in Physics for a material they had peeled off a block of graphite using ordinary sticky tape.

The material was graphene. A single sheet of carbon atoms, stronger than steel and a better conductor than copper, and their work turned it from theory into something you could hold.

One of those two scientists was Sir Andre Geim. Early in his career, Rakesh Joshi worked under Geim at Manchester and co-authored research with him.

These days Joshi is an associate professor at UNSW, where he leads the university’s Graphene Research Group and has published more than 130 papers in the field. Few people on earth are better placed to look at a set of graphene results and tell you whether they hold up.

So Adisyn handed him everything. The same deposition process run three times on three separate days, plus dozens of measurements taken at points right across each sample.

Each of those samples is a small square of copper, about a centimetre a side, with the graphene grown on it. By grown we mean carbon is laid down inside a chamber and the atoms settle into a single layer, one atom thick, across the copper.

One set of tests shows the result repeats, the other shows it’s even across the whole surface.

Joshi, who doesn’t work for Adisyn and has no stake in the outcome, went through the lot and confirmed the graphene is real, and that the process does what Adisyn says it does.

Plenty of companies say their science works. Not many are confident enough in the results to hand an outsider of that calibre the raw data and invite him to prove it doesn’t.

Why the Temperature is the Whole Game

Every advanced chip today runs on copper. Billions of transistors, all linked by copper wiring far too fine to see, moving electricity around the chip.

Copper has worked beautifully for decades. The problem is what's happening now the wires have shrunk this far.

The newest chips are shrinking below two nanometres, and at that scale copper starts to choke. Resistance climbs and the wiring runs hot, so power that should be doing useful work leaks away as heat. Across a data centre full of AI chips, that waste turns into a power bill big enough to run a small city.

The industry has known the fix for years. Graphene moves electricity more efficiently than copper, and it keeps doing it at sizes where copper overheats and fails.

Graphene was always going to work. The hard part was making it.

Growing it the usual way takes heat of around 1,000°C. A chip is a delicate stack of materials, and anything past about 450°C starts to wreck the structures already built into it. So the one material that could save the chip had to be grown at a temperature that would destroy it.

That’s the wall. Every chipmaker on earth has been staring at it for a decade.

Adisyn just grew graphene below 300°C. Comfortably under the ceiling.

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Anyone Can Get Lucky Once

The customers Adisyn is chasing are the giant chip factories, known in the industry as fabs.

TSMC, Samsung and Intel run them, and none of them will build a billion-dollar production line around a coating that worked one Tuesday and never again. So this result was about proving the first one would repeat.

Adisyn ran the same process three times, on three separate days. Same recipe, same setup, and each run produced the same graphene layer.

Then they checked the layer was good across the whole square, not just in one spot. When you grow a coating this thin, the danger is it comes out patchy, solid in one part and thin or missing in another.

A patchy layer is no use inside a chip. So they sampled the graphene at three different points across the surface, and it was the same at all of them.

Repeatable run to run, and the same right across the sample. A university lab can manage a one-off. A fab’s production line needs both, every single time.

The result proved a third thing (and this is the one chipmakers get excited about).

Adisyn's process works across a wide band of temperatures, which the industry calls a process window.

Say a process only forms its coating at one set temperature, 350°C and nothing else. Every other step on the production line then has to be built around that single number, which makes it a headache to fit in anywhere.

Adisyn's process runs from below 450°C all the way down under 300°C. The low end keeps it safe on the delicate structures a hotter process would wreck, and the width gives a fab the room to use it at several points along the line and set the temperature where the rest of the process needs it.

A window that wide also opens it up to jobs beyond the interconnect wiring. The more places a fab can slot it in, the more the industry wants it.

The machine Adisyn used, called an ALD system, is the standard tool already sitting in every leading-edge fab on earth. So if TSMC already owns the machine, what are they paying Adisyn for?

Think of the machine as just the oven. Adisyn’s invention is the recipe, the chemistry and the precise process that makes graphene actually form at low temperature inside that oven.

Owning a pizza oven doesn’t mean you can make the pizza. Adisyn owns the recipe to one of the most promising breakthroughs in microchips in a decade, and it’s patented.

That’s the part a fab can’t get anywhere else, and will pay a whole lot for.

Where AI1 Sits Today

A quick catch-up for anyone new to the story.

We got on the register in early April. Inside a week it ran to 20c, topped the ASX gainers board and added around $130 million in market value.

It hasn’t slowed down since.

The graphene process AI1 has cracked points at two very different markets.

The first is the one we’ve been walking through. Inside a chip, graphene grows as the wiring that carries the signal, the job copper can no longer do as chips keep shrinking.

The second is stealth. A radar finds an aircraft by firing out a signal and waiting for the echo to bounce back. Coat that aircraft in Adisyn’s graphene and the echo gets swallowed instead of returned, so a full-sized drone reads on the screen as something closer to a bird.

The same material that fixes the chip also helps a drone fly in unseen.

The news flow since April has been relentless. Adisyn locked in an exclusive worldwide licence on the stealth tech out of Tel Aviv University, then raised $14 million with Israel’s biggest investment house and Regal cornerstoning the book. Then the former commander of Israel’s Iron Dome came on to advise the drone arm, and the US granted the patent that sits over the whole thing.

This week, the chip side took the next big step forward.

What This Unlocks

Until now, Adisyn has been a lab story. A good one, but a lab story. With the result independently verified, the company can stop talking about what the process might do and start showing it to the people who’d buy it.

That means the Tier 1 chipmakers, the TSMCs and Samsungs of the world, and conversations about running the process inside their own fabs.

There’s a scaling job to do first. Everything so far has been grown on a square of copper a centimetre across. A real chip is built on a wafer, a silicon disc up to 300 millimetres wide, and Adisyn has to take the process up to that size before a fab can run it for real.

Think of it as proving the recipe works in the test kitchen, then proving it works in a restaurant turning out a thousand plates a night.

Then comes the part every small-cap is ultimately judged on. The science can be brilliant, but a company only gets rewarded once that science starts earning.

Adisyn’s path to that is licensing.

It owns the patented recipe, the fabs own the factories, and the cleanest model is to let them run the process and collect a royalty on every wafer that comes off the line.

A process this central is also an asset a major could simply decide to buy outright.

When the industry last switched interconnect material, from aluminium to copper, the chipmakers went out and bought the new chemistry from specialists.

Graphene is also one of the best heat conductors known. AI chips are built by stacking smaller chips tightly together, and packed in like that they run hot. Cooling those stacks could be where the graphene side brings in its first revenue.

The global semiconductor market is tracking towards US$1 trillion next year, and Adisyn’s process plugs straight into the interconnect segment, the wiring sitting inside every advanced chip. That segment is worth around US$31 billion today and headed for US$45 billion by 2035.

Now weigh it against the company carrying it. Adisyn’s whole market value wouldn’t cover the fit-out of one corner of a multi-billion dollar TSMC fab, and it owns the patented recipe the giants are going to need.

What We’re Watching From Here

The next domino is a million-dollar cheque.

Adisyn’s stated target is a binding deal with one of the global chipmakers, worth north of a million dollars to AI1, and the first of what could be many. For a company this size, that first name on a contract would land like a bomb.

Then watch who comes to the table. Adisyn is about to walk into TSMC, Samsung and the rest carrying results nobody can hand-wave away and a US patent in its back pocket, and the names that lean in, plus how fast they do it, will tell the story louder than any ASX release.

The giants will take their time. They test a new process half to death before they let it anywhere near a production line, so the conversations Adisyn is about to start will run on their clock. Worth remembering for anyone expecting sales by tomorrow.

While they get comfortable, we’re sitting on the one company that’s already cracked the thing every last one of them needs.

Our View

Step back from the nanometres and the interconnects for a second.

The most advanced industry on earth has been stuck on the same problem for a decade, and this week a small-cap on the ASX put a verified answer on the table.

Signed off, no less, by a man who learned graphene standing next to the bloke who won the Nobel for it.

Something this big usually sits locked inside a university lab, or buried in a research budget at TSMC. This one trades on the ASX.

The hard science is progressing quickly, and what’s coming is the selling, to buyers who are already telling the world that graphene is the future.

Every target the company has set itself, it’s gone and hit, and now it’s handed the proof to someone with no reason to flatter it.

A Nobel Prize was handed out for discovering graphene.

The fortune goes to whoever works out how to deploy it at commercial scale.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 900,000 performance rights at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AI1 at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.

This week Elon Musk and SpaceX put their hand out for one of the biggest cheques public investors have ever been asked to write, a raise that would value the company at roughly US$1.8 trillion.

ASX investors can get a slice too.

To put that in context, it's about what the entire ASX top 100 is worth combined

SpaceX started life as a rockets company, but that’s almost the boring part now. These days it’s pitching itself as a satellite internet giant and an AI infrastructure player that could end up one of the most important tech platforms of the next decade.

Whether it’s actually worth US$1.8 trillion is something the market will sort out in a couple of weeks when it lists.

Back in small-cap land, news was dropping everywhere. Silicon Valley money turned up in Malawi, AI1 went into a halt chasing a world first, EVG quietly added to its foundations, and DXN reminded everyone that AI stories work a lot better with a signed contract attached.

We also caught one of the strangest announcements of the year, a brutal biotech wipe-out, and a drone supplier having the week of its life off the back of the market's hottest theme.

Let’s get into it.

• Silicon Valley money arrives in Malawi as WndrCo backs Fortuna Metals

• Adisyn shareholders brace for a Milestone 2 verdict

• Evion adds Arthur Sinodinos and delivers positive EBITDA

• KTK keeps climbing as drone demand gathers momentum

• DXN proves AI still works when revenue is attached

• Opthea's 97.5% collapse and the cold reality of biotech

• SRJ's awkward SpaceX moment and the price query that followed

  ---

Silicon Valley’s Smart Money Lands in Malawi

One of the most connected technology investors in Silicon Valley has just written an $8.6 million cheque to Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN), taking a 19.9% stake and becoming its cornerstone shareholder.

The investor is WndrCo, the US fund founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, with more than US$3 billion under management and a track record of backing some of the biggest tech winners of the past decade.

Names in the portfolio include SpaceX, Anduril, Waymo, Databricks, Figma, Airtable and 1Password.

This is smart money. It spends its time working out where technology is heading before the rest of the market catches on.

WndrCo is arriving just as humanoid robotics moves from theory to production. Tesla wants to build millions of Optimus robots, defence contractors are deploying autonomous systems, and every one of those machines needs lightweight, high-strength materials.

Titanium sits near the top of that list, and rutile is one of its key feedstocks (the raw material you process to get the metal).

The money itself is meaningful, but the network may prove even more valuable.

With roughly $15 million in the bank after the raise and a cornerstone backer who understands where titanium demand is heading, Fortuna goes into the second half of the year with options. The stock finished the week at 12 cents. You can find our full write-up here.

Adisyn Waits for a Defining Moment

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) is one of ours. We backed it at 6.8 cents and it's now 17.5 cents, so we're watching this one as closely as anybody.

The company went into a trading halt this week pending independent validation of Milestone 2 in its graphene semiconductor program.

In plain terms, it needs to show it can lay down graphene reliably and repeatably below 300°C across multiple independent runs, with even coverage right across the test surface.

Management reckons that if it lands, nobody anywhere in the world has pulled it off before.

The whole case rests on graphene eventually replacing or improving the tiny connections that move data around a chip, the interconnects, which are one of the bottlenecks the industry keeps running into.

Holders have already had a taste of what a result does here. When Milestone 1 came through in January, the stock ran from around 6.8 cents to almost 30 before settling back under 20.

Milestone 2 carries even more weight.

There’s no guarantee the result lands the way shareholders are hoping. If it does, and the company keeps moving towards commercial engagement with semiconductor groups, Milestone 1 showed how the market tends to respond.

Bring on Tuesday.

EVG Keeps Adding Bricks to the Wall

The share price didn't show it this week, but Evion Group (ASX: EVG) kept putting runs on the board.

First came the appointment of former Australian Ambassador to the United States Arthur Sinodinos AO as a strategic adviser. For a $29 million company, landing someone whose network runs that deep through Canberra, Washington and critical minerals policy is a rare get.

Later in the week EVG’s Panthera Graphite Technologies operation delivered audited EBITDA of US$530,000 in its first full year of commercial production. The eye-catching part was that it did it while running at only 20-25% nameplate capacity (the maximum the plant is built to produce), while still paying down debt from operating cash flow.

Management is now mapping a path towards US$3.4 million EBITDA at Stage 1 capacity and US$5.8 million at Stage 2.

So EVG has a critical minerals business that actually earns money, a Nevada fluorspar project sitting in the middle of America's supply-chain scramble, and now an adviser plugged into the circles writing that policy.

The fluorspar backdrop shifted in Evion’s favour this week, and it came out of China.

China Kings Resources, the country's biggest fluorspar producer, has suspended several mines and launched a self-inspection on environmental and safety grounds.

China supplies most of the world's fluorspar, so when its largest producer pulls tonnes offline, everyone downstream feels the pinch.

Every shutdown like that makes a non-Chinese source worth a bit more, and a Nevada project feeding America's critical minerals push sits on the right side of it.

The market marked the stock down this week, but the underlying story keeps getting stronger.

KTK Keeps Finding Buyers

Plenty of stocks spike for a day and disappear. KTEK Group (ASX: KTK) is doing the opposite.

Another one of ours, backed from the 20-cent IPO, it climbed another 50% this week, from 32 cents to 48 on better than $5 million of turnover, as the market kept chewing over last week's news that deliveries had resumed after some supply-chain strife. On paper that's a fairly standard update. The buying says investors see something bigger.

What they're looking at is where KTK sits in a defence sector changing by the month.

The company makes composite airframes and the electromechanical guts of drones for Tier-1 manufacturers, which plants it inside one of the fastest-growing corners of defence going around.

The backdrop keeps helping, with reports only last week that the Trump administration is weighing funding to prop up domestic drone makers and shore up America's supply chain.

Management has talked about taking its ‘cordless factory’ model into the US, setting up small production sites right next to customers rather than building one giant plant. That idea makes a lot more sense if Washington starts tipping real money into home-grown drones.

For now the market's treating drones less like aerospace and more like ammunition, and that tailwind is still blowing hard.

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DXN Finally Gives the Market Something Real

The most talked-about small-cap of the week was DXN (ASX: DXN), and no wonder, it finished up 775%.

The stock ripped higher after signing a binding $8.8 million contract with a US-listed neo-cloud operator (a newer breed of cloud provider built specifically for AI workloads) to design and build an AI modular data centre.

This one moved because of a signed contract with revenue and a delivery attached.

It stood out in a week where a lot of the market’s biggest movers were still running on reinstatements, capital structure changes, speculative bets or simple repricing.

The contract is a pilot deployment, but management believes a clean delivery could open the door to follow-on work north of US$200 million.

It also lands square in the right theme, with AI infrastructure starting to bleed into the defence-grade and sovereign computing that governments want kept onshore.

The one blemish came late Friday, when two directors trimmed part of their holdings, worth roughly $78,000 and $130,000.

After a move that size, few would begrudge them taking a little off the table.

OPT Shows How Brutal Biotech Can Be

Few charts this year have looked uglier than Opthea's (ASX: OPT).

The company came back to trading this week after a long suspension and immediately lost around 97.5% of its value, dropping from roughly 60 cents to just 1.5 cents.

The collapse had been building for months. A late-stage drug trial failed (Phase 3, the final round before a treatment can be approved), in this case for a common eye disease that causes vision loss in older people. After that, the company had to rethink what it would become next.

The old Opthea is gone.

What's left is a much smaller company built around its remaining drug candidate and a new focus on a rare lung disease called LAM, with $31.2 million in the bank and an 18-month plan to develop it. That's a long way from the business that went into suspension.

Biotech is one of the highest risk/reward corners of the market. Years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars can vanish on a single failed trial.

Sometimes the science works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Opthea is what the second one looks like.

SRJ Gets Itself Into an Awkward Spot

Which brings us back to where we started, only at the other end of the size scale.

SRJ Technologies (ASX: SRJ) was probably the strangest story of the week.

The company emailed shareholders to reveal that SpaceX had adopted its BoltEx technology, a maintenance fix designed to keep critical infrastructure running while bolts are swapped out.

For a small-cap, that’s validation you dream about. SpaceX is one of the most demanding engineering shops on the planet and doesn’t hand out endorsements lightly.

Investors piled in. Shares jumped more than 50% at one stage before the ASX stepped in with a price query.

Then it got awkward. SRJ told the market operator the SpaceX adoption wasn’t material enough to warrant an announcement, and that the underlying order had already been referenced in an earlier update.

Flagging something straight to shareholders and then calling it immaterial when the regulator taps you on the shoulder is not a great look.

The stock still finished the week up 23%, but questions linger.

Having SpaceX deploy your tech is still real validation. The challenge for SRJ now is turning it into revenue and orders investors can actually measure.

The Week Ahead

Tuesday morning is the one to watch. Adisyn comes back from its halt to tell the market whether it can deposit graphene below 300°C, the core of Milestone 2.

We'll also be keeping half an eye on gold after Friday's drop to see whether it steadies, and on copper to see whether it holds its ground.

US markets fell on Friday night, so Monday opens with the question of whether we follow them down or shrug it off, though with Victoria on a public holiday we'd expect a fairly muted session either way.

As we roll into June, the bigger question is whether the market holds up over the coming weeks. Whichever way it breaks, we're expecting a solid run of news out of our portfolio companies.

Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consulting your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

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The company is one we’ve backed: Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN). The fund is WndrCo, an early backer of SpaceX and Figma, with more than US$3 billion under management. It now owns close to a fifth of FUN.

WndrCo was built by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran Walt Disney’s studio before he walked out and built DreamWorks into a Hollywood powerhouse. His partner, Sujay Jaswa, helped scale Dropbox from a few million in revenue to half a billion.

These are the people who get to the front of the queue on what’s coming next. Right now that’s Elon Musk winding down Tesla car lines to build Optimus instead, the humanoid robot he wants a million of a year.

Build robots in those numbers and you need titanium, light and strong under load. The cleanest source of it is rutile, the rock sitting under Fortuna’s ground in Malawi.

That rutile is why WndrCo wrote the cheque.

A cornerstone stake like this takes months in the data room before a cent changes hands. WndrCo came out the other side and put millions into a tiny explorer in a corner of Africa.

That leaves Fortuna with close to $15 million in the bank, enough to run for years without going back to shareholders.

The bigger prize is the network that comes with the money. WndrCo knows the major players who actually buy titanium, the buyers a junior in Malawi could chase for years and never get in front of.

We’ve held Fortuna since it was a 4c stock, and a backer like WndrCo turning up is the strongest sign yet we read it right. Companies this size rarely pull a partner of that calibre. FUN just did.

Who WndrCo Is, and What They’ve Backed

Sujay Jaswa has spent 20 years spotting which companies would win before the rest of the market caught on.

He did it at Dropbox, joining as one of its first hires and watching 15 million users turn into 300 million.

He did it cutting venture cheques at New Enterprise Associates, backing Workday and Cloudflare while they were still unproven names. He does it now at WndrCo, the firm he co-founded in 2016. He still finds time to lecture at Stanford between deals.

Katzenberg sits on the other side of the table, and the pair makes an odd one. One spent decades reading what the public would fall for next from the top of Hollywood. The other spent his career reading which technology would win from the inside of it.

Put a film mogul and a software financier together and you get a firm that backs both instinct and data.

That instinct runs right through WndrCo’s book. Most of the names mean little to an Australian investor, but in US tech they are the ones everyone knows.

They got into Figma early, the design software company that listed in New York last year and tripled on its opening day.

They hold a slice of Databricks, worth around US$134 billion while it is still private (one of a tiny club of companies to reach that kind of money without ever going public).

They own 1Password and Airtable, and they have built cybersecurity companies up from nothing.

Those rockets, drones and self-driving cars from the top of this piece have names. SpaceX. Anduril, the defence-tech outfit building autonomous weapons for the US military. Waymo, Google’s self-driving car arm.

Three of the most closely watched private companies on earth, and every one of them will be reaching for the same metals as it grows.

The way they back a company tells you as much as the names. WndrCo gets in early and goes deep. They lead the round and write the first institutional cheque.

They call themselves “the founders behind the founders”, and the model runs on seeing something before the market does, then helping drag it into the daylight.

So when a fund like that walks past the next AI darling and writes its cheque to a rutile explorer in Malawi, it’s worth asking what they saw. The rest of this is our best read on it.

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Why They're Backing Fortuna

What they saw is titanium, and a squeeze coming for it.

Rutile is the cleanest natural source of titanium there is. Start with rutile and you strip less out on the way to the finished metal, which is why buyers pay up for it. Fortuna’s ground in Malawi is shaping up as one of the best rutile stories on the ASX.

Forecasters have the titanium metal market growing from about US$30 billion this year to US$57 billion by 2035, and the pull is coming from every direction at once.

In aviation, every kilo of titanium that replaces something heavier in a jet engine or airframe saves fuel, so airlines never stop wanting more of it.

And since Russia rolled into Ukraine the West has been rearming in a hurry, with the US and Germany pushing defence budgets higher year on year, and a modern fighter jet is something like 40% titanium by weight.

Humanoids run on the very same metal. Tesla alone is talking about a million Optimus units a year to start, and Musk has floated far higher numbers after that, every one of them needing a frame that stays light under load.

While all that demand stacks up, supply is going the other way. The old rutile deposits are running down. China sits on roughly 70% of the world’s titanium sponge production, the first solid form the metal takes. And America imports 100% of the titanium metal feedstock it runs on, every gram of it from somewhere else.

Demand climbing while the supply tightens, with the biggest economy on earth caught short.

A Silicon Valley fund backing a friendly source early knows where this is heading.

The Doors They Open

The money is the smaller half of this deal. The bigger half is the doors it opens.

The way the deal is built shows WndrCo's hand. The $8.6 million buys the equity, but their real upside sits in a parcel of options that only pay out if they walk Fortuna in front of a US commercial partner by 2029, whether that is a metals trader, a defence or aerospace group, a processor that turns rutile into titanium sponge, or an end user like a humanoid robot maker.

The firm gets paid to open doors, so it keeps knocking long after the cash has cleared.

These are doors a Malawian junior could spend a decade knocking on and never get through.

WndrCo already sits behind the companies turning metal into rockets and autonomous machines, the same outfits that will be hunting for titanium feed as they scale.

They led the funding round for Alembic, an AI business whose product NVIDIA uses in its own marketing and whose work NVIDIA boss Jensen Huang has publicly put his name behind.

Jaswa chairs cybersecurity firms and has sat on American boards for years. Katzenberg has spent four decades building a contact book at the very top of US business.

When people like that ask for a meeting, they get one.

They sit in the rooms where the buyers sit, the companies that will need the titanium all that demand is chasing.

A junior explorer in Malawi can pull brilliant rutile out of the ground and still never get near the people who turn it into jet parts and robot frames.

WndrCo can make the introduction in an afternoon, and the way the options are written, it is squarely in its own interest to make it.

What This Means for Fortuna

A week ago Fortuna was a $37 million explorer with a good story, a great project and the usual junior's headache of how to pay for the next phases.

It now has a US cornerstone holder, close to $15 million in the bank, and a partner whose own payday rides on dragging Fortuna into a room full of American buyers.

Many juniors this size have to live raise to raise, diluting holders just to keep the drills turning. FUN can fund itself through to a decision on whether to build a mine without going back to the market, cap in hand.

The catalysts are already lining up.

Deeper aircore drilling is about to start. A maiden resource estimate for Mkanda is due late this month, the first hard number on how much rutile is in the ground.

And in Johannesburg, the metallurgical test work on a six-tonne bulk sample is wrapping up, with the concentrate it produces headed for the desks of potential buyers.

FUN now storms into the back half of the year with money, a resource, a product in hand and a backer working the phones on its behalf.

A fund that has backed some of the biggest names in technology ran its diligence and decided Fortuna was worth millions and a multi-year partnership.

It is now paid to make Fortuna bigger, and it has the contacts to do it.

Tailwinds like this one do not come along often for a company this size.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, consult your own investment advisor to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. If applicable, you should obtain the Product Disclosure Statement relating to the relevant financial product mentioned in this document (which contains full details of the terms and conditions of the relevant financial product) and consider it before making any decision about whether to acquire the financial product. Whilst the Equities Club Pty Ltd (“Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

Neither Equities Club, nor any of its directors, authorised representatives, employees, or agents, makes any representation or warranty as to the reliability, accuracy, or completeness, of this document or any advice. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,554,000 FUN shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

The information contained in and accompanying this communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for the use of the intended recipient/s. The copyright in this communication belongs to Equities Club. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies immediately.

Equities Club Ltd (CAR No. 001308139) is a corporate authorised representative of ShareX Pty Ltd, Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) No 519872.