The patent protects the method of creating graphene-coated metal surfaces, the resulting product itself, and the devices that use it.

For AI1, it puts a US legal wall around technology targeting two major global industries.

The first is semiconductors, a trillion-dollar industry now scrambling to solve the physical limits of copper wiring inside AI chips. The second is defence and autonomous drones, where radar-absorbing materials and stealth technology are becoming increasingly valuable.

The patent allowance shifts AI1 from being a science project into a company now sitting in commercial conversations around licensing, partnerships and adoption.

Where AI1 Sits Today

A quick recap for anyone catching up.

We added AI1 to the Equities Club portfolio just over two weeks ago at 6.8 cents. Today it sits at 27.5c, a major run backed by major news flow, with plenty more ahead if the company continues executing.

AI1 is a graphene technology company pointed at two enormous markets.

The first is chipmaking, where its low-temperature graphene process cleared a decade-old semiconductor roadblock the day we wrote about the company.

The second is drones, where the same graphene platform is being developed into a coating that effectively hides drones from radar.

Inside the four trading days that followed, AI1 cleared the chip industry milestone, signed the exclusive worldwide stealth drone licence with Tel Aviv University, and filled a $14 million placement cornerstoned by Meitav (Israel’s largest investment house, A$190 billion under management) and Regal Funds Management (A$20 billion under management).

This week, retired Israeli Colonel Tamir Zimber, operational commander of Iron Dome, Arrow, David’s Sling and Patriot, was appointed as the first member of the advisory board for the drone subsidiary.

Today, the US patent allowance lands.

What “Allowed” Actually Means

A quick word on the language, because patent terminology can be slippery.

When the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) “allows” a patent, it has reviewed the application, satisfied itself that the technology is genuinely new and inventive, and decided it will be granted.

The patent process can take anywhere from 18-36 months to be assessed and approved. AI1 is far down that process and the expectation is final approval is one to three months away.

What’s left from here is largely paperwork. The examiner has effectively made the call, with the process now moving toward final sign-off and formal grant.

What the Patent Covers

Most patents protect either a method or a product. This one covers both, plus the devices that contain the product.

That is an important distinction.

• A method-only patent stops competitors from copying the way you make something.

• A product patent stops competitors from selling the thing itself, however they made it.

• A device patent stops them from selling the gadgets that use it.

AI1’s patent covers all three.

The technical side of the patent matters too.

AI1’s patent protects graphene coatings that are ultra-clean, highly consistent, tightly bonded to the metal underneath, and made without the contamination issues that have crippled competing graphene processes for years.

It also protects the low-temperature manufacturing process AI1 uses to build those graphene layers in conditions compatible with real semiconductor factories.

The chip industry has spent years knowing graphene could be the answer, but nobody could make it properly inside an actual chip production environment.

AI1’s patent is built around solving exactly that problem.

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Why These Numbers Matter to Chipmakers

A reminder of the problem AI1 is solving on the chip side.

Every advanced chip on the planet uses copper wiring to move electricity between transistors. It’s why the chip industry is a trillion dollar industry, and growing very quickly.

As chips have shrunk over the past decade, that copper wiring has shrunk with them.

It is now thin enough that resistance is climbing, signals are stalling, and AI workloads are wasting enormous amounts of electricity just pushing electrons through the wires.

The semiconductor industry has agreed for over a decade that graphene is the answer.

Imec, the Belgian research hub TSMC, Intel, Samsung (the latest trillion dollar company) and the rest of the major chipmakers use to figure out what’s next, has publicly named graphene as the most promising replacement.

The catch was always how to make it. Graphene normally needs about 1,000 degrees Celsius to grow. A real chip factory caps out at 450 degrees.

Anything hotter melts the chip.

AI1 is the only company we can find that has demonstrated a process to grow continuous graphene at temperatures that won’t melt the chip.

The patent now puts a US legal wall around exactly that.

The defect and coverage numbers inside the patent are where the value sits.

If the graphene layer is patchy or full of imperfections, it simply does not work properly inside a chip. AI1’s patent sits around the performance levels the semiconductor industry has been trying to reach for years.

That is what turns this from just another patent filing into something commercially valuable.

Why the US Patent Specifically

The US is the largest and most commercially significant patent jurisdiction in the world.

Three reasons that matters for AI1.

First, every major chip equipment company AI1 might one day license to or be acquired by: Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, is US-headquartered. A US patent is the one their lawyers will look at first.

Second, US courts are where the real money in patent enforcement gets decided. A US patent gives AI1 the option to sue infringers, block imports through the International Trade Commission, or use the threat of either to drive licensing deals.

Third, the CHIPS Act has put tens of billions of US government dollars behind onshoring chip manufacturing. TSMC’s Arizona fabs are getting US$6.6 billion. Micron US$6.17 billion. Samsung US$4.75 billion. Every fab built under that program is a fab that needs IP-cleared materials.

A US patent on a fab-compatible graphene process is exactly the kind of asset that fits inside that wave.

Why Method-Plus-Product Matters

Most chip industry patents only cover a method.

That’s a problem if your competitor figures out a different way to get to the same end product, because the method patent doesn’t stop them.

AI1’s patent covers the resulting graphene-coated metal product directly, regardless of how it was made.

Anyone producing graphene-coated metal surfaces that fall within the performance specs laid out in the patent now risks stepping into infringement territory inside the US.

That’s a much wider net than a method patent alone.

For a company that may one day license its technology to multiple customers, this is the structure that maximises what AI1 can charge.

The Bigger Defensibility Story

The patent is one layer. AI1’s announcement makes a point of flagging the rest.

Some of the most valuable elements of the technology include the chemistry of the molecular precursors, the operational know-how, the manufacturing tweaks built up over six years of lab work, will all stay as trade secrets rather than registered patents.

There’s a reason for that is once you patent something, the world can read exactly how it works. The clock starts ticking on your 20-year exclusivity, and after that anyone can use it.

Trade secrets don’t expire. They just need to stay secret.

The Coca-Cola formula has never been patented. Neither has KFC’s secret eleven herbs and spices, but then neither has the precise chemistry inside ASML’s chipmaking machines, the tools used to manufacture the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

The most defensible technology businesses on the planet run a blend of patents on the obvious stuff and trade secrets on the bits competitors most want to copy.

AI1 is now running that same playbook.

Drone Side: One Patent, Two Programs

The patent’s scope explicitly extends to advanced composite materials, including the work happening inside 2D Radar Absorbers Ltd, the subsidiary holding AI1’s stealth drone licence.

Same core technology. Different end market. One patent covers both.

AI1 has two shots at multi-billion dollar markets, this is the cleanest legal structure available, one piece of IP that protects two completely separate commercialisation paths.

What We’re Watching From Here

Three things over the next 12 months on the chip side of the business:

• Formal grant of the US patent. Allowance is the green light. Grant is the formal stamp. Usually a one-to-three month gap.

• Additional patent filings. The company has flagged it is “evaluating the extension of its intellectual property position through additional patent filings in relevant jurisdictions.” Expect more announcements as the global IP wall is built out.

• First commercial conversations on the chip side. The patent allowance gives AI1 something every prospective licensee or partner needs to see before they engage seriously: proven, enforceable IP in the world’s biggest market. Chairman Kevin Crofton spent 30 years inside the rooms where TSMC, Samsung and Intel pick what to adopt next. Those are the conversations the patent now opens up.

The chip industry has been watching graphene for over a decade.

AI1 just turned its lab work into a US legal asset.

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.

Today the company put the first name on the advisory board for the subsidiary that holds it.

The name is retired Colonel Tamir Zimber.

If you were drawing up a wishlist of who you’d want advising a company building radar-evading materials for drones, you’d start here.

Who is Tamir Zimber

Zimber spent more than two decades in the Israeli Air Defense Array, and retired as a Colonel.

The Air Defense Array is the unit inside the Israeli military that runs every system designed to shoot down anything coming through Israeli airspace. Rockets, drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, the lot.

The role he retired from had him in operational command of every major Israeli air defence system at once - Iron Dome, Arrow, David's Sling, and Patriot.

Together these systems form the four-layer shield that has intercepted thousands of rockets, cruise missiles, drones and ballistic missiles over Israeli airspace for nearly two decades.

Iron Dome alone has logged over 5,000 interceptions at a a roughly 90% hit rate.

Zimber commanded the personnel, the readiness and the execution of the lot.

After the army he moved to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Israel's largest defence company and a global top-tier exporter of UAVs, missiles, radars and air defence systems.

His title at IAI is Senior Director, Air Defense Systems (India). India is the largest single-country buyer of Israeli weapons in the world, and IAI's biggest foreign customer.

The role oversees multi-billion dollar programs and runs business development across government and military customers in one of the fastest-growing defence import markets on earth.

In other words: he sells advanced air defence systems to governments for a living.

It’s a pretty handy day job for a man now working with a company looking to commercialise its work on stealth material in drones.

Where AI1 Sits Today

A quick recap for anyone catching up. We announced we’d added Adisyn to the portfolio just over 2 weeks ago when it was 6.8 cents.

AI1 is a graphene technology company pointed at two enormous markets. The first is chipmaking, where its low-temperature graphene process cleared a decade-old semiconductor roadblock.

The second is drones, where the same graphene platform is being developed into a coating that effectively hides drones from radar.

Inside four trading days the company cleared the chip industry milestone, signed the exclusive worldwide stealth drone licence with Tel Aviv University, and filled a $14 million placement.

The book was cornerstoned by Meitav, Israel’s largest investment house with roughly A$190 billion under management, and Regal Funds Management with A$20 billion under management.

The share price ran from 6.8c to 20c across the week. Three of the biggest volume days in the company’s history landed in the same week, and roughly $110 million in market cap was added between Sunday and Friday. It’s now sitting at a very healthy 19.5c.

The stealth drone licence sits inside a subsidiary called 2D Radar Absorbers Ltd.

That’s the entity AI1 just appointed Zimber to advise.

Why This Hire Matters

Stealth materials live or die on one question: do they meet end-user requirements?

A graphene composite that performs in a Tel Aviv lab is interesting. A graphene composite that drops radar return at the exact frequencies a defence ministry’s procurement spec calls out is a contract.

Zimber has spent his career on the buy side of that equation. He knows which signature reduction targets matter, at which frequencies, against which threats, on which platforms.

He also knows the people writing the cheques.

AI1 chairman Kevin Crofton brings the semiconductor commercial network. MD Arye Kohavi brings the Israeli defence relationships and an ex-IDF Special Forces background. Professor Pavel Ginzburg at Tel Aviv University runs the radar physics.

Zimber's been the man on the other end of the phone for twenty years. Now he's on AI1's side of it.

What He’s Actually Doing

The release lays out the advisory board’s brief:

• Tell AI1 which radar-related work to prioritise

• Help translate lab results into specs that end-users will actually buy

• Open doors to defence contractors and government procurement offices

• Plug AI1 into global defence networks

• Lend credibility when AI1 walks into procurement meetings

That last point is worth backing over.

A pre-revenue ASX small-cap walks into a defence contractor with a graphene material, and the buyer's first question is, ‘Who's vouching for this?’.

A former Israeli air defence colonel currently running multi-billion dollar IAI programs is a serious answer.

The Bigger Picture Hasn’t Changed

The drone race is now a stealth race.

Military drone spending is forecast to triple from US$20.7 billion to US$66 billion by 2035. The global counter-UAS market is on track to grow from US$4.9 billion in 2025 to US$36 billion in the same window. Australia just put A$7 billion behind counter-drones over the next decade.

Every dollar going into radars to detect drones is a dollar putting pressure on drone-makers to find ways past those radars.

Now for the not so tech-savvy like us, here’s the part worth slowing down on.

Radar performance moves on a log scale. Every 10 decibels (dB) of radar signature reduction means a tenfold drop in what the radar picks up. So 20dB is 100 times less radar return. 30dB is 1,000 times less.

AI1 has already hit 20dB in lab testing at Tel Aviv University. The 12-month program now under way is targeting 30dB.

Getting from 20 to 30 looks like a small bump on paper. In radar physics, it’s a tenfold leap in stealth performance.

At 100 times less radar return (where AI1 are now), a quadcopter drone that used to read on radar like an F-35 fighter jet now reads like a bird. The radar operator spots the threat too late.

At 1,000 times, the drone shows up looking more like an insect, and gets through undetected.

The country that builds it first gets a lethal edge in the next decade of airborne warfare.

What We’re Watching From Here

Three things on the radar (so to speak) over the next 12 months:

• More advisory board appointments. Zimber is described as the first member. The release calls this “a further step in positioning the company to translate technical capability into commercial outcomes.” More names, particularly from Western primes or US procurement, would build that out.

• Lab results pushing toward 30dB. It’s the same milestone we flagged last time. This is the number that turns their lab work into customer conversations.

• First commercial engagements. Advisory board members open doors. The next signal is who walks through them.

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.

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The bank spent it answering for things that had nothing to do with the price of money or stocks, and by Friday the whole thing was coming apart at the seams.

We won’t dive into it but if you haven’t caught up on the story, wait until the kids leave the room.

Wall Street, as ever, providing the entertainment.

Closer to home, things were quieter. The ASX 200 finished the week roughly flat after another hotter-than-expected inflation number was shrugged off, and commodity prices held their ground while blue chips drifted through five sessions of indifference.

Quarterly reporting season also landed this week, which is the part of the calendar a lot of retail investors underrate.

For a pre-revenue explorer or biotech, the quarterly is the only window you get into how the company is actually being run. What got drilled, what got spent, and most importantly, what’s left in the bank.

It's the cleanest read you'll get on whether the company you're holding is three months from a rerate or three weeks from coming back to market with the hat out.

Here’s what caught our eye:

• We’re giving away an ounce of gold, for FREE

• Fortuna Metals folds rare earths and graphite into the rutile story

• Mount Ridley Mines brings on a metallurgist with the right CV

• The Pentagon goes from US$225m to US$55bn on drones

• Solstice Minerals nearly doubles on Nanadie depth

• Pathkey runs 50% on a Singapore semiconductor deal

• Intel posts its biggest month in half a century

One Ounce of Gold, Yours to Win, for FREE

One ounce of gold. Real, physical, from the Perth Mint. It goes to whoever calls the gold price in AUD closest at 12pm AWST on 1 December 2026.

Entry is free.

Gold’s been on a tear most of us never thought we’d live to see. The Iran war broke the bull run for about a fortnight, then the price went back to climbing. Central banks kept buying through the dip.

Meanwhile, the world’s debt pile crossed US$346 trillion last quarter, or roughly three times global GDP. Governments are now borrowing close to US$29 trillion a year just to keep the lights on. All of this adds chapters to the gold bull narrative.

Whether the next leg is another rip higher or a long sideways stretch is your call.

Closest to the pin takes home the ounce.

Enter here.

From Rutile Play to Three-Commodity Story

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) had a hell of a week. Two announcements in three days and the share price up around 25% by Friday.

For new readers, FUN is a small-cap rutile explorer working in Malawi. Their project, Mkanda, sits 20 kilometres south of Kasiya, the largest rutile deposit on the planet. Kasiya is owned by Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM), capped at roughly $460 million with Rio Tinto on the register.

FUN is working the same belt of rocks with the same weathered geology, but much earlier in the story.

Fortuna’s first announcement this week expanded the mapped rutile footprint at Mkanda from 37 km² to 53 km², with the high-grade core now sitting around 28 km².

That sits on top of a 180-240 million tonne maiden exploration target FUN put out three weeks ago, and that target was calculated on samples only four metres deep.

And there’s a lot more rock under that.

Then on Wednesday came the announcement we weren't expecting. Drilling at Mkanda picked up heavy rare earth grades and graphite intercepts in the same dirt, and the chemistry came back ahead of Kasiya on two of the three magnet metals that matter. Yttrium grades ran nearly double Sovereign's.

Rutile is the cleanest feedstock for titanium. Titanium goes into jet engines, missile casings and humanoid robots, and each humanoid uses up to 10 kilograms of rutile.

There's currently one humanoid being built every thirty minutes in China, and that pace of growth is only going up.

Dysprosium, terbium and yttrium are the magnet metals that sit inside EV motors and defence-grade electronics. Graphite goes into every EV battery on the planet, plus a long list of industrial uses.

At a $28 million market cap, Fortuna is currently valued at less than a fifteenth of its northern neighbour, despite working through the same geology. Graphite hits at Mkanda are already running several times Kasiya's average grade.

Aircore rigs roll into Mkanda late next month to drill below the four-metre depth limit of the hand augers. The last time deeper drills went into this geology, Kasiya’s resource jumped from 644 million tonnes to 2.1 billion.

A $28 million company sitting on the same belt of rocks as a $460 million neighbour, drilling three commodities the world is short of, with deeper holes about to go in. Hard to think of a setup we'd rather own right now.

MRD Hires a Lynas Hand for Grass Patch

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) appointed metallurgist Chris Larder as technical adviser this week. It’s not a flashy headline, but the kind of move that’s crucial once a project gets close to flowsheet work.

Flowsheet design is the engineering blueprint that turns rock into a saleable product. It’s where critical minerals projects live or die.

Larder’s done that work at Wagerup (the WA alumina refinery) and Mt Weld (Lynas’ rare earth operation). Both sit in the part of Australia’s processing chain that governments are now actively trying to expand outside of China.

That experience maps neatly onto Grass Patch, MRD’s project just north of Esperance, where dysprosium, terbium, scandium and gallium are all sitting in the same corridor.

MRD already has early met testwork in the bank on Grass Patch, so this hire is about taking those results into proper flowsheet territory.

Every one of those metals is on the West’s critical minerals list. Bringing in someone who’s actually built flowsheets for these elements before tightens the pathway from resource to product.

Pentagon’s US$54 Billion Drone Bet

Last year the Pentagon spent US$225 million on drones. Next year it’s spending US$54 billion.

That’s the same budget line, multiplied by roughly 240, in a single planning cycle.

And when the US writes gigantic cheques like that, allies have to follow. NATO, Israel, Australia and parts of Asia all build militaries that plug into US gear, so when the gear changes, their defence buying changes with it.

On a military radar screen, a quadcopter drone currently looks about the same size as an F-35 fighter jet. Once spotted, it gets shot down a few seconds later. You can build drones cheap and smart and in swarms all you want, but if the radar sees them, none of that helps.

Adisyn Ltd (ASX: AI1) is developing a graphene material with Tel Aviv University that coats a drone and shrinks its radar signature by up to 100 times.

That same quadcopter, with AI1’s coating on it, now reads on radar at about the size of a bird. The next target, and what they’re working on right now, is making it insect-scale.

We announced AI1 had been added to the portfolio last week when it was 6.8c. By last Friday it was at 20c, after a graphene chip breakthrough on the Monday and an exclusive worldwide licence on the drone material two days later.

Meitav, Israel’s largest investment house, cornerstoned the $14 million placement that followed. Regal Funds Management came in alongside them. The placement shares allocated this Wednesday.

This week AI1 pushed to a new all-time high, then settled back to 21c by Friday.

The Pentagon’s announcement landed straight into the middle of all of that.

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Solstice Minerals Doubles on Nanadie Depth

We flagged Solstice Minerals (ASX: SOL) back in February when the stock was trading at 93c.

It closed this week at $1.66, a roughly 78% move while drilling kept confirming the size of the copper-gold system at Nanadie in WA’s Murchison.

The intercept that kicked the run off was 62m at 1.55% copper and 0.66g/t gold to end-of-hole, including 22m at 2.78% copper and 1.25g/t gold.

This week’s update pushed it further. Solstice completed its first diamond tail to 629.1 metres, confirming visible chalcopyrite (the copper sulphide ore mineral) across multiple zones and extending mineralisation at least 300m below previous drilling.

The existing resource sits at 40.4Mt at 0.4% copper and 0.1g/t gold. In a system like Nanadie, going deeper is how you find more copper, and Solstice just went 300 metres deeper than anyone has before.

A 10,000 metre Phase 2 RC program is already turning, with another 2,000 metres of diamond tails to follow.

Plenty of stories run hard and then sit. This one has reasons to keep moving.

Pathkey Runs 50% on Semiconductor Deal

Designing a custom chip from scratch is one of the hardest, most expensive things a tech company does, and there are not many people in the world who can do it.

The ones who can are paid like surgeons. A mid-level hardware engineer hits the job market and is gone within six hours. They get poached every six months by the same handful of companies who are themselves losing engineers to the same handful of competitors.

It’s the same group of well-paid people just swapping lanyards around basically.

This week, an ASX small-cap with a market cap of $30 million took a binding option on a company that automates what they do.

Pathkey.AI (ASX: PKY) finished the week up roughly 50% after announcing a binding option to acquire Singapore-based Chipforge, an AI platform that runs the chip design process end-to-end.

Engineers describe what they want the chip to do, the platform writes the hardware code and runs the verification tests, then takes the design through to a physical prototype.

Full custom chip manufacture is next on the roadmap.

The slowest and most expensive part of this whole process is verification, the work of checking that the design actually behaves the way it's meant to before the chips get manufactured.

Verification alone eats more than half the time and budget of a chip project. Chipforge does it in software.

The deal lands Pathkey inside a sector that McKinsey predicts will hit US$1 trillion a year by 2030, driven by AI compute, data centres, defence electronics and edge computing.

It also fits with what Pathkey already does. Their existing TrialKey platform applies the same agent-based AI architecture to clinical trial design.

It’s the same engine, applied to two of the slowest, most expensive industries on the planet. One to keep a close eye on.

Intel’s Biggest Month in Half a Century

Intel had its strongest month on Nasdaq in 55 years, with the stock up around 114% in April after years of losing ground to TSMC and Nvidia.

Revenue lifted more than 7% in the latest quarter to US$13.6 billion, helped by hyperscaler demand from Google, Microsoft and Amazon, plus OEM orders from Dell, HP and Lenovo.

The Trump administration converted US semiconductor support into a near 10% stake in Intel this month. Washington now owns part of a chipmaker the same way it owns parts of the steel and oil industries.

Inside AI compute, the bottleneck is also moving. The processor isn't the only ceiling anymore. The interconnect layer between chips, where signal speed and heat loss start to cap performance, is the new pressure point.

Adisyn's graphene material has a second application here. The same coating being developed for drone stealth also works in chip interconnects, letting high-performance chips talk to each other faster and run cooler.

The Wrap

We’re hoping to hear that drilling has kicked off across a couple of portfolio names next week.

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) is lining up its maiden drilling campaign in NSW, and Asian Battery Metals (ASX: AZ9) is gearing up to go again in Mongolia chasing copper-gold. Both have the potential to move quickly if the drilling proves up good grades.

May is the last real window for capital raisings before financial year end, so expect a run of placements across the small-cap space over the next few weeks.

We’ll be watching the upcoming federal budget too, with a few interesting rumours doing the rounds about what might land in it.

On our end, we’ve been sitting down with a handful of companies lately. Can’t say much yet, but readers will be the first to know as things firm up.

Plenty more coming.

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, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, 900,000 AI1 performance rights, 200,000 10X shares, 187,500 BHL shares, and 1,150,000 AZ9 shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN, AI1, BHL, MRD, 10X and 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.

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Since acquiring Mkanda in September, FUN has been progressing work to define the rutile system across the project.

Rutile is the highest-grade feedstock for titanium, a metal expected to see strong demand growth as lightweight titanium alloys become increasingly important in humanoid robotics.

Today's announcement adds heavy rare earths and graphite to the Mkanda story, and the project is reading more and more like the world-class Kasiya deposit immediately to the north.

Kasiya is owned by Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM), which is valued at $460 million and has none other than Rio Tinto as share holders. SVM released a study two weeks ago valuing the Kasiya asset at USD$2.2 billion before tax.

Rutile is still the main game at Mkanda. But these results add two more revenue streams alongside it, and the closer FUN's chemistry tracks Kasiya's, the harder that $430 million market cap gap gets to justify.

FUN’s first heavy rare earth assays at Mkanda came back with a basket that looks like Kasiya’s.

The chemistry alone doesn’t close a $430 million gap, but every step that confirms the geology runs further south makes it harder to argue Mkanda is a different beast.

Aircore drilling kicks off in the coming weeks. It goes much deeper than previous drilling, and graphite grades are known to climb at depth.

That's where the graphite credits start to count.

With heavy rare earths on the board and graphite still to come, that valuation gap is starting to look stretched.

FUN vs SVM: How the Numbers Stack Up

Lining the assays up against Kasiya, FUN comes out in front on two of the three measures.

• Dysprosium-terbium came back at 3.1% versus SVM's 2.9%.

• NdPr was a touch lower at 19.7% versus 21.8%.

• Yttrium nearly doubled SVM at 20.1% versus 11.9%.

The samples FUN sent off were originally being processed for rutile, the project’s main game. Heavy rare earths were tested as a side analysis from material that had already been through the rutile workflow.

That workflow uses a magnetic separator to pull out the different minerals.

Dial up the current and you grab more magnetic material. FUN ran theirs at 2.4 amps, the right setting for clean rutile. SVM used 2.9 amps when targeting rare earths at Kasiya.

In plain English, FUN picked up these grades while running a process tuned for a different metal. Push the current to where SVM had it and the grades likely go higher from here.

The lab work also picked up monazite and xenotime, the minerals that hold the rare earths in the rock and the same ones SVM found at Kasiya. The geology is reading the same.

When SVM confirmed its own heavy rare earth credits in January, the stock moved sharply, up nearly 30% on the previous days close.

FUN’s now sitting on its own version of that catalyst.

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What These Rare Earths Are Worth

Dysprosium and terbium are heavy magnet rare earths, used in the high-temperature magnets that go into defence systems and precision weapons.

Q4 2025 prices in Europe sit at US$850,000 a tonne for dysprosium and US$3.6 million a tonne for terbium.

Yttrium goes into aerospace coatings and semiconductor manufacturing. The Q4 2025 price is US$270,000 a tonne, up roughly 4,000% on a year before.

The US imports 100% of its yttrium from China, and China has been tightening exports, so the US is looking for supply from another source.

There’s also a monazite by-product alongside the rare earths. Concentrate sells for over US$8,500 a tonne delivered to China and pulls out of the same processing flow at near-zero incremental cost.

That’s a third revenue line alongside rutile and graphite, with no extra capital required.

Graphite Builds With Depth

The graphite results came in alongside the rare earth work. The best hit was 6 metres at 4.93% Total Graphitic Carbon (TGC), the standard measure of graphite content in a rock.

Sovereign’s Kasiya is the world’s second-largest coarse flake graphite deposit. It averages 0.95% TGC.

Fortuna’s best Mkanda hits are running roughly five times that grade. A 10-metre intercept came in at 4.16% TGC, with plenty of other holes returning grades above 2%.

Another 115 hand auger holes are at Intertek in Zambia right now, with results flowing through 2026.

Grades have been climbing the deeper the drill goes, the same pattern Sovereign saw at Kasiya before aircore drilling confirmed the resource down at 20-30 metres.

Fortuna’s aircore rig kicks off in a matter of weeks and will tell us whether Mkanda’s graphite holds at depth.

Closing the Gap

SVM’s Kasiya ore reserve gets uplifted from 0.96% rutile to 1.51% rutile equivalent once graphite credits are added in. The graphite adds another 57% to the value of every tonne mined.

If Mkanda is Kasiya's twin, similar arithmetic applies down here, and FUN’s graphite hits are running several times SVM’s grades.

FUN trades at 6-7% of SVM’s value on the same geology, with assays still to flow this year.

Aircore drilling and metallurgical results are next, and that valuation gap is looking out of step with what's coming out of the ground.

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.

Mount Ridley (ASX: MRD) just hired theirs.

His name is Chris Larder, and his job is to turn the deposit at the Grass Patch project into something a Western processing plant will actually take.

Grass Patch sits just north of Esperance in WA, with heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium in the same deposit.

Larder has thirty years in mineral processing, and his flowsheet work in WA covers both sides of MRD's basket.

He's been involved in flowsheet design and review at Alcoa's Wagerup refinery in WA, the exact facility Australia and the US recently picked for a US$200 million gallium processing build.

He’s also worked on REE flowsheet design at Mt Weld, one of the only rare earth separation plants running outside China.

China has had its boot on the throat of rare earth processing for years. The US and Australia are finally throwing real money at prying it loose, with a lot of that build-out happening in WA.

Larder’s CV maps onto MRD’s deposit almost line for line - gallium at Wagerup, heavy rare earths at Mt Weld.

For a $41 million junior moving from a defined deposit and proven recovery into flowsheet design, that's about as targeted a hire as you can make.

MRD vs VTM - The Heavies

Grass Patch carries dysprosium, terbium, scandium and gallium. Four metals, all of them on the West's "we need this but we don't have it" list.

Dysprosium and terbium are the high-strength magnet ingredients that go into EV motors, wind turbines, fighter jet electronics and missile guidance systems.

China controls more than 90% of global supply and has been tightening export controls since late 2024.

Scandium is a strengthener for aluminium alloys used in aerospace and humanoid robot frames. Global production sits at around 25 tonnes a year. MRD has 18,855 tonnes in the ground.

Gallium goes into radar, semiconductors and EV fast chargers. China controls about 95% of refined supply there too.

On the heavies specifically - the part of the basket that goes into magnets - MRD’s resource holds 44,600 tonnes of contained heavy rare earth oxides. Victory Metals (ASX: VTM) North Stanmore, the most advanced ASX-listed clay-hosted heavy rare earth project, holds 57,400 tonnes.

MRD has roughly 80% of VTM’s heavy rare earth tonnes. It trades at $41 million. VTM trades at $223 million.

That’s MRD at about 20% of VTM’s market cap, with 80% of the heavies, plus scandium, plus gallium, plus a metallurgist whose CV maps onto the deposit line for line.

The market hasn’t priced much of that in yet. Larder’s job is to give it a reason to.

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What Larder Actually Does

Larder’s first piece of work is reviewing what came back from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

LLNL is one of three US nuclear security labs and runs on a US$3.7 billion annual budget. MRD shipped them a sample of Block 1 core last year under a Material Transfer Agreement, and a follow-up batch of around 200kg is already prepared.

Larder’s job is to read what LLNL has done with the first sample, then help shape the formal collaboration agreement that governs the next round of work. The CRADA, in industry speak.

The second workstream is the historical met testwork as Grass Patch has been drilled on and off for over a decade.

There are old reports, old leach results and old beneficiation data sitting in filing cabinets. Larder’s job is to pull it all together so the current programs build on what’s already been done instead of redoing it.

The third piece is the integrated flowsheet itself - the actual processing route that takes clay from the ground and produces a saleable product at the other end.

That’s the work Larder has spent thirty years doing, and it’s the work that decides whether MRD becomes a mine or a footnote.

There’s also re-assay interpretation on around 3,300 samples already submitted to the lab. The goal there is to expand and upgrade the Mineral Resource without drilling a new metre.

Sending old material to a lab to find something earlier explorers missed is the cheapest way to grow a junior’s resource. MRD’s entire rare earth discovery came from doing exactly that.

And he's also got a tech assessment brief - looking at processing technologies and licensing opportunities the company could plug into rather than build from scratch.

Five workstreams across LLNL, historical data, integrated flowsheet, resource expansion and tech licensing, all going through one experienced process engineer.

Where MRD Sits From Here

MRD joined our portfolio in March on the back of the maiden resource. Met testwork landed shortly after and cleared the first hurdle.

The Larder hire is the next step on the same path.

MRD has a defined heavy rare earth resource, met testwork that says the metals come out, and now a metallurgist with hands-on flowsheet experience at the two WA facilities those metals could realistically feed into.

All at a $41 million market cap.

The risks are the usual ones for a junior at this stage. Lab recovery doesn't always survive the jump to a flowsheet, and government funding pathways like the ones flowing into Wagerup don't always reach the projects you'd expect them to.

None of that is unique to Mount Ridley. All of it is the game.

What changed today is that the work of pulling those workstreams together now sits with someone who has done it before, at the exact facilities that matter for this deposit.

The Larder hire is the kind of step that closes the gap to peers like VTM, and we’re still backing the story.

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.

We said then it was a fraction of what was actually there. Today’s results are the first evidence backing that up.

For new readers, FUN is the small-cap rutile explorer we added to the portfolio at 4c. Their ground in Malawi sits 20km south of Sovereign Metals’ (ASX: SVM) Kasiya deposit, the largest rutile deposit on the planet.

Same belt, much earlier in the story.

Mkanda's mapped rutile footprint has pushed out from 37km² to 53km², a 40% expansion in a single batch of results. A 28km² high-grade core is taking shape inside it.

A brand new prospect has appeared in the centre of the project, with surface grades up to 2.5%. 73% of the latest 0-2m samples came back above the cut-off, averaging 0.9% rutile.

Best drill intercepts came in at 10m at 1.43% rutile, 4m at 1.22% and 5m at 1.04%, with surface samples peaking at 2.52%. Most of the 28 full-depth drill holes ended in mineralisation, meaning more rutile sits below where the auger stopped.

At 8.9c and a $25 million market cap, FUN still trades like an early-stage explorer despite an exploration target of 180-240Mt and 53km² of mapped rutile already on the board.

SVM is worth $460 million for the same belt of rocks.

Following the Kasiya Playbook

Rutile is the cleanest natural feedstock for titanium, and the titanium market is tightening as defence, aerospace and robotics demand keeps climbing.

FUN’s ground sits 11km from a major rail line connecting to a deep-water port in Mozambique, so the export route is already there.

Today's results pushed the system out further on both ends.

Fortuna’s new central prospect sits in the middle of the project, stretching about 5km north-south by 1km east-west. Standout surface grades came in at 2.5%, 2.05%, 1.89% and 1.74% rutile.

Up north, the Mbale prospect has stretched another 1.6km this batch, with shallow samples across the extension running at 1.5%, 1.07%, 1.01% and 0.94% rutile.

Twenty-eight full-depth drill holes also delivered, most of them ending in mineralisation.

That gives FUN two prospects growing at once across different parts of the project. Pair that with a 53km² footprint and the picture looks familiar, the same enrichment story that built SVM’s Kasiya into a 2.1 billion tonne deposit 20km north.

The first pass was a wide net by design. FUN punched out 675 holes on a 400m grid across 180km² to find where the rutile actually sits. With the hot zones mapped, the next round tightens to a 200m x 200m infill grid over the high-grade cores.

Rutile is showing up almost everywhere FUN puts a hole in the ground.

It's the same playbook SVM ran at Kasiya, just earlier in the cycle and at a fraction of the share price.

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What Actually Matters From Here

Today’s update is one piece of evidence in a much bigger run. The numbers that can move FUN’s valuation are coming in the next two quarters.

The first is depth. Hand augers can only drill to about eight metres before the water table stops them. FUN's current 180-240Mt exploration target is calculated on an average depth of just 4.1 metres.

At Kasiya, the rutile keeps going to 20-25 metres. SVM’s resource started at 644 million tonnes. After deeper drilling, it grew to 2.1 billion tonnes.

Aircore drilling starts at Mkanda in late May, with more than 5,000m planned. That’s the first proper look at whether FUN’s system holds at depth. If it does, the 180-240Mt target is the floor, not the ceiling.

The second is graphite. SVM’s ore reserve went from 1.03% rutile to 2.00% rutile equivalent once graphite credits were added. That’s the same rocks, with twice the payable mineral.

241 of FUN's drillholes are already in the lab for graphite analysis, with results due Q2 to Q3.

There's also a third commodity being tested from the same drilling, with rare earth results expected later this year.

On top of that, there’s a steady stream of rutile assays in the pipeline. 117 holes due mid-May, another 125 by end of June. All of it feeding into a maiden inferred resource estimate in the second half of 2026.

That’s a lot of catalysts for a $25 million company sitting on the same belt as a $460 million peer.

The Run-Up

Three weeks ago FUN had a maiden exploration target on the table. Today the footprint behind that target is 40% bigger, with a brand new high-grade prospect taking shape in the middle of the project.

The aircore rigs roll in next month to test depth for the first time. Graphite results land soon after. The maiden inferred resource is on track for the second half of the year.

The next six months decide whether FUN stays a $25 million explorer or starts closing the gap on a $460 million neighbour.

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.

In the four trading days between those two prices, a tech company a lot of our readers hadn’t heard of seven days earlier topped the ASX gainers board and added around $110 million to its market cap.

Weeks like that don't come along often.

AI1 had spent six years on a problem the semiconductor industry had not cracked in a decade.

They landed the microchip result on Monday, signed an exclusive worldwide licence on stealth drone material on Wednesday, and had a $14 million book filled mostly by Israel’s largest investment house and Regal Funds Management on Thursday.

By Friday's close, all the week's news was in the share price.

A lot of you got in on Monday. The posts started popping up not long after and didn’t slow down as the stock nearly tripled and hit daily volume records.

Six years of work for the Adisyn team. Four trading days for the market to catch up. And there’s plenty more to play out from here.

What caught our eye this week:

• Mount Ridley kicks off a 17,000-sample re-assay across Grass Patch

• Asian Battery Metals locks down 100% of Maikhan Uul ahead of fresh Mongolian drilling

• Goldman Sachs holds 2026 copper forecast at US$12,650/t, flags DRC supply risk

• Cochlear cuts net profit after tax guidance by 30%, share price at a decade low

• Canaccord forecasts a structural lithium deficit through to 2035

• PLS posts 52% revenue jump for the March quarter, share price testing $6 again

But first, who is Adisyn and what just happened...

AI1: From Tel Aviv to the Top of the ASX

A handful of people in a lab in Tel Aviv have been working on the same problem since 2020. The chip industry has been working on it for over a decade.

On Monday morning, Adisyn's team got there first.

That's the short version of what happened to AI1 this week. Here's the longer one.

Most chip factories on the planet make their chips with copper wiring. The wiring has been getting thinner with every new generation, and it's now thin enough that signals are stalling and resistance is climbing.

Graphene is the answer everyone agrees on. A sheet of carbon one atom thick, conducts electricity better than copper, holds up at dimensions where copper physically gives out.

The catch has always been making it. Graphene normally needs about 1,000 degrees Celsius to grow. A real chip factory caps out at 450. Cook a chip at a thousand degrees and you get a puddle.

That's the problem AI1's team in Tel Aviv has been chasing since 2020. On Monday morning, they cleared it. Full-coverage graphene on a 1cm by 1cm coupon, grown below 450 degrees.

No one else has done it. Imec, the Belgian research hub the entire chip industry uses to figure out what's coming next, has been publicly naming graphene as the answer for years.

AI1 just delivered the first version that actually works.

The market noticed by Monday afternoon. Around 40 million shares changed hands for roughly $3.5 million in turnover, a new all-time volume record for AI1.

Then Wednesday happened.

AI1 announced an exclusive worldwide licence with Ramot, the commercial arm of Tel Aviv University, on the same graphene platform - this time pointed at making a drone that radar can't see.

Right now, a quadcopter drone on a military radar screen reads as roughly the size of an F-35 fighter jet. Adisyn’s tech has already shrunk that signature by 100 times in lab testing. A full attack drone now reads on radar somewhere closer to a bird.

The next target is 1,000 times, where the drone shows up looking more like an insect than an aircraft.

Two breakthroughs inside 48 hours, on the same graphene platform, pointed at two markets each tracking toward hundreds of billions of dollars.

Thursday morning, AI1 announced a $14 million placement at 6.75c. Cornerstoned by Meitav, Israel's largest investment house with roughly A$190 billion under management.

Meitav cornerstoned another Israeli ASX-listed deep-tech company called Weebit Nano (ASX: WBT) in 2021. WBT now trades at a market cap just shy of A$1 billion.

They were joined in AI1 by Regal Funds Management, which has A$20 billion under management and a long track record of being early on good ASX tech.

Chairman Kevin Crofton and non-executive director Dominic O'Hanlon also tipped $200,000 of their own cash in on top, subject to shareholder approval.

Funds with $210 billion between them don't show up to a $14 million book unless they've spent serious time on the file.

The trading on Thursday set a new record. Over 60 million shares changed hands. Friday slotted in at 43 million, the second-biggest day in the company's history.

The volume record AI1 had held since Monday was beaten twice in three sessions.

Sitting behind all this is a capital-light commercial model. AI1 licences the tech, clips royalties, and lets someone else build the factories.

The global chip market is tracking toward US$1 trillion a year later this decade. Military drone spending alone is forecast to climb from around US$20.7 billion this year to US$66.5 billion by 2035.

AI1 doesn't need to own much of either market to justify a valuation several multiples above where it sits today.

Two weeks ago AI1 barely registered on the ASX. This week it was the biggest gainer on the ASX, with the smartest money in Israel and one of the sharpest small-cap funds in Australia on the new register. Equities Club subscribers had been told the Sunday before that a new addition was coming.

The market knows AI1 exists now. From here, the milestones do the talking. Repeatability testing on the chip side, the 30dB target on the drone side, and first commercial conversations with the chipmakers Crofton spent thirty years selling into.

All of that could be inside the next 12 months.

We’re not done with this story. Not even close.

MRD Opens a Low-Cost Path to Resource Growth

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) is one of our portfolio companies, and it sits on three commodities the West desperately needs to source outside China - heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium.

All from one deposit in Western Australia, 25km from the deep-water port at Esperance.

This week MRD took a useful step toward growing the resource without spending much to do it.

The company submitted around 3,300 historical drill samples to the lab, the first batch of a broader 17,000-sample pipeline the team turned up while cleaning out their database.

The work targets better coverage across heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium, with the aim of lifting both the scale and the confidence of the current resource.

Most of these samples were drilled years ago when MRD was hunting nickel and copper. Nobody thought to test them for rare earths at the time. Now they’re sitting in storage, already paid for, ready to go.

For a junior, re-assaying samples already on the shelf is about as cheap as exploration gets.

It also feeds the story we keep coming back to on MRD, which is how wide the valuation gap has become with peer Victory Metals (ASX: VTM). VTM is trading at around a $230 million market cap this week, with MRD at around $41 million. VTM has one commodity. MRD has three.

On contained heavy rare earth oxide tonnage alone, MRD holds 44,600 tonnes against Victory’s 57,400.

That’s not a six-times difference.

If the re-assay work delivers the resource growth management expects, the gap between what MRD owns and what the market is paying for it gets harder to justify with every batch of results.

AZ9 lines up a fresh Mongolian drill run

It has been a little while since we last checked in on Asian Battery Metals (ASX: AZ9), but activity is picking up again across its Mongolian copper-gold ground.

AZ9 is a small-cap copper explorer with two discoveries in southwestern Mongolia, sitting eight kilometres apart in the same volcanic belt.

The flagship is Oval, a copper-nickel-PGE deposit that delivered 95% copper recovery rates earlier this year. That puts Oval inside the top 10 reported copper deposits globally for recovery, at a $18 million market cap.

The newer discovery is Maikhan Uul, eight kilometres up the road. A twin hole drilled in October pulled more than 20 metres of massive sulphide outside the existing resource boundary.

This week AZ9 took 100% ownership of Maikhan Uul. Drilling kicks off within a week as part of a broader 2026 campaign across the Yambat district.

The earlier work has already confirmed thick massive sulphide mineralisation, including a standout intercept of 14.5 metres at 2.23% copper and 0.73g/t gold, alongside multiple supporting zones of copper and gold mineralisation extending to at least 215 metres depth and open along strike.

Maikhan Uul also sits just eight kilometres from the Oval discovery, where AZ9 has already hit sulphide-rich mineralisation and identified what looks like a developing feeder-style system beneath the existing zone.

For that pipeline of targets, AZ9 still trades at roughly an $18 million valuation with around $6 million in cash.

If the upcoming drilling can repeat or extend those earlier sulphide intercepts, the market probably will not leave it sitting at this level for long.

Copper’s second-half setup keeps getting more interesting

Copper is back to looking like a second-half story.

Goldman Sachs held its 2026 copper price forecast this week at an average of US$12,650 a tonne. They also flagged real supply risk if the Middle East disruption drags on.

Their longer-run 2035 target sits at US$15,000 a tonne, but the near-term story is running on the supply side.

Sulphuric acid and diesel flows have been knocked around by the shipping disruption in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and it is landing on African copper producers first.

The most exposed are the operations using a chemical leaching process called SX-EW, which accounts for roughly 17% of global copper supply. The DRC has the largest concentration of these mines and is sitting on two to three months of acid inventory.

If delays push past late May, Goldman estimates DRC production alone could be curtailed by around 125,000 tonnes this year.

Demand is climbing on top of all that. Power grids are chewing through more copper as electrification rolls out, and AI data centres are adding another leg.

New supply is slower to respond than it used to be, with permitting timelines extending and grades falling.

Even on flat demand, the market looks short. Every junior copper hit gets a tailwind in this market.

Cochlear's Worst Day in Years Wakes Up Confession Season

One of the ASX's most reliable defensive names dropped nearly 40% in a session this week. Cochlear (ASX: COH) doesn't usually do that.

Cochlear is a global medtech that makes implantable hearing devices sold into hospitals across developed markets. The company has traded as one of the steadier operators on the ASX for years, which is why the downgrade landed as hard as it did.

The company cut FY26 profit guidance guidance to $290-330 million from $435–460 million. That is a ~30% reduction at the midpoint, wiped about $4 billion off the market cap in a single session, and sent the share price to a decade low around $100.

Developed market implant volumes have softened since January, with Western Europe particularly weak, and the stronger Australian dollar is doing extra damage on top.

Middle East disruption added cancellations, delivery delays and a one-off provision for receivables.

Small caps do this from time to time. A $10 billion medtech rarely does.

A defensive name issuing a downgrade of this size makes the rest of confession season worth reading carefully.

Lithium's Deficit Story is Back on the Table

Lithium sentiment has had a brutal couple of years. The long-term supply picture is starting to reassert itself anyway.

Canaccord is now calling a material structural deficit from 2026 through to 2035, driven by a chronic lack of investment in new supply rather than runaway demand. Even if higher prices in 2027–28 trigger a supply response, they say the gap stays open.

Markets are starting to respond.

PLS Group (ASX: PLS), the renamed Pilbara Minerals, dropped its March quarter today. The numbers land hard in this direction.

Revenue up 52% quarter-on-quarter, realised spodumene prices up 61%, and cash margin from operations up around 178%. The share price is up roughly 35% year-to-date and testing A$6 again.

That matters well beyond the majors.

Lithium juniors were the first names crushed on the way down, and they are usually the first to move when confidence comes back. The supply picture is now pointing the right way, and the money that left during the glut has a reason to come back.

The Wrap

There are weeks in this game that justify the rest of the years and weeks that test whether you should have got into it at all.

This one was the first kind.

There’s also a particular discipline required not to mistake one good week for the shape of a year. The job from here is finding the next one.

Some of the names in the rest of the portfolio are moving - MRD’s pulps to the lab, AZ9 to Maikhan Uul, copper tightening, lithium reasserting - but those stories will tell themselves in their own time, and we will be here when they do.

We’ll be back on the hunt tomorrow.

Till next week.

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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, 900,000 AI1 performance rights and 750,000 AZ9 shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AI1, MRD, and AZ9 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.

We added the company to the portfolio on Monday, after it cleared a semiconductor milestone the chip industry had been stuck on for over a decade.

Around 40 million shares changed hands that day, roughly $3.5 million in turnover, the biggest volume day in the stock’s history.

On Wednesday came an exclusive worldwide licence on the graphene material behind the next wave of stealth drones, signed out of Tel Aviv University.

And this morning, on the back of all that, the company pulled the trigger on a $14 million placement at just under 7c a share.

We’d usually be grumpy about a raise this soon after adding it to our portfolio. The details of this one took the sting out.

The bulk of the book went to two cornerstones. Meitav is Israel's largest investment house, with roughly A$190 billion under management, and sits inside the same Israeli defence and research ecosystem the stealth drone licence came out of.

Regal Funds Management came in alongside them. They have A$20 billion under management and a long track record of being early on the good ASX tech stories.

Chairman Kevin Crofton and non-executive director Dominic O'Hanlon tipped in $200,000 of their own cash on top.

Two things brought these funds onto the register. The interconnect breakthrough on Monday, and the stealth drone licence on Wednesday.

The Stealth Drone Licence

Right now, a drone on a military radar screen looks about the size of an F-35 fighter jet. AI1's tech has already shrunk that signature by 100 times in testing at Tel Aviv University.

The next target is 1,000 times, where the drone shows up looking more like an insect than an aircraft.

The country that builds it first gets a lethal edge in the next decade of airborne warfare.

The deal Adisyn signed is a binding licence between AI1’s subsidiary, 2D Radar Absorbers Ltd, and Ramot, the commercial arm of Tel Aviv University. It replaces the option AI1 had in place.

An option means you might own it. A licence means you do.

The licence gives Adisyn the right to earn royalties whenever the graphene tech is deployed in a drone or defence platform.

That’s how the drone side of the business turns into revenue.

AI1 is a graphene technology company pointed at two enormous markets.

One is chipmaking, where its low-temperature graphene process cleared a decade-old semiconductor roadblock earlier this week.

The other is drones, where the same graphene platform drives the stealth tech above.

Anyone who watched Droneshield (ASX:DRO) rip from 20c to over $5 knows what a defence thematic can do to an ASX small-cap.

Meet Ramot

Ramot is Tel Aviv University's commercial arm, and this will be the first time most of our readers come across them.

Ramot's partner list runs through the heavy hitters of global pharma and tech: Pfizer, Teva, Bayer, Novartis, Merck, Samsung, Google and Microsoft.

These companies pay Ramot to license Tel Aviv University research. The university is a global leader in applied physics and materials science (the two fields AI1's tech sits on).

Ramot’s defence credentials are just as serious. It’s been a strategic partner of Leonardo since 2023.

Leonardo is a A$32 billion defence giant that builds helicopters for armies, cyber systems for NATO, and sits alongside BAE, Lockheed and Raytheon. The partnership covers cybersecurity, unmanned vehicles and defence electronics.

They’ve also run research programs directly with the Israel Defense Forces.

These are the names Ramot usually sits across the table from. Handing an exclusive global licence to an ASX small-cap is not normal.

Ramot has its pick of partners. It’s telling that they chose AI1 for the exclusive deal.

The 20dB Story, in Plain English

Radar performance moves on a log scale. Every 10 decibels (dB) of reduction means a tenfold drop in what the radar picks up.

So 20dB is 100 times less radar return. 30dB is 1,000 times less. 40dB is 10,000 times.

AI1 has already hit 20dB in testing, and got there faster than they thought possible. The 12-month program that just got funded is now chasing 30dB.

Getting from 20 to 30 looks like a modest bump on paper. In physics terms, it’s a tenfold leap in stealth performance.

At 100 times, the radar operator spots the threat too late. At 1,000 times, the drone gets through undetected.

AI1 chairman Kevin Crofton, who spent three decades running businesses that sold into TSMC, Samsung and Intel, put it to us this way:

The 12-month research program chasing 30dB is costing AI1 less than A$100,000. In defence R&D terms, that’s a rounding error. A defence contractor spends more than that on a single week of engineering time.

AI1 is pointing it at exclusive rights to the next generation of stealth material.

The Drone Race is Now a Stealth Race

Ten years ago, drone development was about range. Then payload. Then autonomy. Now it’s about visibility.

Radar sees a drone early, the drone gets intercepted. Radar sees nothing, the drone gets where it’s going. That’s the whole game.

Monday’s portfolio addition piece walked through the defence spending numbers. Short version: Germany, the UK, the Pentagon and NATO have committed tens of billions to autonomous systems in 2026, and Australia added A$5 billion for drones a few weeks back.

This week, Australia put A$7 billion behind counter-drones specifically over the next decade, more than double the previous allocation.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy called it “Star Wars happening right now.”

Every counter-drone system depends on detection. Lasers, missiles, interceptors. None of them fire until radar spots the threat. A drone the radar can't see slips past every dollar Australia just spent.

And more money spent shooting drones down means more money for drones that can get through.

Military drone spending alone is forecast to triple from US$20.7 billion in 2026 to US$66 billion by 2035. US investment bank Oppenheimer pegged the total addressable drone market at US$400 billion within a decade.

Inside all that money sits a materials problem. Stealth coatings work, but they add weight, and on a small drone every extra gram matters.

Graphene sidesteps the trade-off. It becomes part of the composite structure itself and absorbs the radar signal there. The drone stays light.

That’s the technology AI1 just locked up.

The Team

Adisyn’s managing director Arye Kohavi has been solving military logistics problems for nearly two decades.

As an IDF Special Forces commander, he saw what happened when frontline troops ran out of drinking water. In Lebanon or Gaza, supply could only come by convoy or helicopter.

In 2009 he co-founded Watergen to build a machine that pulls drinking water out of the air. Soldiers at the front had their own water source.

Watergen sold to the US Army, UK Army, French Army and IDF. TIME named it one of the 100 best inventions of 2019, and Foreign Policy put Kohavi on its list of 100 leading global thinkers.

Now he’s doing it again.

Alongside Kohavi on the drone side sits Professor Pavel Ginzburg, a radar physicist at Tel Aviv University who picked up a European Research Council Proof of Concept grant in February.

That’s one of only 150 handed out worldwide, and they exist specifically to push university research into commercial use.

Alongside him is Professor Maxim Sokol, whose speciality is advanced materials integration and scalable composite manufacturing.

Two serious operators working on exactly the problem every defence contractor is trying to solve right now. Reduce radar visibility. Keep the weight off.

Israel is the world’s testing ground for drone technology. Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries sit near the top of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) export market, and stealth has been a core edge of their platforms for decades.

Running a materials program in that ecosystem is about as close to the customers as you can get.

The Terms

AI1 pays Ramot a 4% royalty on net sales, and Ramot takes a 19% equity stake in AI1’s 2D Radar Absorbers subsidiary.

Both numbers keep Tel Aviv University aligned with AI1 for the long run. The more the tech sells, the more Ramot earns.

The whole commercial model stays capital-light. Someone else builds the factories and holds the inventory. AI1 collects royalties.

For a small-cap with two licensing shots at multi-billion dollar markets, the upside stays uncapped.

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What We’re Watching From Here

There are three main drone-side catalysts we see over the next 12 months.

• Lab results pushing toward the 30dB milestone. That’s the number that takes the drone story from proof of concept to the doorstep of commercial conversations.

• Validation across operational radar frequencies. Real battlefields operate across a wider band than any lab can replicate. Confirming performance holds up in the field unlocks live customer trials.

• First contact with customers. UAV makers and defence contractors have budgets they can deploy right now. Early engagement signals tell us how fast this goes from licence to revenue.

Defence procurement runs on its own clock and milestones slip. A graphene composite that works in Tel Aviv may need reformulation elsewhere, and AI1 is a small-cap with a long runway ahead of it.

The asymmetry is what we like. Less than A$100,000 of research spend, against a market writing the biggest cheques defence has seen in a generation.

When we added AI1 to the portfolio on Monday, we told you the company had two shots at multi-billion dollar markets. Four trading days later, both look a lot clearer.

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.

Every serious military on the planet is chasing that same goal right now.

The material that makes that drone possible is also the material at the heart of NVIDIA’s next generation of AI chips.

Every one of those chips runs into the same physical wall. The copper wires that have carried electricity through every computer chip for 40 years are running out of room.

The semiconductor industry has spent more than a decade trying to manufacture the replacement.

Meet Adisyn (ASX: AI1), our latest portfolio addition, which just cleared the milestone the multi-billion dollar industry's been stuck on.

What AI1 Just Grew

AI1 spent six years building a process to grow graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, inside the same equipment already running in every major chip factory on the planet.

Today it confirmed the result the industry has been chasing. Full-coverage graphene on a 1cm by 1cm coupon, grown at a temperature low enough for a real chip factory to use.

No one has done this before. It’s a world first.

Graphene has been the known answer to the copper problem for over a decade. The catch was always how to make it. Growing graphene normally takes around 1000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt any chip you’d want to put it on.

Most of the industry's decade of effort has gone into growing graphene cold using the same tool - a machine called a CVD, or Chemical Vapour Deposition reactor. Enormous sums have been spent on that path without a commercial result.

AI1 took a different path. They didn't try to fix CVD. They switched to a completely different tool - an Atomic Layer Deposition machine, known as ALD - and built their own chemistry for it.

AI1 is the only company we can find using ALD for graphene at fab-compatible temperatures, and both the process and the chemistry are patented.

That’s what got grown today. Continuous graphene, deposited via ALD, well below 450 degrees Celsius, which is the thermal ceiling any material has to sit under to make it inside a commercial chip fab.

The result opens the door to the conversation AI1 has been waiting six years to have. Engagement with the TSMCs, the Samsungs, the Intels, and the equipment giants that build for them.

At 6.8 cents and a $57 million market cap, we think the ceiling on this one is a long way up.

The Chip Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Problem

The chip industry has never faced demand like this.

Last month, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told investors the company now has "high confidence visibility" of US$1 trillion in orders for its Blackwell and Rubin chips alone through 2027.

Just those two product lines. That's before the CPUs, the networking gear, or anything else NVIDIA sells.

The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics body, the industry’s main market tracker, forecasts the global chip market will hit US$975.5 billion in 2026, up 26% on this year.

One NVIDIA Blackwell server rack sells for around US$3 million. NVIDIA is shipping a thousand of them every week, and six million Blackwell GPUs have shipped in the past year. That's the scale of what the chip industry is trying to build.

The US government is putting real dollars behind bringing advanced manufacturing back onshore. The CHIPS Act has already committed US$6.6 billion to TSMC’s Arizona fabs, US$6.17 billion to Micron, and US$4.75 billion to Samsung.

Every chip built inside that wave hits the same bottleneck.

For decades, copper has been the interconnect material - the wiring that moves electricity between billions of transistors inside every chip.

It’s been getting thinner with each new generation, and it’s now so thin it’s behaving like a bottleneck rather than a bridge.

This means resistance rises, heat builds up, and signals start to stall inside the chip itself.

At the scale of an AI data centre, that inefficiency shows up in the power bill of an entire country.

Imec, the Belgian research hub where TSMC, Intel, Samsung and most of the world’s major chipmakers develop their next-generation processes, has publicly named graphene as the most promising replacement.

Graphene conducts electricity more efficiently than copper and keeps working at dimensions where copper physically breaks down. It also handles heat better, which matters when billions of transistors are firing at once.

The physics has been settled for over a decade. The obstacle has always been making it inside a real chip factory.

AI1 just cleared the first real step.

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The Drone Race is a Materials Race

We opened on drones for a reason.

The drones in operation right now are easy to see and easy to track. Almost every radar on the planet picks them up.

The real race is for the next generation: a drone that slips past radar, sits thousands of metres above a target undetected, drops in on a mission no human could survive, and comes home without anyone knowing it was there.

That drone doesn’t exist yet. The materials to build it are what every defence program in the world is now chasing.

Capital is pouring into drone tech broadly. A few recent prints:

• Anduril is raising US$4 billion at a US$60 billion valuation

• Helsing, the German AI drone maker, hit a €12 billion valuation this year

• AEVEX Aerospace listed in New York on Friday at US$2.7 billion on debut

• Stark, a German drone startup founded fifteen months ago, is already sitting on a US$500 million valuation after raising US$100 million from Peter Thiel and the CIA

Governments have opened the taps for drone tech too:

• Germany has committed €10 billion specifically to military drones, part of the biggest defence buildup since the Cold War

• The United Kingdom put up £6.5 billion under its latest Strategic Defence Review

• NATO members have collectively agreed to lift defence spending to 5% of GDP

• The Pentagon’s FY27 budget request includes US$54.6 billion for its newly formed Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, up from US$225 million the prior year

• Australia committed $5 billion to drones last week

Inside that race is a materials problem that's proven hard to crack: making a drone the radar can't see. That's where AI1 sits.

In lab testing, its graphene coating has already cut the radar return from a drone to one hundredth of its size. A full-size attack drone appearing on a radar screen at roughly the size of a bird.

The next target takes that to one thousandth. AI1 is working on the material that makes it possible.

AI1's radar-signature work is based in Israel, built around a partnership with Tel Aviv University.

Israel has been a testing ground for drone and defence tech for decades, and with every major military now writing cheques, that's a useful place for this work to sit.

The Two Markets AI1 Sits in Front of

Let’s take stock and pull back for a second, and look at what AI1 is actually selling into.

The global chip market is on track to hit US$975 billion next year, with most forecasts pointing to US$1.2 trillion by 2030.

Every device running a modern chip sits inside that number. That's the processor in your phone, the chips driving your car, the AI accelerators inside every data centre.

All of them hit the same interconnect wall, which is the one AI1 just cleared the first real step on.

That means the total addressable market for a working low-temperature graphene process is every high-performance chip built over the next 20 years.

Drones are the smaller market, but growing faster.

Military drone spending alone is forecast to triple from US$20.7 billion in 2026 to US$66.5 billion by 2035.

US investment bank Oppenheimer recently put the total addressable drone market at US$400 billion within a decade. The anxiety-inducing drone warfare videos coming out of the Ukraine-Russia war make it easy to see why.

And those figures are before you factor in what a working stealth material would be worth to any defence program chasing the next-generation drone.

Two massive markets, one materials breakthrough, and the same team behind both sides of it.

AI1’s market cap is $57 million.

Five Reasons We’re Backing Adisyn (ASX: AI1)

1. The Six-Year Overnight Success

Graphene has been the obvious answer to chipmaking's biggest problem for over a decade, and for just as long, nobody has been able to use it.

The reason was always temperature. Traditional graphene growth melts the chip. Every major chipmaker has known graphene was the material that extends the industry past copper's limits, and every one of them has been stuck at the same wall.

Adisyn started working on the problem in 2020.

The graphene tech came into Adisyn through the January 2025 acquisition of 2D Generation. The team, the patents and the R&D all came with it.

Six years, more than 20 specialists across three continents, and a research roadmap published in mid-2025 that set out three milestones in order:

• First (completed in January): a graphene-like carbon layer deposited below 300 degrees Celsius, independently verified by Professor Yoram Selzer of Tel Aviv University

• Second (landed today): A full 1cm by 1cm coupon, covered in continuous graphene, at a temperature a commercial chip factory can actually use.

• Third (in progress): repeatability across hundreds of samples under factory conditions, and scaling from coupon to full wafer

AI1 is the only company on the planet with a demonstrated process to grow continuous graphene at fab-compatible temperatures using an industrial ALD system. Both the process and the chemistry are patented.

Chairman Kevin Crofton spent 30 years running semiconductor businesses that sold into TSMC, Samsung and Intel. He knows exactly what happens next.

Crofton has told us that when he's asked chip companies what solving this would mean to them, the response has been blunt: "It's worth more than my company."

A working low-temperature graphene process is the kind of asset a chipmaker buys. It’s not licensed out in small pieces to competitors. It’s acquired, wholesale, by the first company that wants to own the interconnect layer of every advanced chip built for the next 20 years.

2. AI1 is Working on the Problem the AI Boom Keeps Making Worse

Every new generation of AI chip is harder to build than the one before it.

The transistors shrink. The wires that connect them shrink with them. At the scale of modern AI models, those tiny copper wires are moving so much data, so fast, that they're wasting enormous amounts of electricity just pushing electrons through resistance.

Every bit of electricity lost to heat is electricity not spent on computation.

NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang has called AI infrastructure the next electricity. He’s forecast US$1 trillion in chip orders through 2027 alone.

Every one of those chips runs into the same wall. TSMC, Samsung, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and every government trying to build its own AI capability needs a solution to the copper problem, and they needed it yesterday.

Graphene keeps working at dimensions where copper physically breaks down. It conducts more efficiently, runs cooler, and holds up under loads that melt conventional wiring.

The physics argument between graphene and copper has been settled for over a decade. The problem was always how to grow it inside a real chip factory.

AI1 has just shown a process that does exactly that.

The chips built for AI in the next 20 years are going to need a replacement for copper interconnects. AI1 is the only company we can find that has cleared the first real step on the industrial path to one.

3. The Drone Side is a Second Swing at a Real Market

Earlier this year, AI1 released early results on something the global defence industry has been chasing for decades.

Working with the commercial arm of Tel Aviv University, the company coated a drone in a graphene-based material and put it in front of a radar. The radar saw one hundredth of what it should have.

Management’s next target takes that to one thousandth, the point where a full-size attack drone shows up on a radar screen at roughly the size of a butterfly.

It’s worth flagging what that means and what it doesn’t. The one-hundredth figure is radar return - what the radar sees - not the drone’s physical size. And the one-thousandth target is where the company’s aiming, not where it’s got to yet.

It’s still the kind of result that turns heads in defence.

The program is led by Pavel Ginzburg, a professor of electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University and a globally recognised radar physicist. In February he was awarded a European Research Council Proof of Concept grant, one of only 150 handed out worldwide.

He's a serious operator, and the technical lead AI1 is building the drone program around.

The drone program is the same graphene platform pointed at a different problem, with its own addressable market and its own customer set. This kind of second shot on goal isn’t a small one, it’s big and the addressable market is only growing.

Potential customers are already spending. Germany has committed €10 billion to drones and counter-drone systems. The United Kingdom is putting up £6.5 billion. The Pentagon is asking Congress for US$54.6 billion.

The country that owns the invisible drone owns the next decade of airborne warfare, and AI1’s materials work is aimed squarely at that problem.

4. The Management Team is First in Class

AI1 is chaired by Kevin Crofton, a semiconductor industry operator with more than 30 years running the businesses that build chips for the world’s biggest fabs.

He has held senior roles at Lam Research and KLA, two of the four biggest chip equipment companies on the planet, both of which supply TSMC, Samsung and Intel directly.

Crofton then led the management buyout that created SPTS Technologies, a UK manufacturer of the machines that deposit and etch layers onto semiconductor wafers. Under his leadership, SPTS was sold to Orbotech for US$370 million in 2014, and Orbotech was then acquired by KLA for US$3.4 billion.

After SPTS, Crofton ran Comet AG, a Swiss-listed technology company, where he took the market capitalisation from CHF0.8 billion to CHF2.2 billion during his tenure.

He spent eight years on the board of SEMI, the global industry body for chip equipment makers, including a term as chairman. He has also advised the US government on semiconductor policy.

Crofton has spent three decades inside the rooms where the world’s biggest chipmakers decide which new technologies they adopt. He now chairs a company that has just cleared the exact kind of milestone those rooms are watching for.

Managing director Arye Kohavi runs the graphene program day to day, and he’s a serial entrepreneur having built a world-class technology company before.

In 2009, Kohavi co-founded Watergen, an Israeli company that built machines to pull drinking water straight out of the air.

The technology has been deployed in more than 65 countries, and is used for point-of-use drinking water in disaster relief, remote sites, clinics and military field settings.

Watergen was one of TIME magazine's 100 best inventions of 2019, named one of Fast Company's 50 most innovative companies, and was picked by the Israeli Ministry of Economy as one of the nine greatest Israeli inventions of all time. The company was acquired in 2016.

Foreign Policy magazine named Kohavi one of its 100 leading global thinkers in 2014.

A year later, Kohavi started work on the graphene program AI1 owns today.

VP of R&D Miri Kish Dagan spent decades running research and development in Israeli semiconductor and laser systems before joining the program.

Behind them sits a team of more than 20 specialists across three continents, with research partnerships at imec and an EU chip consortium that includes NVIDIA, Applied Materials and NXP.

No other ASX company at this market cap has a team with this kind of track record. In deep tech, who’s running the company is half the answer to whether the science ever gets out of the lab. AI1 has the other half already.

5. The Valuation Gap is the Reason we’re Here

$57 million at 6.8 cents a share.

With that you get:

• A patented low-temperature graphene process that has just cleared the milestone the chip industry has been working on for a decade

• A drone radar absorption program with a grant application going to the Israeli Ministry of Defence

• A management team that has already built and exited multibillion-dollar businesses in the same industry, and

• A legacy IT services business that still generates revenue.

Pitt Street Research, an Australian equity research firm, valued AI1 at 29 cents per share on a sum-of-the-parts basis covering the chip technology, the drone program and Adisyn Services. That's roughly four times today's close.

Our framing is simpler.

The global chip market is heading toward US$1 trillion next year. NVIDIA alone has forecast a trillion dollars of chip orders through 2027, and every one of those chips has the same copper interconnect problem AI1 is working on.

The military drone market is on track to triple by 2035, and NATO governments have just committed hundreds of billions to the autonomous systems AI1’s radar work sits in front of.

AI1 doesn’t need to own a big piece of either market to justify a much larger valuation than today’s. It just needs to keep clearing milestones.

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Our view on AI1 from here

Today's announcement is a technical one, and the market may take a beat to work out what it means. Here's our read:

The next 12 months are a straight line to commercial conversations. Repeatability testing across hundreds of samples, scaling to a full production wafer, and first partnership announcements.

On the drone side, management has set a target of hitting 30 dB radar signature reduction by the end of 2026. That's the milestone that takes the drone story from proof of concept to the doorstep of commercial interest.

Each one is a potential share price catalyst, and they are all sequenced inside the next 12 to 18 months.

This is the kind of company that gets bought. Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, ASML and Tokyo Electron have spent the past decade acquiring smaller businesses to lock in the materials and processes their customers need.

A low-temperature graphene process is exactly the kind of asset they pay for. Crofton himself built SPTS into a business that KLA eventually owned inside a US$3.4 billion deal.

He understands how this movie ends.

The six years of research, the specialist team, the IP position and the institutional partnerships with imec, Tel Aviv University and the EU chip consortium put AI1 well ahead of anyone else chasing the same problem.

A well-funded competitor starting today would be years behind, and the chip industry doesn't wait.

None of this is currently priced in to the 6.8 cent share price, and that’s why we are in.

We're backing AI1 from here.

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.

More on that in the morning.

As for the rest of the week, if you’d only glanced at the ASX 200 you'd have shrugged, put your phone down, and gone about your day. The index barely moved.

Meanwhile a refinery fire knocked out 10% of Australia's fuel, oil crashed 11% as the Hormuz story flipped twice in 48 hours, gold sat near US$4,800/oz, Eden put on 91% in a fortnight, and Yugo flew 54% on its first drill result.

The index seemed to sleep through the lot.

What caught our eye this week:

• Director buying ahead of drilling at Exultant Mining

• Defence spending piling into drones

• Scandium demand lifting on the back of AI infrastructure rollout

• Gold IPOs keep ripping out of the gate

• A DFS next door to Fortuna Metals reprices the corridor

• Over $5 billion in coordinated Australia-US critical minerals support

• Yugo Metals flies on first drilling hits

• Eden Innovations adds another 31% for a huge two-week run

A New Name Joins the Portfolio Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning we’re introducing a new portfolio addition in a thematic that’s running hot. Without giving the game away, here’s what you’re getting:

• Management team with decades at the top of the industry

• A multibillion-dollar market that's compounding faster than most people realise

• Commercial revenue within sight

• A valuation with plenty of room to run from here

Full breakdown lands in your inbox before market open tomorrow. If you’re subscribed, keep an eye out. If you’re not, hit the button below.

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Chairman Buying Ahead of Drilling at Peak View

This week, Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) chairman Brett Grosvenor bought another 100,000 shares on market, adding to an already sizeable holding in 10X.

The rigs are weeks from turning at their Peak View project, targeting a copper-lead-zinc-silver-gold sulphide in New South Wales.

10X has mapped a target corridor using IP and gravity work across multiple 1.6km lines, alongside surface rock chips running up to 50.9 g/t gold over a 360 metre quartz vein trend. (Rock chips are hand-picked surface samples, so they tell you where to look, not what the bulk grade looks like.)

The upcoming program targets the biggest geophysical anomaly on the project, an area earlier drilling campaigns missed.

Directors see the targeting work before anyone else. Grosvenor’s buying right before the first hole goes in tells you he likes what he’s seen.

Peak View is about to get its first proper test.

Drone Funding Catches up to the Talk

Last week we said we liked the drone space. The funding numbers this week did the rest of the talking.

Australia this week flagged up to $5 billion of new spending on uncrewed systems, funnelled into programs with names that sound like rejected Tom Clancy titles.

Ghost Bat is a combat drone that flies alongside crewed fighters. Ghost Shark is an autonomous submarine that just entered service with the Navy this month.

The Integrated Investment Program is now spending $12 to $15 billion on kit like this through to 2036.

Three years of Ukraine has taught every defence ministry that a cheap drone can take out a $10 million tank, and the budgets are starting to reflect it.

The US, as it tends to, is going magnitudes larger on defence spend, with policy proposals pointing towards a US$1.5 trillion defence budget in 2027 and loitering and kamikaze drones near the top of the shopping list.

China’s also spending hard on the same tech.

The contracts are starting to flow, and there are two ways small-caps get their cut. The ones making the parts that go inside these things, and the ones digging up the metals that go inside the parts.

The Scandium Sweet Spot

Scandium used to be a specialist alloy story. This week it walked straight into the AI data centre trade.

Oracle just signed a master services agreement with Bloom Energy covering up to 2.8GW of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) systems. It’s the biggest single SOFC deal ever done.

SOFCs make electricity through an electrochemical reaction instead of burning fuel, and they rely on scandium-stabilised zirconia to work efficiently and last longer.

SOFCs already soak up around 47% of global scandium demand. A 2.8GW contract puts real numbers behind a market that had mostly lived in forecasts.

Bloom has deployed 1.2GW to 1.4GW globally to date, and entire national SOFC fleets usually sit in the hundreds of megawatts to low single-digit gigawatts. A 2.8GW order from a single customer is a big step up from anything the market has seen.

Sunrise Energy Metals (ASX: SRL), the most advanced large-scale scandium exposure outside China and Russia, has already run roughly 50% over the past month as the story flows into the share price. It’s now valued at roughly A$1.85 billion.

Which brings us to our portfolio company, Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD).

MRD has scandium sitting alongside rare earth mineralisation across 367.98Mt at Grass Patch, and there are no large-scale primary Western scandium producers.

A big volume of pulps is still to be re-assayed for scandium, with clear scope to expand the resource footprint. At a $45 million market cap, we still think the scandium exposure inside MRD is getting overlooked.

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Gold IPOs Running Hot

Gold juniors are having a moment on the ASX. Three new listings in a few months have all rewarded the people who got in early, and the latest one ran harder than anything before it.

With the war in Iran at the negotiating table, the market is pivoting back towards gold, and the price closed the week stronger.

Here’s who’s been running, and who we think lists next:

Bison Resources (ASX: BSR) listed this week at 20c, ran as high as 95c, and closed the week at 57c. A 185% premium to issue price after five trading days.

The move followed a heavily oversubscribed $5.5m raise to fund its Nevada projects along the Carlin Trend, one of the world’s most prolific gold belts.

Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) listed in December and peaked at 220% above its 20c IPO price. They're drilling a historic Victorian gold mine that produced more than a million ounces before water forced it shut.

Valiant Gold (ASX: VAL) is the other one, holding well above listing after peaking at a 70% premium.

When gold is this strong for this long, investors are paying up for any IPO with clear geology and a credible path to proving it out.

Which naturally leads to the next question: who’s next?

Elk Range Mining earned a mention in our top stockbroker picks for 2026 article, and we think for good reason.

Elk comes to market with a permitted underground mine sitting on defined historical ounces, with processing infrastructure already in place. That’s a meaningful headstart over your average early-stage listing.

With gold holding near US$4,800/oz, Elk shapes up as the next gold float to keep an eye on.

The DFS Next Door to Fortuna Metals

Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM) dropped its Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) for Kasiya this week. The numbers make it pretty clear how valuable the rutile and graphite corridor in Malawi really is.

The headline figure was a pre-tax Net Present Value (NPV) of US$2.2 billion. SVM’s current market cap is around A$470 million.

A DFS is the study that tells you whether a project actually makes money, and NPV is the headline figure - the present-day value of all future cash flows once time and risk are accounted for.

It’s one of the cleanest ways to size up a project’s economic strength.

SVM closed the week up just under 6%. That one week’s gain in market cap is worth more than the entire market cap of Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN), which sits around A$25 million.

FUN sits along the same geological trend as SVM, just south of Kasiya. SVM is now putting study-backed numbers against a multi-billion-dollar project, which validates the corridor itself at a valuation level.

We've been backing FUN as leverage into this region since we added it to the portfolio. Proven geology, now proven economics, and still trading at a fraction of what's sitting further down the belt.

Policy Support Keeps Building

More than $5 billion in coordinated export credit support is now being pointed at new critical minerals projects across Australia and the US.

Export Finance Australia and the US Export-Import Bank issued aligned letters of support across nickel, cobalt, rare earths and gallium supply chains.

For anyone not across it - letters of support are the step before financing, signalling to developers and investors that the money will be there once projects clear their milestones.

That’s governments moving from strategy documents to project financing, which is the step that usually moves a project from study to build.

For years, Western critical minerals projects have been stuck waiting for someone to underwrite the risk. China already underwrites its own.

Having two allied governments do the same in parallel is a different setup than the one small-cap developers have been working inside.

For small-caps like MRD with heavy rare earths and scandium exposure, the policy direction keeps getting clearer. Allied governments are backing domestic and partner supply chains directly, and that’s a better macro setup for emerging projects than anything we’ve had before.

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Yugo flies on First Drilling Update

Yugo Metals (ASX: YUG) ripped 54% this week to a roughly $34 million market cap after its first drilling update from the Erak Prospect at the Sinjakovo Project in Bosnia.

Early scout drilling hit shallow breccia-hosted mineralisation across gold, silver, copper and antimony, with a 7.1 metre zone from just 26.2 metres depth. The structure remains open along strike and at depth, and assays are due shortly.

Surface support was already there before the rigs turned. Historical trenching returned 61 metres at 1.5 g/t gold, and rock chips went as high as 7.9 g/t gold and 2,070 g/t silver.

Adriatic Metals is the reference point in this part of the world. They scaled a breccia-hosted system in Bosnia into a takeover at around US$1.25 billion.

Yugo is a long way behind that, but first-pass drilling confirming a live polymetallic system in the same belt is how those stories usually start.

The Strait of Hormuz: 48 Hours of Whiplash

Every paragraph of this section has a shelf life of about six hours right now, but we’ll do our best to wade briefly into the fog of war.

Overnight Friday was the wild one. Iran’s foreign minister declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open” for the first time since the war started, oil crashed more than 11% in its biggest single-day move of the conflict, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both closed at record highs. For a few hours, it looked like the war premium was gone.

That already appears to be falling apart. Iran’s military said the strait had “returned to its previous state,” the IRGC opened fire on commercial tankers, and warned that approaching the strait would be treated as “cooperation with the enemy.”

A second round of US-Iran talks is now scheduled for tomorrow in Pakistan. The ceasefire itself runs out mid-week.

Friday was the market pricing peace. Saturday was the reminder that war is messy.

Gold gave back some ground on Friday, while oil juniors went the other way. Both those trades could flip in a heartbeat if the peace talks go sideways.

Eden Keeps Running

Last week we flagged Eden Innovations (ASX: EDE) after a 45% move. This week the stock added another 31%, taking the two-week gain to roughly 91%.

The latest announcement gives you the why. Eden launched its new EdenShield division targeting defence and national security applications, with products including hardened concrete and electromagnetic shielding materials.

Hardened concrete does what it sounds like. Stronger, more blast-resistant building material, useful for anything important from embassies to data centres.

Electromagnetic shielding protects sensitive electronics from interference, whether that’s electronic warfare or the weird guy next door with a big magnet.

Governments are writing bigger cheques for the infrastructure that houses all of this, and retrofits tend to land faster than full rebuilds.

This is why selective exposure to emerging small caps still matters. When a company sits in a sector with structural demand and starts moving from trials into commercial rollout, the market responds fast.

Eden’s two-week run is a reminder that the biggest percentage moves often come from smaller names sitting in the right theme at the right time.

What’s Next

The themes are all pointing the same way right now.

Defence budgets are turning into contracts, AI infrastructure is showing up in metals demand, critical minerals policy is moving from press release to cheque book, and gold sitting at records is keeping the exploration and IPO pipeline wide open.

With Iran (possibly) winding down it’s as good a backdrop for small-caps as we’ve had in a while, and several names we covered this week have drills turning or results pending over the coming weeks.

Tomorrow morning, we’re adding one more to the portfolio.

If you want to be first in line, hit the subscribe button below.

Till next week.

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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, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, 200,000 10X shares, and 187,500 BHL shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN, 10X, BHL and 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.

But the people who’ve been collecting dividends from the same handful of companies for a decade tend to be the calmest investors in any room, and 2026 has given everyone plenty of reasons to want to be calm.

We love the stories about the 10-bagger. The IPO that made early believers rich. The explorer that hit copper and ran 400% in a week. Nobody wants to hear from the bloke who bought BHP in 2009 and just kept reinvesting the dividends. He’s boring.

He’s also rich.

If you'd gone camping for all of 2025, come back and checked your portfolio, you'd assume you missed a quiet year. You didn't.

Tariffs, a federal election, Trump moving markets via Truth Social, a new war in the Middle East, and AI advancing fast enough to make half the country nervous about their careers.

Yet the ASX 200 finished 2025 up more than 6% and pushed toward new highs in 2026. And the dividend cheques kept arriving.

We spend most of our time at the smaller end of the market. Early-stage companies, drill results, the kind of stocks that can move 50% on a single announcement. This piece is about the other end entirely.

The end where companies make money, pay tax on it, and send you a cheque twice a year.

What follows is the top 10 ASX-listed dividend payers to start 2026, the best from 2025, and the top 10 from mining and energy of 2025. We've also pulled apart how dividends actually work and whether the good ones are likely to keep paying.

First though, the basics.

What is a Dividend?

A dividend is simply a company sharing part of its profits with shareholders. You own a slice of the business, and when it makes money, you get a cut.

Most companies that pay dividends do so twice a year: an interim dividend partway through the financial year (February/March) and a final dividend (August/September).

There’s no minimum shareholding required to qualify. Even a small holding entitles you to your proportional share of the payout.

In Australia, dividends also come with a tax angle worth understanding: they’re either franked or unfranked.

Franked and Unfranked Dividends Explained

Franked dividends

Franked means the company already paid tax on the money before it reached you. Australia's company tax rate is 30% for most listed companies, so a franked dividend comes with a credit for that 30%.

What happens next depends on your tax bracket. If you're on 30%, you're square. The company already covered it. If you're higher, say 37%, you pay the difference. If you're lower, you might get a refund. That last bit is why retirees love franking credits.

Unfranked dividends

Unfranked dividends don’t carry a tax credit. The full amount hits your taxable income and gets taxed at your marginal rate.

Franking credits are one of the biggest advantages of investing in Australian shares. You don't get the same deal from interest, rent, or most overseas income.

Understanding Dividend Dates (and When You Need to Own the Shares)

There are four dates that matter when a dividend gets paid. Only one of them determines whether you actually get the money.

Announcement date
This is when the company tells the market a dividend is coming. They'll disclose the amount, whether it's franked or unfranked, and lay out the ex-dividend, record, and payment dates. Owning shares on this date alone doesn't mean you're getting paid.

Ex-dividend date
The ex-dividend date is the cutoff: to receive the dividend, you need to own shares before this date. Buy on or after it, and the payout goes to whoever held the shares before you. This trips people up more than anything else in dividend investing.

Record date
The record date is when the company reviews its official list of shareholders to confirm who gets paid. If you bought before the ex-dividend date and you’re on the register at close on this date, you qualify.

Payment date
This is when the money actually lands - either in your bank account or reinvested through a dividend reinvestment plan if you’ve opted in.

If you take one thing from this section: buy before the ex-dividend date. Everything else is plumbing.

The Case for Dividends

When markets are running hot, nobody’s thinking about dividends. Growth stocks grab the headlines. But growth stocks also get smashed when expectations shift, and as we’ve seen recently, a war on the other side of the world can rattle the entire ASX.

Dividend payers tend to keep sending cheques through all of it. That’s the bit most people underestimate. Over time, that reliability compounds in ways that are hard to appreciate until you see it in your own portfolio.

Australia also has a feature most other markets don’t: dividend reinvestment plans, or DRPs.

These let you automatically reinvest your dividends into more shares, usually without paying brokerage and sometimes at a small discount to the market price. The dividends are still taxable income, but reinvesting instead of pocketing the cash means your position quietly compounds without you lifting a finger.

Who Dividend Investing Suits (and When It Matters Most)

How you think about dividends depends on where you’re at.

If you’re 23, dividends aren’t paying your rent. Most people at that stage reinvest them and let compounding do the work over decades. The money is almost irrelevant. What matters is that your shareholding is quietly getting bigger every six months.

Mid-career, it shifts. Some keep reinvesting. Others start redirecting dividends toward a mortgage, school fees, or that renovation that's been on the list since 2019. It becomes more about flexibility than a single strategy.

Closer to retirement, dividends start doing what most people assume they always do: providing income. Consistent payouts can cover living expenses without having to sell down your portfolio, which matters when you're no longer earning a wage.

A 25-year-old and a 65-year-old might own the same stock for completely different reasons. Neither is wrong.

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The Market Backdrop From 2025

For anyone unfamiliar with the index, the ASX 200 tracks the 200 largest listed companies by market cap. There are more than 2,000 companies on the exchange, but those top 200 account for roughly 80% of its total value. The market's now worth more than $2.6 trillion.

What keeps pushing it higher is fairly simple: bank profits, commodity prices, and the relentless flow of superannuation money into large caps. Every pay cycle, 12% of every wage in the country gets funnelled into super, and most of that ends up in the biggest, most liquid stocks on the board.

Those tend to be the same companies paying dividends.

The ASX has long had a reputation as one of the more income-friendly exchanges going around. It's well-regulated, liquid, and tends to attract capital when investors want somewhere reliable to park their money.

2026 has seen commodity prices bounce around and the property market keep the big banks happy, but the super money flows in on autopilot regardless.

High Yield Does Not Always Mean High Quality

Picture two stocks on a screen. One yields 4%. The other yields 10%. A reasonable person picks the 10. A reasonable person would also be walking into a trap that catches thousands of investors every earnings season.

Because yield is just the dividend divided by the share price, and when a share price drops 40% while the dividend stays the same, the yield looks incredible right up until the board meets and slashes the payout to match reality.

Profits can be massaged with accounting, but dividends are paid from cash, and when payouts consume most of a company’s free cash flow, there’s not much left in the tank if conditions turn.

This matters most in cyclical sectors like resources, where dividends can be generous when prices are high but thin out quickly when they’re not.

The companies that pay reliably for years tend to be the ones nobody gets excited about at barbecues. Steady earnings. Conservative management. The kind of businesses that would rather protect the balance sheet than make a yield table.

They rarely top the rankings in any given year. They rarely blow up either.

How to Assess a Dividend Stock

Start with the business, not the yield. A bank collecting mortgage repayments every month has a very different dividend profile to a gold miner whose cash flow swings with the spot price. Both might show the same yield on a screen. The story underneath is completely different.

Pay attention to how management treats the dividend. Some companies aim to smooth payouts over time, keeping them steady even when profits dip. Others let dividends ride with conditions, paying big when times are good and pulling back when they're not.

Neither approach is wrong, but you want to know which one you own before conditions change.

Then zoom out. Mining dividends track commodity prices. Bank dividends track credit growth and interest rates. Retailers follow consumer spending. If you can read what's driving earnings in a sector, you can usually see a dividend cut coming well before it arrives.

Common Dividend Mistakes New Investors Make

Two traps catch people that we haven’t covered yet.

The first is buying shares right before the ex-dividend date, expecting easy money. The dividend lands in your account, but the share price usually drops by a similar amount the morning it goes ex-dividend. If you factor in tax you might’ve gone backwards.

The second is concentration. Australian dividend portfolios have a habit of drifting heavily into banks and resources, because that’s where income has historically been highest. It works fine for years, but when those sectors turn at the same time, the whole portfolio feels it at once.

How Often Should You Review Dividend Stocks?

Less often than most people assume.

Most dividend-paying companies are fairly predictable beasts. They’re established businesses doing much the same thing year after year, and checking the share price every morning doesn’t change that.

Pay attention when new information lands. Financial results, dividend announcements, anything that could knock earnings around. Those are the moments that matter.

If your miner’s commodity price collapses, that’ll flow through to the dividend. If your bank’s mortgage defaults start ticking up, same deal.

Short-term noise rarely changes the story. Structural shifts can change it permanently. Learning to tell the difference takes time, and it’s one of the more valuable skills a dividend investor can develop.

The hardest part for most people is doing nothing when nothing needs to be done.

What to do Next

If you’re new to dividend investing, the best thing you can do is pick a handful of dividend-paying companies and follow them for a few months.

Watch when dividends get announced, how the share price moves around the ex-dividend date, and whether payouts stay steady or jump around.

You’ll learn more from observing a full dividend cycle than from chasing a headline yield.

After that, the rest comes down to your own situation. How much volatility you’re willing to stomach. Whether you need income now or you’d rather let it compound for a decade.

There’s no single right answer, and the bloke at the barbecue who never brags about his dividends worked that out a long time ago.

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Highest paying Dividend stocks to start 2026

Earnings season has just wrapped up on the ASX, and with it a fresh round of half-year results covering July to December.

This is where you find out whether companies met the market's expectations. Stronger profit usually means a bigger dividend. Disappointing results, and the payout's usually the first thing to get trimmed.

We've gone through the reports and pulled out the companies that are off to a good start. Below are the top 10 dividend payers to start 2026, ranked by yield.

The ex-dividend dates have passed on these, but with another payout due after full-year results, it gives you a read on who's tracking well.

(Note: Past dividend payments are not indicative of future payments. The rankings reflect payouts recorded for the interim 2026 dividend. The final dividend is unknown and to be calculated at a later date)

Top 20 Dividend-Paying Stocks of 2025

Here are the top 20 ASX dividend payers from 2025, ranked by total payout and yield.

This list reflects what happened in 2025, not a prediction for 2026. Profits change, and dividend policies follow. Think of it as a snapshot of who was paying well, and not a guarantee they'll keep doing so.

(Note: Past dividend payments are not indicative of future payments. The rankings reflect payouts recorded across the 2025 financial year and may differ in 2026. Yield has been calculated based off the closing price 31 December 2025)

How Commodity Prices Shaped Dividends in 2025

Dividends in 2025 tracked where the money was being made in commodities. Gold led the way, iron ore held up, and coal quietly kept rewarding shareholders without making much noise.

Gold was on a tear through 2025 and into early 2026, hitting record after record as central banks loaded up and inflation worries kept buyers coming.

The war in the Middle East has pulled it back roughly 15%, but at around US$4,750/oz it's still well above the levels that have producers swimming in cash.

That's flowed straight through to dividends. If gold holds anywhere near here, expect that to continue.

Iron ore held firm around US$100/t despite the China slowdown. The massive cheques from a few years ago have eased, but the majors are still paying well.

Lithium has had a shocking run. Oversupply and weak demand crushed prices for the best part of two years. There are signs that’s turning, with several analysts expecting a stronger 2026.

Prices settled from their peaks, but disciplined producers kept paying, and some of the highest yields on the ASX came from names most people weren't watching.

Top 10 Dividend-Paying Mining and Energy Stocks of 2025

Here are the top ten ASX-listed mining and energy companies from 2025 based on dividend payments.

(Note: Past dividend payments are not indicative of future payments. The rankings reflect payouts recorded across the 2025 financial year and may differ in 2026. Yield has been calculated based off the closing price 31 December 2025)

The Superannuation Tailwind

Australia’s population has passed 27.7 million and keeps growing faster than most developed economies.

Every new job, every pay rise, every employer contribution tips more money into the super pool. Right now, 12% of every wage in the country gets funnelled into the system automatically.

Most of that money ends up in large, liquid ASX-listed companies that have been paying dividends for decades.

Think BHP, Woolies, Commonwealth Bank. The names everyone knows.

Super funds buy them because they generate cash and return it to shareholders. They keep buying them regardless of what the broader market is doing.

Most funds also operate under mandates that cap how much they can put into smaller stocks until a company hits a certain size and liquidity threshold, often around ASX 200 inclusion.

Once a company enters the index, it becomes a natural destination for those inflows.

In practice, Australia's compulsory super system is a constant buyer of dividend-paying large caps.

That buying pressure is there whether markets are up, down, or sideways.

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Will 2026 Repeat The Returns Of 2025?

Probably not, and expecting it to would be a mistake.

The list of top dividend payers shifts every year. A gold miner paying record dividends at the top of the cycle can look very different twelve months later. Same company, different commodity price, different size cheque.

Dividends move with profits, and profits move with conditions nobody can predict 12 months out. The companies paying well today may look different by December.

The best you can do is understand what’s driving the earnings behind the payout. The tables in this piece are a snapshot of 2025 only.

If you take one thing from this piece, it's that last year's top payer isn't guaranteed to be next year's.

The Final Step When Investing

Payouts rise and fall with profits, and even the most reliable payers are influenced by forces outside their control. A war can eat into margins overnight. A rate move can shift the maths on a bank’s lending book. Commodity prices don’t ask permission before they turn.

None of that changes the basic proposition. Companies make money, they share it with the people who own them, and over time that adds up to something worth having.

The bloke who bought BHP in 2009 and kept reinvesting the dividends didn’t time anything perfectly. He just kept showing up.

Patience isn't exciting. But the patient investors tend to be the ones still standing when the dust settles.

Glossary of Regularly Used Financial Terms

ASX (Australian Securities Exchange) – Australia’s main stock exchange, where shares in publicly listed companies are bought and sold.

ASX 200 - An index tracking the 200 largest companies listed on the ASX by market capitalisation and liquidity. Commonly used as the benchmark for the Australian share market.

Announcement date - The date a company formally announces it will pay a dividend, including the amount, whether it is franked or unfranked, and the key dates that follow. Owning shares on this date alone does not guarantee you will receive the dividend.

Assessable income – Income the ATO counts when calculating your tax, which can include dividends.

Benchmark – A reference point used to measure market or portfolio performance, such as the ASX 200.

Biotech – Short for biotechnology. Companies developing medical or science-based products, often with higher risk and less predictable profits than mature dividend payers.

Blue-chip stocks – Large, established companies with long operating histories, strong balance sheets, and regular dividend payments.

Brokerage – A fee charged by a broker when you buy or sell shares.

Capital – Money invested or available to be invested.

Capital growth – An increase in a company’s share price over time, separate from dividend income.

Cash flow – The actual cash a business generates from its operations. Dividends are paid from cash, not accounting profits.

Central bank – A country’s main monetary authority (such as the RBA in Australia) that influences interest rates and financial conditions.

Compounding – Earning returns on your returns over time. With dividends, this often occurs when payouts are reinvested to buy more shares.

Consumer spending – Household spending across the economy, which can influence company profits, particularly for retailers and banks.

Credit growth – Growth in borrowing and lending across the economy, which can impact bank earnings and dividends.

Cyclical sectors – Industries whose earnings rise and fall with economic or commodity cycles, such as mining, energy, and resources.

Dividend – A payment made by a company to shareholders as a share of its profits.

Dividend history – A company’s track record of paying dividends over time. Useful for context, but not a guarantee of future payments.

Dividend income – The cash an investor receives from dividends over a period of time.

Dividend-paying stocks – Companies that regularly distribute part of their profits to shareholders as dividends.

Dividend policy – A company’s approach to paying dividends, including how stable or variable payouts are through different market conditions.

Dividend payout ratio – The portion of a company’s profits or cash flow that is paid out as dividends.

Dividend reinvestment plan (DRP) – A program that allows shareholders to automatically use dividends to buy more shares in the same company, usually without brokerage and sometimes at a discount. Dividends remain taxable income.

Dividend yield – The annual dividend paid by a company divided by its current share price, expressed as a percentage. It shows income relative to price, not total return.

Earnings – A company’s profit after expenses.

Economic conditions – The broader environment affecting businesses and markets, including growth, inflation, interest rates, and employment.

Employer contribution – The percentage of wages paid into an employee’s superannuation account under Australia’s compulsory system.

Equities – Another term for shares or stocks. The "equity market" is simply the market where shares are traded.

Essential services – Products or services people continue to pay for in most conditions, such as utilities or major financial services, often supporting steadier earnings.

Ex-dividend date – The most important dividend date. To receive a dividend, an investor must own the shares before this date. Buying shares on or after this date means the upcoming dividend will not be received.

Federal election – Australia’s national election that determines the federal government and can influence markets through policy expectations.

Final dividend – A dividend paid at the end of a company’s financial year, usually larger than the interim dividend.

Franked dividend – A dividend that includes a tax credit for company tax already paid, which can be used to offset an investor’s personal tax.

Franking credit – The tax credit attached to a franked dividend, reflecting the 30% company tax rate already paid in Australia.

Free cash flow – Cash remaining after a company covers its operating costs and capital spending. A key measure of dividend sustainability.

Headline yield – The stated dividend yield without considering sustainability, risk, or future earnings.

High yield – A relatively large dividend yield compared to other companies or the broader market.

Inflation – A general rise in prices over time, which can influence interest rates, company costs, and investor behaviour.

Index – A basket of shares used to track the performance of a market or group of companies, such as the ASX 200.

Index provider (S&P Global) – The organisation responsible for maintaining and setting the rules for indices such as the ASX 200.

Interest rates – The cost of borrowing money or the return earned on savings, influenced by central bank policy.

Interim dividend – A dividend paid partway through a company’s financial year.

Liquidity – How easily shares can be bought or sold without significantly affecting the price.

Low-cost mining assets – Mining operations that can remain profitable even when commodity prices fall, often supporting more resilient dividends.

Marginal tax rate – The tax rate you pay on your last dollar of income, which determines how dividends are ultimately taxed.

Market capitalisation (market cap) – The total value of a company, calculated by multiplying its share price by the number of shares on issue.

Mining majors – Large, established mining companies, often global operators and regular dividend payers.

Mining discovery – A new mineral find that can drive speculative share price moves, often unrelated to dividends.

Monetary policy – Actions taken by a central bank to influence interest rates and money supply, affecting markets and economic activity.

Oversupply – A situation where supply exceeds demand, often putting downward pressure on prices.

Part-owner – When you buy shares, you own a small piece of the company and may be entitled to dividends.

Payout – The amount of money a company pays out to shareholders as dividends.

Payment date – The date a dividend is actually paid to shareholders, either in cash or via a dividend reinvestment plan.

Personal tax bracket – The tax rate you pay based on your income level.

Portfolio – A collection of investments held by an individual or fund.

Property market – The market for buying and selling real estate, which has a significant influence on banks and the broader economy.

Record date – The date a company checks its shareholder register to determine who is entitled to receive the dividend.

Resources sector – Industries involved in extracting natural resources such as metals, minerals, coal, and energy.

Sector – A group of companies in the same industry, such as banks, resources, retailers, or healthcare.

Sector exposure – How much of your portfolio is concentrated in one part of the market, such as banks or miners.

Sentiment – How optimistic or pessimistic investors feel, which can influence prices in the short term.

Settlement (T+2) – The standard ASX settlement cycle, where a share trade is finalised two business days after the transaction occurs.

Share price – The current market price of a company’s shares.

Shareholder – A person or entity that owns shares in a company.

Small-cap stocks – Smaller companies listed on the ASX, often with higher growth potential but higher risk.

Speculative stocks – Higher-risk investments where outcomes depend on future events or developments.

Superannuation – Australia’s compulsory retirement savings system funded by employer contributions.

Tariffs – Taxes imposed on imported goods that can affect trade, costs, and company profits.

Tax credit – A credit that reduces the amount of tax you owe, such as franking credits attached to franked dividends.

Taxable income – Income used to calculate your tax. Unfranked dividends are generally added to taxable income.

Term deposits – Bank savings products offering a fixed interest rate for a set period, generally lower risk than shares.

Total return – The combined return from both share price movement (capital growth) and dividends.

Unfranked dividend – A dividend paid without a tax credit, meaning the full amount is taxed at the investor’s marginal rate.

Volatility – The degree of price movement in markets or individual shares over time.

Yield – A percentage measure of income relative to a share price, most often referring to dividend yield.

Yield chasing – Focusing solely on high dividend yields without considering sustainability or risk.

General Disclosure

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 adviser to consider whether that is appropriate having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs.

Whilst 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. No responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way from 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 contained within it. Nor do they accept any liability or responsibility arising in any way (including negligence) for errors in, or omissions from, this document or advice.

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. Any reference in this document to historical returns, dividend payments, dividend yields, rankings, market performance, or outcomes achieved during prior periods is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as an indication of future results.

Dividend payments are not guaranteed. The payment, size and timing of dividends may change or cease at any time and are subject to a range of factors including, but not limited to, company profitability, cash flow, capital requirements, commodity prices, interest rates, regulatory settings, taxation changes and broader market conditions.

Any forward-looking statements, opinions, estimates or expectations expressed in this document are based on information available at the time of preparation and reflect judgments as at that date. Such statements are inherently uncertain and involve known and unknown risks, assumptions and other factors that may cause actual outcomes to differ materially from those expressed or implied.

Market conditions, economic factors, government policy and company-specific circumstances can change without notice. No assurance is given that any strategy, outlook or scenario discussed will be achieved or prove accurate.

Readers should conduct their own independent research and analysis and consider seeking professional advice before making any investment or financial decision.

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 Licence (AFSL) No. 519872.

Somewhere between lunar orbit and cartel airspace sits the reality of small-cap investing in 2026.

Clean-tech stocks ripped higher, the ASX bounced hard after Easter on ceasefire headlines, and gold held steady around US$4,750 while oil swung US$16 in a single session.

The Equities Club portfolio had met results, resource estimates and drill-ready targets dropping through the noise.

Let’s get to it.

• Ceasefire headlines moved oil markets but gold holds steady

• Artemis II circled the Moon, putting space tech back on the radar

• MRD metallurgy at Grass Patch stacks up well

• FUN outlines major rutile scale potential at Mkanda

• 10X defined drill targets ahead of Peak View drilling

• Three cleantech names that ripped 45-65% this week

• Shots fired in Mexico (a reminder investor risk comes in many forms)

• Leadership changes as DroneShield slips despite sector demand

Ceasefire? Markets Up, Gold Steady, Oil All Over the Place

A US-Iran ceasefire was signed this week and oil dropped US$16 in a session, and the ASX ripped 2.5% higher on the back of it.

Then Israel hit Lebanon and everyone remembered how shaky a Middle East ceasefire can be.

The ASX pushed to 8,960 by Friday, its best weekly gain since 2020 and within striking distance of all-time highs. But anyone trading oil this week earned their grey hairs.

The Strait of Hormuz is still only partially reopening, and nobody seems sure whether this ceasefire holds long past this weekend’s marathon talks in Islamabad.

Gold held around US$4,750 per ounce throughout it all, which tells you the bid underneath the metal is structural. Sovereign buying and inflation hedging are propping up the price more than any single headline at the moment.

China’s central bank has added to its gold reserves for 17 straight months now. At that pace it sets a floor under the price and it almost doesn’t matter what happens in Lebanon or Iran on any given Tuesday.

Silver continued to track higher alongside gold and remains near multi-decade highs, backed by safe-haven flows and ongoing demand from solar and electrification.

If gold and silver stay anywhere near these levels, money keeps finding its way into the small-cap explorers trying to pull them out of the ground. We're already seeing that across a few of our portfolio names.

From Artemis to the ASX?

Four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific yesterday after spending ten days circling the moon. The last time anyone did that, Gough Whitlam had just moved into The Lodge.

It's easy to write it off as a (very cool) NASA headline with no ASX angle, but the infrastructure keeping those astronauts alive runs through some interesting ground.

It often sits inside the same technology stack as defence electronics and satellite infrastructure.

Australia’s own deep-space tracking capability supported the mission through CSIRO facilities in Canberra, a reminder that global lunar programs rely on distributed ground networks as much as launch vehicles.

As NASA pushes toward a permanent lunar presence, that capability will only get more valuable.

A couple of ASX names sit in the orbit of all this (pun intended).

• Electro Optic Systems (ASX: EOS) develops the tracking systems that monitor satellites and debris in orbit using ground-based optical networks. More missions mean more stuff in orbit and tracking infrastructure becomes critical for managing congestion and collisions across busy space corridors.

• Gilmour Space Technologies (upcoming IPO) raised $217 million in Series E funding recently, valuing the company above $1 billion. They're building the Eris orbital rocket and a spaceport in Queensland. The rocket is still in testing, so there's plenty of execution risk, but the money flowing in tells you how serious people are getting about Australia having its own launch capability.

We're some ways away from space stocks being a mainstream ASX theme. But every time a crew goes around the Moon and comes back safely, the investment case for the ground infrastructure gets a little harder to ignore.

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Mets Looking Good for Mount Ridley Mines

Mount Ridley (ASX: MRD) closed the week up 7% to 3.2c after metallurgical results answered the biggest question hanging over the Grass Patch heavy rare earth project: can you actually get the good stuff out?

The testwork confirmed that dysprosium and terbium can be extracted using a simple acid leach pathway, with recoveries up to 86.5% in some samples.

Those two elements sit at the very top of the heavy rare earth value chain and are among the hardest to source outside China, which is exactly why projects like Grass Patch are attracting more attention globally.

The metallurgy already works before optimisation has even begun. That’s a good starting point.

The next round of testwork targets dysprosium and terbium extraction from within the defined resource, which is where projects typically start moving from interesting geology to something the market can begin to price more seriously.

Scandium and gallium still sit in the background as potential by-product credits, so there’s more than one pathway emerging here.

You can find our full article here.

Big Tonnage Announced for Fortuna Metals

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) closed the week up 8% to 9.3c after outlining a 180 to 240 million tonne rutile exploration target at Mkanda, from just three months of shallow drilling.

At that scale, Mkanda is already a serious rutile system. And most holes so far have only gone down about eight metres. There's a lot of ground left to test.

For context, Sovereign Metals’ (ASX: SVM) Kasiya project just to the north in Malawi is the world’s largest known rutile deposit and backed by Rio Tinto, and its scale only became clear once drilling pushed deeper into the weathered profile.

FUN’s Mkanda sits along strike on the same geological corridor, and the company will now be stepping into that same deeper drilling phase where we could see this already large target grow further.

SVM is valued at roughly $450 million. FUN is currently at $26 million. Back-of-the-envelope, that disconnect suggests potential upside of about 80% from its current valuation.

There are 245 holes of assays still pending, deeper drilling about to kick off, and a maiden inferred resource targeted for the second half of the year. Graphite assays in Q2 could add another commodity layer on top of the rutile.

You can find our full article here.

10X Has Four High-Priority Drill Targets

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) finished the week at 18c with drilling about to kick off at Peak View. We still see this as one of the more appealing near-term setups across our portfolio.

The 50 g/t gold at Undoo Creek and 339 g/t silver at Big Badja grabbed headlines over the past month, but Peak View is the drill program 10X has been building towards since listing.

Historical drilling hit zinc, lead, copper and silver, but only tested a fraction of the system. New IP and gravity surveys have now mapped out what was missed.

The standout is a 700-metre anomaly sitting west of all previous drilling. The old holes hit sulphides next to a weaker geophysical response. The stronger one has never been touched.

A 1.1km gravity high lines up in the same spot, right on the southern continuation of the fault that hosts Captains Flat, one of NSW’s biggest historic base metal mines.

Every dataset is pointing at the same piece of ground.

Senior geologist Seb Hind walks through it in the video below.

At 18c with $4 million in cash, you're paying about $3 million enterprise value for a funded 15-hole program across multiple targets on a proven mineralised structure. Late April it kicks off.

You can find our full article here.

Small-Cap Clean Tech Stocks Clean Up

Three small-cap cleantech names put up big numbers outside the resources space this week.

Environmental Clean Technologies (ASX: ECT) ran 58% after extending its PFAS destruction technology into water filtration waste.

For those who aren't chemical engineers (like us), water treatment plants use activated carbon to filter forever chemicals out of drinking water before it reaches your tap.

The water comes out clean, but the carbon is now full of toxic chemicals and currently gets trucked to landfill.

ECT's tech destroys those chemicals on site so nothing toxic leaves the plant.

In a strong sign of confidence, the Chairman bought over 50k on market this week too.

Eden Innovations (ASX: EDE) rose 45%. They make concrete additives that cut cement use (and emissions) on big infrastructure projects.

Global construction groups are under pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete, and technologies that slot directly into existing batching plants are starting to get attention.

The company cleared its debt earlier this year and is now installed across multiple ready-mix networks in North and South America, so the story is shifting from trials to repeat orders.

Sparc Technologies (ASX: SPN) climbed 65% and the ASX wanted to know why. The company’s response, more or less, was “our MD went on a podcast.”.

If you needed proof that new media moves small-cap stocks now, there it is.

Sparc makes graphene-enhanced coatings that protect steel infrastructure from corrosion.

In the podcast, MD Nick O’Loughlin said they’re testing with five of the eight largest protective coatings companies globally and are close to getting their first additive into a commercial coating line.

Their lab work has shown up to 79% improvement in how coatings resist corrosion spread. Recoating a bridge or dry-docking a ship costs a fortune. So if the paint lasts longer, you do it less.

At $20 million with first revenue only arriving in December last year, Sparc is still very early in the story and chasing a slice of a $30 billion global coatings market.

New media like podcasts is moving markets now, and where investors get their information is shifting fast.

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Mayhem in Mexico

Most MDs spend their week in boardrooms. Mithril Silver & Gold's (ASX: MTH) managing director spent his dodging gunfire over Northern Mexico.

The company reported that its MD and two staff were forced into an unscheduled landing after their aircraft took fire from the ground while flying between the Copalquin silver-gold project in Durango and the city of Chihuahua.

News reports linked the gunfire to La Linea cartel activity in the area. Everyone walked away unharmed and drilling continued as planned.

Mexico is the world's largest silver producer and a lot of that output comes from the northern states where mining districts and cartel territory overlap. It comes with the address.

The incident happened away from the project site and it was described it as isolated.

When people talk about risk in small-cap investing, they usually mean dilution or a dud drill hole. Not many annual reports have a section for incoming gunfire.

DroneShield Drops as CEO and Chairman Exit

We like the drone tech space a lot. The demand story across Ukraine, the Middle East and the broader defence build-up is only getting stronger.

But DroneShield (ASX: DRO) had a rough week, falling 13% on about $334 million in traded value after a series of governance and pipeline updates unsettled investors.

Founder CEO Oleg Vornik and chairman Peter James both stepped down on Wednesday after having already sold their entire shareholdings months earlier. Holders noticed that sequence at the time, and we covered it here.

The sales pipeline also slipped $100 million, from $2.3 billion to $2.2 billion. Contract timing shifts constantly in defence procurement, but when your CEO and chairman have both walked out the door, investors often aren’t in the mood to give you the benefit of the doubt.

DroneShield still sits inside one of the fastest-growing defence technology segments globally, but weeks like this show how critical execution and communication are when valuations are already pricing in strong growth.

Hamish McLennan is coming in as chairman. He's currently chair of REA Group and well connected across corporate Australia, so the board is clearly trying to attract a different class of investor to the register.

The sector tailwind is still blowing hard. New management now needs to prove they can keep up with it.

The Week Ahead

The ceasefire talks are going to dominate everything. Pakistan-mediated talks between the US and Iran kicked off yesterday and what comes out of that room will set the tone for Monday (and potentially the foreseeable).

As markets push higher we expect gold to keep climbing as a hedge to debt, a theme that will likely take control of the news cycle again soon.

The ASX is still within striking distance of all-time highs and small-cap volumes tend to pick up when the big end of town is running.

Gold looks to have found a base around US$4,750/oz, and if we'd said that figure two years ago we'd have jumped at it. With sovereign debt piling up and inflation staying sticky, we expect that base to hold.

There's still a lot of upside in small-cap gold discoveries and developments.

A few of our portfolio names have drill programs kicking off or results pending over the coming weeks, so there’s plenty to watch.

Though as we’ve all learned by now, one post on Truth Social can rearrange the whole board.

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, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, and 200,000 10x at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN, 10X and 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.

Exultant Mining’s (ASX:10X) Peak View prospect sits in the Lachlan Fold Belt in New South Wales, a mineral belt that's produced some of Australia's biggest base metal deposits.

50 g/t gold at Undoo Creek and 339 g/t silver at Big Badja grabbed the headlines over the past month for 10X, but Peak View's base metal target is the drill program they’ve been building towards since listing in December.

Historical drilling at Peak View hit zinc, lead, copper and silver, but only tested a small part of the system. 10X’s soil sampling has since defined a 900-metre mineralised corridor, and new IP and gravity surveys have now defined several large targets along the same trend that have never been tested.

10X is trading at around 19 cents a share with roughly $4 million in cash. Strip out the cash and you’re paying about $3 million for everything else. Drilling starts in late April.

At that price, the market is paying almost nothing for a funded drill program on a structure that hosts Captains Flat, one of NSW's biggest historic base metal mines, and more than 30 mineral occurrences along strike.

Why Peak View matters

The Lachlan Fold Belt has produced base metal deposits worth billions.

Captains Flat was one of NSW's largest, producing lead, zinc, copper, silver and gold from the 1880s through to 1962.

Woodlawn, owned by Develop Global (~$1.7B market cap), is now being brought back into production after Trafigura backed it with a US$65 million offtake deal.

Both sit along the same broader structural trend as Peak View.

The region has produced multiple base metal systems and those two deposits alone show what scale looks like when you find something real in this belt.

At $7 million, 10X is the cheapest way into this belt. The historical drilling proved the system carries grade.

The new geophysics says the best parts were never touched. Late April will tell us whether that gap between the geology and the valuation closes.

What the Surveys Found

The IP survey tested the soil anomaly we mentioned above and identified four priority target zones. Two of them stand out.

A soil anomaly is exactly what it sounds like. Elevated metal values show up at surface, usually because mineralisation sitting deeper underground has weathered and left traces in the dirt above it.

It tells you something is down there. It doesn’t tell you how much.

The first is a 700-metre chargeability anomaly sitting west of all the historical drilling.

Chargeability is a geophysics term that measures how strongly rocks hold an electrical charge after a current passes through them.

Sulphide minerals hold charge well, and sulphide minerals are what host metals like copper, lead and zinc.

So a strong chargeability response is the geophysicist’s way of saying “there’s probably sulphides down there.”

Historical drilling hit mineralisation beside a chargeability response of around eight milliseconds. The newly identified western anomaly exceeds 12 milliseconds, and nobody has ever put a drill hole into it.

The weaker signal had metal. The stronger signal is untested.

The second sits directly beneath the widest part of the surface anomaly and shows both high chargeability and high resistivity.

Resistivity measures how easily electricity moves through rock. When chargeability and resistivity both increase in the same spot, it often means sulphides are concentrated within a structured rock unit rather than scattered through surrounding material.

For the non-geos, that means the metals are likely sitting in one place rather than smeared across the landscape, and gives the drillers something to aim at.

Historic hole PVI010, drilled within 40 metres of this anomaly, returned 1.3m at 3.4% zinc, 1.4% lead, 21 g/t silver and 0.14% copper from 106 metres downhole.

That's real metal, right next door to a stronger anomaly that has never been tested.

A third target sits down-dip of massive sulphides hit by earlier drilling, where PVI006 returned 4.4m at 342.7 g/t silver, 4% lead, 1.1% copper, 0.74 g/t gold and 0.84% zinc from 48.7 metres. A resistivity anomaly beneath it suggests the system continues at depth and has never been followed up.

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Gravity Anomaly Lines Up With a Major Fault

The ground gravity survey defined a 1.1 kilometre long gravity high that lines up with the western chargeability anomaly.

Gravity surveys pick up changes in rock density underground.

Dense rocks pull harder on the gravity meter. Sulphide accumulations are dense compared to surrounding rocks, so a gravity high can point to sulphides at depth.

When the gravity high and the chargeability anomaly land on the same spot, it strengthens the case that there’s sulphide accumulation sitting below.

This anomaly sits beside the Peak View Thrust, interpreted as the southern continuation of the Narongo Fault.

That structure hosts the Captains Flat deposit and more than 30 mineral occurrences along strike.

When you’re exploring near a fault system with that kind of track record, the odds improve. It tells you the plumbing was there to move mineralised fluids through the rock.

Most of the historical drilling targeted a gravity low. The gravity high corridor, where the strongest chargeability and gravity responses overlap, was missed entirely.

Where the Structures Cross

Magnetic data has identified several cross-cutting structures intersecting the prospect.

In base metal systems like this, the interesting spots are where big regional faults meet smaller cross structures.

Think of the big fault as the highway and the cross structures as the off-ramps. Where those pathways hit favourable rock units, metals can concentrate into defined zones instead of spreading thin.

At Peak View, the widest part of the surface metal anomaly sits where one of these cross structures intersects the main trend.

The strongest geophysical anomaly sits in the same spot.

Every dataset is pointing at the same piece of ground. Soils, IP, gravity and now the structural interpretation all converge on one area.

That suggests one connected system running through the prospect.

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What Comes Next

10X has already lodged drilling applications covering 15 holes and is finishing final targeting work before mobilisation. Late April is the current timeline.

Peak View is only one component of the broader project area. Big Badja and Undoo Creek remain separate exploration opportunities within the same district-scale footprint.

At 19 cents with $4 million in cash, the enterprise value is sitting around $3 million. That's for a funded drill program across multiple targets on a proven mineralised structure, with two other prospects already putting out high-grade surface results.

Fifteen holes will tell us a lot. We think the ground will do the talking.

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.

Met work can often be a project killer, but the results from Grass Patch show MRD has cleared that hurdle.

Using a simple acid leach, up to 86.5% of the heavy rare earths were extracted from the clay, with dysprosium and terbium - the two most valuable elements in the deposit - responding strongest.

For a stock where the big question is "can you actually get the valuable metals out," this is a solid first answer.

MRD trades at 3 cents with a $41 million market cap. Victory Metals (ASX: VTM), the most advanced comparable WA clay-hosted heavy rare earth play, sits at around $207 million.

The metallurgy was the biggest unknown hanging over this stock. It's looking a lot less unknown today.

Why Are Dysprosium and Terbium a Big Deal?

There are 17 rare earth elements. Many of them are relatively common, and plenty of projects around the world are chasing them.

Dysprosium and terbium are a different story.

Terbium oxide trades at around US$970/kg inside China. Western buyers pay closer to US$1,200/kg after export duties and licensing costs. Dysprosium oxide runs about US$220/kg domestically, with Western prices carrying a similar markup.

Those prices reflect the fact that every EV motor, every offshore wind turbine, every guided missile system and every industrial robot needs dysprosium or terbium to stop its permanent magnets from overheating. Standard magnets lose their strength as temperatures climb, and a small addition of either element fixes that.

Beijing decides who gets supply and how much they pay for it. That premium has been widening since April 2025, when China imposed export controls on both elements.

There’s no substitute for either element, and China controls almost all global supply.

European prices nearly tripled within weeks after China’s export control. A temporary suspension followed, but it expires in November 2026, and nobody is confident about what comes next.

Western governments are desperate for alternative supply. The US, EU and Australia have all flagged heavy rare earths as critical and billions of dollars in government funding is flowing toward building supply chains outside Chinese control.

That’s the backdrop for Mount Ridley.

What Grass Patch Actually Carries

The Grass Patch Complex sits about 55km northeast of Esperance in WA. MRD's HREE mineral resource across Blocks 1 and 2 comes in at 122.5 million tonnes grading 889 ppm total rare earth oxide, with 364 ppm of that being heavy rare earth oxide.

Grass Patch runs a 41% heavy rare earth ratio. That's 364 ppm of heavy rare earth oxide out of a total 889 ppm, meaning nearly half the rare earth content at Grass Patch falls in the high-value basket.

In most clay-hosted deposits around the world, light rare earths dominate. At Grass Patch, nearly half the rare earth content is the expensive stuff - with dysprosium and terbium sitting at the top of the value chain.

Victory Metals at North Stanmore runs about 39%. That puts MRD at the top end for this style of deposit on the ASX.

MRD also holds the Mia resource (Block 3) at 168 million tonnes grading 1,201 ppm TREO, though that block skews toward light rare earths rather than heavies.

And MRD is sitting on a 367.9 million tonne scandium resource and an 838.7 million tonne gallium resource across the broader project. Both metals have their own supply problems, and both could add by-product value if the processing pathway works.

We’ll come back to those later.

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The Met Results: Old Data, New Relevance

The testwork released today was originally run between 2021 and 2023 across several Grass Patch prospects including Vincent, Winstons and Jody.

It was designed before MRD pivoted to heavy rare earths, so the programs were targeting total rare earth extraction rather than dysprosium and terbium specifically.

That's actually what makes the results so interesting. The conditions weren't set up for the heavies, and the heavies still came out best.

Here's what came back:

• At Winstons, which sits inside the current mineral resource, heavy rare earth leach recoveries hit 86.5%. Across the broader Grass Patch Complex, HREE recoveries averaged around 50%, with multiple samples coming in well above that.

• Magnet rare earths - that's the combination of neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium that goes into permanent magnets - recovered at up to 85.2% at Vincent, averaging 76.9% under the best conditions.

In most clay-hosted rare earth deposits, the light rare earths leach more easily than the heavies. At Grass Patch it's the other way around.

The geology here is different from the typical clay-hosted systems you see elsewhere in Australia and globally, and that different geology appears to make the valuable elements easier to extract.

For a company trying to build a project around heavy rare earths, that's about as good a starting point as you could ask for.

The next round, designed specifically around dysprosium and terbium extraction, should tell us how much further those recoveries can go.

Making Sense of Beneficiation

Beneficiation is about removing waste material before you start the expensive chemical extraction process.

Think of it like panning for gold, you’re getting rid of the stuff you don’t want so you can concentrate what you do want into a smaller, richer package.

At Grass Patch, MRD tested a simple screening process using a 75-micron sieve, roughly the thickness of a human hair. The rare earths passed through the screen into the finer material, while the coarser barren waste sat on top.

The results showed that more than 80% of the rare earth content ended up in roughly half of the sample mass. The other half, mostly barren silica, can be tossed out before processing even begins.

Grade improvements averaged 164%, with one sample more than doubling its grade just by screening, turning 498 ppm rare earth oxide into 1,007 ppm.

Processing costs money. Every tonne of clay that goes through a chemical leach circuit costs money in reagents, energy, water and processing time.

If you can bin half the material upfront and still keep 80% of the rare earths, you've taken a big chunk out of your operating costs before you've even started on the chemistry.

Scandium and Gallium: The Extras in the Basket

We mentioned these two earlier. Here's a quick primer on why they matter.

Scandium is basically a steroid for aluminium. A small amount turns standard aluminium into something dramatically stronger and lighter, which is why aerospace and defence manufacturers have been trying to get their hands on as much of it as possible.

The problem is supply. The entire world produces about 25 tonnes of scandium a year.

MRD’s scandium resource sits at 367.9 million tonnes grading 57.3 ppm.

Gallium is the metal behind the next generation of semiconductors - the chips going into 5G networks, EV fast chargers and military radar.

China dominates production and has already imposed export controls. MRD's gallium resource runs to 838.7 million tonnes grading 29.3 ppm, which on paper represents roughly 34 years of current global production.

Neither metal has been part of the leach testwork yet. MRD flagged in today's announcement that it's planning met studies to see whether scandium and gallium can be extracted alongside the rare earths through the same processing pathway.

If that works, it means extra revenue without a separate processing circuit. That's a meaningful addition to the project economics.

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What Comes Next

Today's results are a baseline. The testwork was run before MRD had defined its Blocks 1 and 2 mineral resource, and before the company had zeroed in on dysprosium and terbium as the main game.

That means the next round carries more weight - it'll be designed specifically around those two elements, using material from inside the defined resource rather than broader prospect samples.

Here's what's ahead:

• Fresh metallurgical testwork specifically targeting the HREE mineralisation within the defined resource, with conditions optimised for dysprosium and terbium extraction rather than total rare earth recovery.

• Combined recovery studies assessing whether scandium and gallium can be extracted alongside rare earths, potentially through a single processing pathway producing a mixed rare-earth carbonate product.

• Flowsheet development, building on the beneficiation and leach results to design an integrated processing route from raw clay through to a saleable product.

Behind the scenes, the company is bringing in outside expertise. Discussions are underway with Australian and international specialists in rare earth processing, and the Lawrence Livermore collaboration feeds directly into this next phase.

Lawrence Livermore is one of the US Department of Energy's premier labs. The collaboration is part of the forward met work program.

Most juniors at this stage can't get a meeting with a lab like that, let alone a formal partnership.

And once you're in that ecosystem, the funding pathways that come with it - US government grants, defence procurement channels, critical minerals financing - open up fast.

The heavy rare earths leach. The beneficiation works. The next question is how far optimised testwork can push the numbers - which MRD will be answering through 2026 - and whether Grass Patch can start the transition from resource to development.

At this valuation, the market is giving you a lot of room if it does.

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.

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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.

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A maiden exploration target of 180 to 240 million tonnes grading 0.86% to 1.0% rutile, outlined in roughly three months of drilling since FUN acquired the Mkanda project.

We added FUN to our portfolio at 4c because the geology looked like a continuation of Sovereign Metals' (ASX: SVM) Kasiya, the world's largest rutile deposit, sitting 20km to the north.

SVM is valued at around $450 million. FUN trades at roughly $25 million, and today is the first time the story has real tonnage behind it.

But the number that matters most for FUN might be 4.1 metres, the average depth the assays actually cover. The holes went to around 8 metres and the mineralised system at Kasiya runs 20 to 30 metres deep, so FUN hasn't come close to testing the full extent of what's there.

Only a third of Fortuna’s 359 holes have been fully assayed. Aircore drilling starts in late May to push below the water table and test the deeper system, and if Mkanda behaves anything like Kasiya did when deeper drilling started, this target is a fraction of what’s there.

Three months of drilling. That’s all it took to outline a target already sitting in the same league as globally relevant rutile deposits.

FUN now has a published exploration target on ground directly along strike from the world’s largest rutile deposit, and the share price still doesn’t reflect it. We think that changes from here.

Why Rutile, Why Now

We wrote about the humanoid robot angle back in November and said it was moving quicker than most people expected.

We undercooked it.

This has moved past demo reels and conference-stage theatre. The factory rollout is already happening.

A week ago, Foshan opened China’s first automated humanoid production line. It is built for more than 10,000 units a year and is turning out one robot every 30 minutes.

They’re not the only ones scaling up.

Agibot just rolled out its 10,000th humanoid. Unitree (who’s about to go public at US$610 million) shipped around 5,500 last year and is targeting capacity of up to 75,000 a year.

Tesla has repurposed part of its Fremont factory for Optimus production. Figure AI is sitting at a $39 billion valuation. Boston Dynamics has its entire 2026 Atlas production already spoken for by Hyundai and Google DeepMind. We could go on.

The industry has evolved from a dancer in spandex on a Tesla stage five years ago to real factories shipping real robots at increasing scale.

Every one of these robots needs titanium. The frames, joints and structural components rely on titanium alloys because nothing else gives you the same strength at the weight.

Fortuna’s Malawi project sits along strike from the world’s largest rutile deposit and has only been tested to shallow depths so far.

Rutile is the cleanest, highest-grade natural feedstock for titanium production. It sits at the top of the feedstock pyramid, and processors pay a premium for it because lower-grade alternatives like ilmenite cost more to upgrade and create more waste.

Each humanoid robot is estimated to contain around 10.4 kilograms of rutile.

Factories are already producing 10,000 units a year. Others are planning for hundreds of thousands.

That’s a lot of rutile, and there aren’t many places to get it.

Natural rutile deposits are rare and legacy producers are in decline. And titanium demand is only going one way as robotics, aerospace and defence all scale up.

Fortuna Metals is one of a handful of ASX companies sitting on a large-scale rutile system with real drilling behind it. Mkanda sits 11km from a major railway connected to the deep-water port at Nacala, one of the best export corridors on Africa’s east coast.

The demand story and the deposit are lining up at the same time.

That doesn’t happen often.

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How These Deposits Get Bigger

Rutile at Mkanda sits inside a weathered layer of rock called saprolite. Tropical weathering has been breaking down the original rock for millions of years, and the rutile concentrates through the full depth of that weathered zone.

The deeper you drill into it, the more rutile you tend to find.

The hand auger rigs FUN has been using can’t push past the water table. Once the ground gets saturated, the samples turn to mush, and at Mkanda that’s been cutting holes off at around 8 metres.

Aircore drilling, which starts in late May, solves that problem.

It punches through the wet ground and keeps going until it hits saprock, the hard unweathered rock at the base of the system where the mineralised zone ends.

At Kasiya, that base sits 20 to 30 metres down. When Sovereign tested that deeper zone at Kasiya, the resource went from 644 million tonnes to 2.1 billion tonnes.

FUN is at the stage Sovereign was before that growth kicked in.

Another 245 holes worth of assays are still in the pipeline too, so even before the deeper drilling starts there’s more data coming through.

The Valuation Gap

An exploration target tells you potential scale based on initial drilling and geological interpretation, and further work is needed before a formal resource can be declared.

But it does let you start comparing apples with apples.

FUN’s target of 180 to 240 million tonnes is roughly one tenth of Kasiya’s 2.1 billion tonne resource. One tenth of SVM’s $450 million valuation would imply about $45 million.

FUN trades at roughly $25 million.

That’s already a gap, and it’s based on a target built from shallow drilling with two thirds of the assays still outstanding. There are clear pathways for it to grow:

• Deeper drilling toward the 20-30 metre saprock boundary starting in late May

• Another 245 holes worth of assays still in the pipeline

• Resource drilling on a 200m grid starting late April, aimed at supporting a maiden inferred resource in H2 2026

• Graphite results from 241 holes expected in Q2

Each of those could change how much of the Lilongwe Plain mineral system ultimately sits within Fortuna’s tenure.

We've done this comparison in past articles and the numbers keep moving in FUN's favour. Back in 2019, SVM was valued at around $35 million and was just starting to show rutile continuity across its ground. Twelve months later it was $160 million.

FUN is sitting below that starting line with three batches of drill results and a published exploration target already in hand.

And FUN has barely scratched the surface of its own ground. The Mkanda and Kampini licences cover 658 square kilometres of the same geological corridor that hosts Kasiya. FUN controls roughly 70km of strike along it.

So far the company has drilled 675 holes across about 180 square kilometres, all on wide 400 to 800m spacing designed to find the mineralised zones.

Kampini, the southern licence, has had almost no work done on it yet.

The exploration target released today covers a portion of one project. The corridor keeps going.

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Graphite is the Bonus Round

Today's exploration target is rutile only. But Mkanda is a multi-commodity system, and graphite assays from 241 drill holes are expected in Q2.

At Kasiya, graphite changed the economics of the entire project. The ore reserve went from 1.03% rutile to 2.00% rutile equivalent once graphite credits were included. It effectively doubled the payable mineral content from the same tonnes of rock.

That change helped demonstrate that the deposit could supply both titanium feedstock for aerospace and industrial markets and graphite that goes into energy storage and battery manufacturing.

POSCO, one of the world's largest battery materials manufacturers, confirmed that graphite from Kasiya could be processed into material suitable for lithium-ion batteries.

That’s not a formal offtake agreement, but it shows graphite in this corridor can support a second customer base separate from rutile buyers.

SVM also recently signed an offtake MOU with Traxys, a major global commodity trader, covering up to 80,000 tonnes per annum of Kasiya graphite.

Graphite grades at Kasiya increased with depth. FUN hasn’t tested that deeper zone yet, and aircore drilling will be the first real look at whether the same pattern holds at Mkanda.

If it does, FUN goes from a rutile story to a rutile-plus-graphite story, and that’s a very different conversation with offtake partners.

Our Take

We got into FUN at 4c. At 8.3c with a published exploration target and drilling about to step up across two programs, we’re comfortable holding.

The news flow runs through the rest of the year. Remaining assays, deeper drilling, graphite results, and a maiden inferred resource targeted for the second half of 2026. That’s a lot of catalysts for a $25 million company sitting on the same corridor as a $450 million peer.

This is still early-stage exploration. Drilling can throw curveballs and resource estimates don't always land where early results suggest.

But we think FUN is one of the most mis-priced small-caps on the ASX right now, and today’s announcement is the first real proof of scale behind that view.

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 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.

The overriding sentiment seemed to be we’ll worry about it after the long weekend. Which is a pretty Aussie way to deal with a crisis.

Trump followed up Thursday claiming the US had “completely won” in Iran, then said they’d need a few more weeks to wrap things up. Gold and silver gave back ground on the contradiction, and the ASX followed.

It was a shortened week, with plenty of noise up top, but the small end kept moving.

Firstly, a Happy Easter from all of us at Equities Club. Now here’s what caught our eye this week:

• 10X builds momentum at Big Badja with its best silver hit yet

• MRD's chairman puts his money where his mouth is

• Gold and silver soften as the US stays put in Iran

• Uranium juniors surge as sector sentiment returns

• NeuroScientific rockets on Crohn's disease progress

• We caught up with Cosmo Metals, a $5 million gold explorer with near-term drills

• A humanoid robotics IPO and what it means for the supply chain

10X Keeps Delivering at Big Badja

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) dropped more sampling results this week from Big Badja, part of the broader Peak View Project in NSW. And the grades keep climbing.

We had 10X's exploration manager in studio this week to walk through the results. Video below.

The standout was a new rock chip sample returning 339 g/t silver, 1.8% lead and 0.4 g/t gold. That's the highest-grade modern assay the company has recorded from the historic workings.

Rock chips are hand-picked samples so they're not representative of bulk grade, but they tell you the system carries serious metal. And the consistency across multiple samples backs that up - 256 g/t silver, 108 g/t silver, and 93.4 g/t silver with 3.32% lead from earlier rounds.

A trial IP line run across the historic mine confirmed a chargeability anomaly sitting directly beneath the old workings, open at depth. Nobody has ever drilled this target with modern techniques and it’s a first pass at something that could extend the system well beyond what's visible at surface.

Big Badja sits on a 15 km granite-sediment contact with a 3 km Pb-Zn soil anomaly nearby. There’s a lot of ground still to test across the wider Peak View tenure.

We backed 10X in early February and the team hasn't slowed down since. At 19c with a $7 million valuation and roughly $4 million in cash, the company is spending money on the ground while the silver price sits in a holding pattern because of Iran. When that resolves, 10X will be well placed to have the targets ready to go.

Mount Ridley Mines on The Front Foot

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) hosted an investor webinar this week, and the most telling moment had nothing to do with slides.

Chairman David Wall recently bought roughly $180k worth of shares on market. For a junior explorer with a $40 million market cap, that's a decent cheque. On the webinar, he said he wouldn't be buying if a near-term capital raise was coming.

That takes one of the main risks off the table heading into a busy stretch.

If you didn’t get the chance to listen in, we have the link here.

We added MRD to the portfolio on March 24 and you can read the full breakdown here. The short version: three critical minerals from one deposit in WA, a maiden JORC resource, a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and a market cap that looks light next to its nearest peer.

The webinar filled in more colour on the Grass Patch project. The heavy rare earth resource is 41% heavy rare earth elements, with significant dysprosium and terbium endowment - two elements China has slapped export controls on and the same ones the Pentagon is stockpiling.

The peer comparison that keeps coming up is Victory Metals (ASX:VTM), which hosts a similar rare earth system in WA and trades at roughly $207 million.

MRD sits at around $40 million with additional scandium and gallium resources that VTM doesn’t have.

The gap between $40 million and $207 million is where the opportunity sits, and the path from here runs through metallurgy and resource growth.

On the scandium side, MRD already holds the second-largest JORC scandium resource in the western world behind Sunrise Energy Metals (ASX: SRL), which carries a $1.3 billion valuation.

The company has around 20,000 historical drill pulps sitting in storage to be assayed. If those come back with decent grades, the resource grows without a single new hole in the ground.

The 2026 catalyst list is busy:

• Assaying historical pulps for scandium growth potential

• Metallurgical work underway with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

• Seven walk up drill targets ready across Grass Patch

• Early flow sheet development

• Downstream partnership and government funding discussions

With $2.5 million in cash and no near-term raise on the horizon, MRD is funded to tick most of that list off through 2026. We'll be watching closely as they work through it

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Gold and Silver Give Back Ground

Gold had been charging toward US$4,800/oz and silver was up over 10% for the week, nearly touching US$80/oz. The market had priced in the US leaving the Middle East, and precious metals were running on it.

Trump’s Thursday speech killed that momentum. The US looks to be staying put for the next few weeks (at least), and both metals pulled back as traders recalculated.

Right now, gold and silver are trading almost entirely on what happens in Iran. Until there’s a clearer picture on the conflict, we’d expect both to stay choppy.

For small-cap explorers, the soft patch is actually useful. Drill programs take months to plan, permit and execute, and results don't come back overnight.

Companies doing the work now could have news landing right around the time the conflict picture clears up and sentiment improves. The ones sitting on their hands waiting for a better market will be scrambling to catch up.

We continue to hold our full positions across the precious metals side of the portfolio:

• Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) - Drilling for gold in Victoria

• Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) - On the ground in NSW building towards a near-term gold drilling campaign

• Asian Battery Metals (ASX: AZ9) - Working towards a copper-gold drilling campaign in Mongolia

Uranium Juniors Catch a Bid

A few small-cap uranium names had a strong week on the ASX, and we didn’t see it coming.

American Uranium (ASX: AMU) was the standout, up nearly 40% after releasing an updated resource for its Lo Herma Project in Wyoming.

The interim resource now sits at 945 Mlbs eU₃O₈. For a company trading under $20 million, that's a resource approaching the billion-pound mark.

To put that in context, several producing or near-production ISR operations in Wyoming and Texas are running on resource bases in the tens to low hundreds of millions of pounds.

The deposit also looks suitable for in-situ recovery mining, which is the cheaper end of uranium extraction.

Instead of building an open pit or going underground, ISR circulates solution through the ore body to recover uranium in place. If the project advances, that keeps development costs and complexity well below what a conventional mine would need.

The jump in share price reflects renewed investor appetite for uranium exposure as energy security continues to dominate the macro backdrop.

Cauldron Energy (ASX: CXU) surged almost 80% during the week without any price-sensitive news, which earned it a formal ASX price query. CXU put the move down to broader uranium sector strength and growing attention on nuclear power globally.

Both moves are a reminder of how fast sentiment can swing back into uranium when the macro lines up. These stocks can sit dormant for months and then move 40-80% in a week.

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NSB Jumps 40% on Crohn’s Progress

NeuroScientific Biopharmaceuticals (ASX: NSB) was up roughly 40% this week after hitting a manufacturing milestone for its StemSmart™ platform ahead of Phase 2 clinical trials.

StemSmart™ is being developed to treat fistulising Crohn’s disease, one of the most severe forms of Crohn’s where ongoing inflammation creates small tunnels between the bowel and surrounding tissue.

These are extremely difficult to treat and often do not respond to existing therapies, leaving patients with limited options. StemSmart™ is designed to reduce the inflammation driving the disease and support the body’s ability to repair damaged tissue itself.

The company confirmed the first manufacturing transfer run has begun with Q-Gen Cell Therapeutics in Brisbane, which is the step that gets them to actual clinical trial material ahead of a planned Phase 2 study in the second half of 2026.

The global Crohn's treatment market is expected to exceed US$13 billion, so the commercial prize is huge if the science holds up.

That's often a big ‘if’ with any biotech, and the share price from here will live and die on trial timing and results, but it’s one for the watch list.

A $5 Million Gold Explorer Worth a Look

We caught up with Cosmo Metals (ASX: CMO) this week. It's a micro-cap gold and antimony explorer sitting under $5 million with about $1.5 million in cash.

Safe to say it’s firmly in "one good drill hole changes everything" territory.

Managing Director Ian Prentice walked us through what’s coming, and the drill calendar for the next few months is fuller than you’d expect for a company this size.

In WA, CMO is about to drill the Kanowna Gold Project, right next door to Northern Star’s Kanowna Belle operations near Kalgoorlie. An EIS grant is helping fund the program.

The project sits along the same structural corridor that hosts several multi-million ounce deposits, and historical drilling has already returned 18m at 5.3g/t and 10m at 4.7g/t gold. And they're about to find out if there's more where that came from.

Over in NSW, CMO controls a big ground position across the historic Bingara goldfields, where recent drilling returned 6m at 9.99g/t gold from just 11m depth.

So it’s shallow, high-grade, and barely scratched.

Two active projects in proven gold regions gives them more than one shot at it, which is as much as you can ask for from a $5 million explorer. It’s worth keeping a close eye on.

Humanoid Robots Are Getting Real. The Supply Chain Should Too.

One of the more interesting IPO stories this week came out of China. Unitree Robotics is preparing to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, looking to raise around US$610 million.

Unitree is already profitable. In 2025 the business did roughly US$250 million in revenue and delivered around US$90 million in net profit. Humanoid platforms now make up more than half of core revenue.

That’s worth pausing on. This is a humanoid robotics company that’s actually making money, not burning through cash pitching a prototype.

They're targeting production capacity of 75,000 humanoid robots annually in the near term. Tesla is aiming to start commercial sales of Optimus by 2027 with ambitions above a million units in the short term.

If even a fraction of those production targets land, the metals demand that follows is enormous. And it could be worth having one or more humanoid associated narrative plays in your shortlist.

We’ve backed Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) on this theme. FUN is exploring for rutile in Malawi, right next door to the world’s largest rutile deposit held by Sovereign Metals with Rio Tinto backing.

Every humanoid frame needs titanium, and the cleanest path to titanium is rutile.

At 8.3c with a market cap of roughly $25 million, FUN has a big upside. If the humanoid supply chain story plays out the way the production numbers suggest it could, rutile demand is only heading one direction.

The Week Ahead

Markets will keep swinging on whatever comes out of Iran, or Trump’s press conferences, each day.

Until there’s a clearer picture on the conflict, that’s just how it is. And the fuel supply conversation in Canberra could move from “catch the bus” to something more serious pretty quickly.

Our portfolio is heading into a busy stretch. We'd rather be holding companies doing work during the quiet periods than chasing them after sentiment turns.

Enjoy the long weekend. Eat some chocolate. Try not to look at the price of petrol on the drive home.

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, 187,500 BHL shares, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, 1,150,000 AZ9 Shares, and 200,000 10x at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN, BHL, 10X, AZ9 and 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.

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) just dropped 339 g/t silver from rock chip sampling around the old workings at the historic Big Badja Silver Mine - the highest-grade result yet from the target.

A trial IP survey lit up directly beneath the mine, and the anomaly stays open at depth.

Every result like this is stacking the deck in favour of 10X before the rig shows up to test a system that hasn’t been touched in 136 years.

Silver’s more than doubled since the start of last year. It spiked to an all-time high above US$121/oz in January and sits around US$70 today, even after a sharp pullback.

If you've been following our coverage, Exultant Mining’s broader tenement package will ring a bell. Big Badja sits within Peak View, the same project that delivered 50.9 g/t gold rock chips at Undoo Creek last week.

What started as a gold story now has exposure to the two hottest commodities of the past 18 months.

At a $7 million market cap with more than $4 million in cash, 10X has two active high-grade systems on one tenement. One gold, one silver, and both heading toward the drill.

High-Grade Silver From a Mine Nobody Drilled

We covered the basics above. Here’s where the historical detail gets interesting.

The Warden’s Report from the era documents silver grades of up to 334 oz/t from just six metres depth. In modern terms, that’s 9,469 g/t Ag.

The main shaft reached 30 metres before it collapsed, and the reasons for shutting down were never properly recorded.

Alongside the 339 g/t headline result, four other rock chips from 10X came back with grade from around the old workings:

• 339 g/t Ag, 1.8% Pb and 0.4 g/t Au

• 256 g/t Ag, 4.82% Pb and 0.36 g/t Au

• 108 g/t Ag

• 93.4 g/t Ag and 3.32% Pb

• 63.4 g/t Ag

Silver and lead are showing up together across multiple samples. In vein systems like Big Badja, that pairing usually means the mineralisation has depth to it.

The veins sit along a contact between granite and sediment, a geological boundary that acts like plumbing for metal-bearing fluids. That same structure is what made the IP survey work.

The geophysics can see it, and it lit up.

Rock chips are hand-picked surface samples, so they’ll skew toward the best stuff on the ground. They tell you the system carries metal, not what grade it’ll run at when you drill it.

But five separate results between 63 and 339 g/t silver, clustered around workings where the Warden’s Report recorded grades in the thousands, says there’s a real system here carrying real metal.

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The IP Gives Them a Map

Some early-stage explorers at this market cap would be punching holes based on surface samples and a best guess.

10X has a geophysical response sitting directly under the old workings that tells them where the sulphides are and how deep they go.

10X ran a trial induced polarisation (IP) survey line over the mine, and the result was clean and stays open at depth.

That means the sulphide mineralisation that carries the silver continues well below where the old-timers stopped digging, and the first drill hole at Big Badja can target something specific.

The next round of work is more IP lines to push the depth penetration further and test along strike of the granite-sediment contact.

There’s also a 3km lead-zinc soil anomaly sitting about three kilometres north of Big Badja along the same structural corridor.

If that anomaly turns out to be another Big Badja-style target, you’re looking at district-scale potential across a 15km contact zone that’s barely been touched.

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The Commodity Tailwind

Gold and silver have both pulled back hard from their highs earlier this year. Gold’s off more than 20% from above US$5,500 in January. Silver’s dropped from US$121 to around US$70.

But zoom out and the picture is still strong. Gold’s up more than 40% over the past year. Silver’s more than doubled. Both corrections look ugly on a short-term chart, but the longer-term run hasn’t broken.

For a pre-drill explorer, commodity prices are the tide that lifts or sinks everything. You can have the best geology in the world, but if the metal you’re chasing is in a bear market, the phone doesn’t ring.

Even after the pullback, the cycle is still working in 10X's favour. Gold and silver explorers heading into their first drill program don't often get a commodity backdrop like this.

Our Take

The drill will decide this one. Rock chips and geophysics can tell you a system is there. Only the bit going into the ground confirms what’s underneath.

But the surface work at Big Badja keeps delivering. Five rock chips between 63 and 339 g/t silver from a mine that’s sat idle since 1890, an IP anomaly open at depth, and silver sitting at US$70 after more than doubling in a year.

A couple of weeks ago it was 50.9 g/t gold at Undoo Creek. Now it’s 339 g/t silver at Big Badja. Two high-grade systems on one tenement, both heading toward the drill, with more than $4 million in the bank to get there.

And that’s before you factor in the copper exposure across the broader project portfolio. 10X is a gold, silver and copper company trading at a $7 million valuation.

With 37 million shares on issue and no need to raise capital in the near term, the register is tight. If drill results land at either target, there aren't a lot of shares to absorb the demand.

Only one of these targets needs to come off for a $7 million company to look very different.

We reckon it’s a good place to be sitting when the rig turns 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, 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.

And yet, here we are.

Closer to home, we added Mount Ridley Mines to the portfolio after its maiden heavy rare earth resource in WA, and it ran as much as 42% before settling up nearly 20%. BHL kept climbing with more high-grade gold at Mt Egerton, 10X dropped rock chips up to 50.9 g/t, and Valiant Gold listed with an early 20% pop.

What caught our eye this week:

• Our newest portfolio addition MRD rockets

• 10X delivers high-grade rock chips as it marches towards drilling

• Black Horse Mining reports high-grade gold as deeper drilling awaits

• Humanoids take over the White House

• We sat down with small-cap explorer Albion Resources

• Valiant Gold lists as the price of gold settles

• Firmus and the $6 billion AI IPO heading to the ASX

Mount Ridley Mines Rockets on Maiden Resource

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) is our newest portfolio addition, and it wasted no time. The stock ran as much as 42% intraweek before settling up nearly 20%.

The catalyst was a maiden heavy rare earths resource in Western Australia, and the numbers are big. 122.56 million tonnes at 889 ppm TREO, with roughly 109,000 tonnes of rare earth oxides in total.

About 45,000 tonnes of that sits in the more valuable heavy rare earths - dysprosium and terbium - which are the elements you find inside permanent magnets powering everything from defence systems and robotics to wind turbines and electric motors.

The deposit is the same ionic clay style that makes Chinese operations the cheapest rare earth producers on the planet, and early met work shows the most valuable heavy rare earths leach out first.

That's something we'll be watching closely as more technical work comes through.

It also helps that this sits in Western Australia, with real infrastructure nearby and clear export pathways into Asian processing markets. When governments around the world are scrambling to lock in critical mineral supply, being in WA counts for a lot.

You can dive deeper into why we’re bullish on MRD here, which did big numbers earlier in the week:

More drilling is coming to test extensions and expand the system, and at 122 million tonnes, the deposit is already large enough to attract serious attention.

This looks like the first step rather than the peak of the Mount Ridley story.

10X Lights Up Undoo Creek

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) dropped rock chips this week running at 50.9 g/t, 12.6 g/t, 8.4 g/t and 6.4 g/t gold along a quartz vein system now mapped across 360 metres of strike.

One high-grade rock chip can always grab attention, and plenty of juniors have milked a single result for months. But multiple strong results spread across a mapped corridor is a different story.

The old workings scattered through the area are now being stitched together by modern mapping, and the picture coming into focus looks like a proper mineralised system.

The main vein is cut by several cross-veins coming in at an angle, and the strongest rock chips sit right at those intersections.

In gold systems like this, those junction points act as traps where gold-bearing fluids pool up and drop their load. It gives 10X somewhere to aim a drill and makes sure they’re not just punching holes and hoping.

The historic workings are all shallow, and nobody has ever drilled beneath them. High-grade shoots in these systems tend to plunge, and if that’s the case here, the real prize is sitting at depths that have never been tested.

10X listed in December at 20c with no exploration results. Since then they've confirmed high-grade gold across 360 metres. At a $7 million market cap with over $4 million in cash, drills are getting closer and the homework they’re doing now will make for better holes when they arrive.

BHL Keeps Hitting at Mt Egerton

Our portfolio company Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) finished the week up 27% after further high-grade results from its Mt Egerton gold project in Victoria.

Hole 26MEDD004 cut a 4.4 metre mineralised zone from 49.65 metres downhole, including 0.5 metres at 20.5 g/t gold and 0.25 metres at 46.2 g/t gold. That extends the known high-grade zone by roughly 10 metres vertically above the earlier intercepts.

These results are still in the shallow portion of the system where the old miners were working. But every hole is tightening the structural picture, and that’s what you need before you start pointing a rig at the deeper stuff.

The next round of drilling goes below the historic mine. In Victoria, that’s usually where things tend to get interesting.

Fosterville and Sunday Creek both strengthened with depth once drilling moved beyond the early workings.

If Mt Egerton follows the same pattern, these shallow hits are just the appetiser. We've been in BHL since listing and the thesis has only firmed up with each hole.

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Humanoids Take Over the White House

We opened with the robot walking alongside the First Lady, and we weren’t being cute. The robotics industry is scaling faster than most people realise.

Not that long ago most people thought EVs were a niche play for rich early adopters. Now they’re on every second driveway. Humanoid robots feel like they’re at that same tipping point.

Elon Musk says Tesla could be producing up to a million humanoid robots per year by the end of next year. Even if he’s half right, the demand for raw materials is about to shift.

Titanium is the metal that makes humanoids work. It's light, it's strong, and it holds up under constant mechanical stress. You can't build a robot that walks, lifts and operates all day out of steel. It's too heavy. Titanium solves that problem, and rutile is the cleanest path to producing it.

This is one of the reasons we backed Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) and its rutile discovery in Malawi. FUN has moved quickly to strengthen the technical team and fast-track the project toward a maiden resource later this year.

More robots means more titanium. More titanium means more rutile. We like where FUN sits in that chain.

Albion Resources on Our Radar

We sat down with the team at Albion Resources (ASX: ALB) this week after they picked up the Gidgee Gold Project in Western Australia.

Gidgee sits in the Gum Creek Greenstone Belt, which has produced more than 1.1 million ounces historically with an estimated 2 million-plus ounces across the broader district.

The historical drilling is what got our attention. Intercepts like 21 metres at 5.4 g/t gold and 16 metres at 5.52 g/t gold from relatively shallow depths. Those are solid hits for a project that most of the market hasn’t heard of yet.

The average drill depth across the project is only about 54 metres. That’s barely scratching the surface, and it means the system has never been properly tested where it counts.

Albion trades at around $7 million with just under $3 million in cash. Albion now has a clear pathway toward follow-up drilling over the coming months, and we’ll be watching.

Valiant Gold Lists With a Pop

We flagged Valiant Gold (ASX: VAL) as one to watch ahead of its IPO, and it delivered early.

The company listed at 25 cents after spinning out gold assets from Westgold, and closed the week at 30 cents, roughly a 20% gain in the first few days of trading.

Early moves off an IPO can be noise, but they often tell you something about how the market rates the assets being brought to market.

The appeal with spin-outs like this is you’re getting projects that have already had years of technical work done on them by a larger producer. Westgold has spent real money on these assets and Valiant gets to pick up where they left off without starting from scratch.

Valiant now begins the next phase as an independent company with a clear gold focus and a pathway to demonstrate value through exploration results.

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Firmus and the $6 Billion AI IPO

Firmus Technologies is preparing for an ASX listing later this year that could value the company at around A$6 billion. If it gets there, it'll be one of the largest local tech IPOs in recent memory.

The company builds large-scale AI data infrastructure powered by renewable energy. They’re calling them “AI factories”, and they want to roll them out across Australia at a time when access to compute and power is arguably the biggest bottleneck for AI growth globally.

The race for data centre capacity has changed. The big global tech companies already compete for chips and now they’re competing just as hard for electricity. Australia is starting to attract serious attention as a destination for that investment, and Firmus is already running investor roadshows ahead of a raise that could run into the billions.

An IPO at this scale is worth paying attention to for what it says about the broader theme. When a company can raise billions for AI infrastructure in Australia, it pulls capital and attention toward the smaller listed players exposed to data centres and energy supply.

We’ve seen this before. Major LNG builds reshaped how investors looked at Australia’s energy sector a decade ago. AI infrastructure is starting to feel similar.

The Week Ahead

Gold has settled into a range between roughly US$4,300/oz and US$4,500/oz, while oil is holding near US$110 a barrel with markets still pricing in the uncertainty around Iran.

While that situation stays unresolved, this range probably holds. There’s a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how it plays out. Depending on who you listen to, a ceasefire is either close or nowhere near, which makes positioning around both commodities tough in the short term.

If a deal lands, the moves could go in opposite directions. Oil eases as supply risk unwinds, but gold could actually catch a bid again as investors rotate back toward the bigger picture - debt levels, currency settings and longer-term inflation expectations haven’t changed. It’s worth watching closely.

Another for the watchlist is 49 Metals. It’s preparing to list on the ASX with a valuation below $20 million and exposure to gold and silver in Nevada. Recent precious metals IPOs have gone well on debut.

It’s a shorter trading week heading into Easter, so expect the news flow to thin out. But with the Strait still closed and Trump’s ever-changing deadlines for action on Iran, the macro won’t be taking a holiday even if the ASX 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 1,554,000 FUN shares, 187,500 BHL shares, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, and 200,000 10x at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by FUN, BHL, 10X and 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.

Between the war, rising oil prices and the usual post-spike profit-taking, gold’s been pushed through a correction that looks ugly on a two-week chart.

Zoom out though and gold is still up 45% over the past year. And if you’ve been around small-cap mining long enough, you know that pullbacks in the gold price tend to be where the better entry points show up.

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) just dropped rock chip results from Undoo Creek in NSW, and we think this is one of them.

Rock chips have returned assays of 50.9 g/t, 12.6 g/t, 8.4 g/t and 6.4 g/t gold, all sitting along a quartz vein system that’s now been mapped over 360 metres of strike.

For a company trading at 18.5 cents with a market cap of roughly $7 million and more than $4 million in cash, we think they’re worth a lot more attention.

10X listed in December at 20c per share with no exploration results to its name. Fast forward to today and the company has confirmed high-grade gold mineralisation, the gold price is 4.5% higher than it was on listing, and the share price has drifted back 7.5%.

Smells like opportunity to us.

We wrote about why we're still bullish gold on the weekend. Gold's nearly tripled in two years and the forces behind that run - the debt, the geopolitical mess, central bank buying and the relentless money printing, haven't gone anywhere.

The oil shock and a stronger dollar have knocked it around in the short term, but the bigger picture is intact.

If gold gets moving again, funded explorers putting out 50 g/t rock chips at sub-$10 million valuations don’t stay there for long.

High-grade Gold Across 360m of Mapped Strike

Rock chip sampling is selective by nature, but when you see multiple results above 5 g/t gold spread across 360 metres of mapped quartz veining, with historic shafts and pits dotted along the same corridor, the picture starts to build.

At the Undoo Creek prospect within their Peak View project, Exultant’s latest round of sampling has returned four standout results:

• 50.9 g/t Au

• 12.6 g/t Au

• 8.4 g/t Au

• 6.4 g/t Au

To be clear, rock chips are the best-looking bits of rock on the surface. They don't tell you what grade the system will run at when you drill it. What they do tell you is that the system carries serious gold, and at these grades, it warrants a much closer look with a drill rig.

These sit alongside earlier results of 5.42 g/t and 2.61 g/t Au from the same prospect, reported in January. In our write-up on 10X a few weeks ago, that 5.42 g/t result was one of the things that caught our eye. The grades have now jumped up considerably as the team has mapped more of the system.

Early results said there was gold here. These results say there might be a lot of it.

The vein sits within granite (the Devonian Glenbog Granodiorite, for the geo nerds) that’s common in this part of NSW and a known host for gold mineralisation.

Some sections of the vein crop out at surface, some sit just below, and some are completely buried under soil and vegetation.

Where the vein disappears underground, old shafts and pits mark the trend, telling you where the historical miners were chasing gold.

Those old-timers were clearly picking off the richest pockets they could find along the vein.

Exultant’s modern mapping has stitched those isolated workings together into a single structural picture.

What looked like a handful of separate small mines turns out to be different access points into the same mineralised system running over 360 metres. And that number is still growing - the vein hasn’t been mapped to its limits in either direction.

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Where the Veins Cross

There's a detail buried in this announcement that most people will skim past, but it caught our eye.

The system runs as a main NNW quartz vein cut by several NW-SE veins coming in at an angle. (Stay with us here, this is the bit that tells you where the gold is.)

Where those veins cross each other, you get zones of disruption in the rock, and in gold systems like this, those junction points act as traps.

Hot, gold-bearing fluids moving through the rock pool up at those intersections and drop their gold. That’s where high-grade shoots form.

Several of the strongest rock chip results sit right at or near these intersections. It gives the company a geological reason to aim a drill at specific spots along the vein rather than just punching holes and hoping.

The historic workings at Undoo Creek are all relatively shallow, and the depth extent of the mineralisation is completely untested by modern drilling.

High-grade shoots in systems like this tend to plunge, angling downward into the earth along predictable orientations. If that’s the case here, and the surface data is building a case that it could be, the real prize sits below the old workings at depths that have never seen a drill bit.

At $7 million market cap, you're looking at a gold system that's untested at depth and now has a roadmap for where to point the rig. Every shaft those old miners dug was chasing gold near the surface. Nobody has ever looked underneath them.

What Happens Next

10X is working Undoo Creek toward drill targets.

More mapping, more rock chip sampling to test whether there are parallel veins sitting nearby, and geophysical surveys to figure out how deep the system goes.

None of it is glamorous, but it's the work that makes the difference between a good drill hole and a wasted one.

Plenty of juniors at this market cap would have had a rig on site already, punching holes into underdone targets.

10X is doing the homework first. That tends to produce better holes, and better holes are what move a $7 million company.

Undoo Creek sits within the broader Peak View project corridor. We covered several of Peak View’s prospects in a recent write-up on 10X, and Undoo Creek was one of them. Back then it was early days. These results have put it firmly in the spotlight.

With more than $4 million in cash, 10X has the runway to advance these targets without needing to raise capital in the near term.

In a market where dilution is the silent killer for micro-caps, a funded explorer with no pressure to issue shares is already ahead of most of its peers.

Our Take on 10X

Gold’s pullback has pushed small-cap explorers off most people’s radar. We think that creates a window.

At $7 million market cap with over $4 million in cash, 10X is sitting on an enterprise value of around $2.7 million while putting out rock chip results that would get attention on a company five times this size.

Rock chips are early-stage data, and the grades will need to be confirmed by near-term drilling. But high-grade results keep showing up across a 360-metre system that's untested at depth, and the geology is now giving them clear targets to drill.

For a $2.7 million enterprise value, that's a lot of upside sitting in the ground waiting to be tested.

The market is looking the other way right now, and for a funded explorer putting out 50 g/t rock chips at a $7 million valuation, we’ll take that all day.

Drills are getting closer, and we think the ground will do the talking.

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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.

There are seventeen rare earth elements, but two matter more than the rest right now: dysprosium and terbium. The magnets inside every EV motor, every wind turbine, every military actuator, every industrial robot - they all need these two elements to function at operating temperature.

There is no substitute for either element.

In April 2025, Beijing imposed export controls on both. European dysprosium prices have since quadrupled relative to Chinese domestic prices. Terbium oxide is up over 100% year-to-date.

The Pentagon is stockpiling both elements. The US Department of Energy has been handing out hundreds of millions to anyone with a non-Chinese source, and the Australian and US governments signed a formal framework in October 2025 to fast-track mining and processing in allied jurisdictions.

Meet Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD), our latest portfolio addition.

MRD has just delivered a maiden JORC rare earth resource, and all of that mineralisation sits in the same ground as the company’s existing scandium and gallium resources.

Three critical minerals, one deposit, all from surface.

Each one has its own supply crunch. China controls the rare earths and the gallium. Scandium barely has a supply chain at all - global production is 25 tonnes a year against forecast demand of 117 tonnes.

MRD's numbers are worth sitting with for a $31.9 million market cap. 122.56 million tonnes of mineralised material, containing just under 109,000 tonnes of rare earth oxide, including 4,272 tonnes of dysprosium and 719 tonnes of terbium - the two elements driving the supply panic.

The project sits in Western Australia, 25 kilometres from the deep-water port at Esperance. It’s a tier-one jurisdiction with real infrastructure.

The nearest comparable is Victory Metals (ASX: VTM), a single-commodity clay-hosted rare earth play in WA trading at roughly $180 million. MRD sits at less than a fifth of that, with two additional strategic commodities and over 80% of its 63km mineralised corridor still untested.

That’s the mismatch that caught our eye.

With a stacked catalyst pipeline through 2026 and a bilateral partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - one of the US government’s three nuclear security laboratories - we reckon MRD has the setup to close that gap quickly.

The Maiden Resource - What Landed Today

Today’s Mineral Resource for MRD of 122.56Mt @ 889 ppm contains about 109,000 tonnes of rare earths overall, including roughly 45,000 tonnes of the more valuable heavy rare earths.

Rare earths split into two groups: lights and heavies. The heavies are where the money is.

MRD’s resource has a 41% heavy rare earth ratio. Victory Metals at North Stanmore runs about 39%. That puts MRD at the top end for this style of deposit on the ASX.

Dysprosium and terbium are what stop permanent magnets from demagnetising at high temperatures. Without them, the motor in your EV overheats and the generator in your offshore wind turbine shuts down.

Beijing knows that, which is why they’ve kept a chokehold on processing and slapped export controls on both. If the West wants to build anything with a permanent magnet in it, the supply has to come from somewhere else.

The resource is split across two blocks within the Grass Patch Complex.

Block 2, the larger of the two, hosts 87.18 million tonnes at 947 ppm TREO. Block 1 carries 35.36 million tonnes at 746 ppm.

Both are shallow, flat-lying and continuous from surface to about 52 metres depth.

Shallow is good - it means you can excavate with standard earthmoving gear. No drill and blast. No underground development. This is the same deposit style that has made Chinese ionic clay operations the cheapest rare earth producers on the planet.

The resource also carries roughly 23,500 tonnes of combined neodymium and praseodymium - the light rare earths that form the base of every permanent magnet. The heavies get the headlines, but the lights add real tonnage underneath.

Scandium is basically a steroid for aluminium. Add a tiny amount to an aluminium alloy and it gets dramatically stronger, lighter and more resistant to fatigue.

The aerospace industry has used it for years. More recently, humanoid robot manufacturers have started building frames with scandium-aluminium alloys.

MRD holds 18,855 tonnes of contained scandium. That’s one of the largest JORC-compliant endowments in the world, in a market where global production sits at 25 tonnes a year and 95% comes from China, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Gallium is the metal behind compound semiconductors - the chips powering 5G networks, EV fast chargers and military radar systems.

It’s another commodity where one country controls almost all of the refined supply. MRD’s 24,584 tonnes of contained gallium across 838.7 million tonnes represents roughly 34 years of current world production.

Three critical minerals, same deposit, same ground. Every dollar MRD spends on development has the potential to unlock value across all of them.

Why This Resource is Likely the Starting Point

The Grass Patch Complex runs for 63 kilometres along strike. Today's resource covers about 15 kilometres of that. The other 80% is untested.

The ground either side of the resource blocks shows the same geological signatures - the same gravity anomalies, the same structural controls - as the ground that just produced a 122 million tonne resource. Which is either a coincidence or a much bigger deposit (we know which way we're leaning).

MRD’s geophysics review has identified seven primary gravity targets totalling 33km of untested strike, with the highest-priority area being a 12.8km trend sitting immediately east of the existing blocks.

Between Block 1 and Block 2 sits a 3km zone that has never seen a drill bit - the exact geological setting where thicker, higher-grade heavy rare earth clay zones tend to develop.

MRD's entire rare earth discovery came from going back through old nickel-copper exploration data and recognising what earlier explorers had missed.

About 22,000 archived drill pulps are still sitting in storage, never assayed for rare earths, scandium or gallium.

If even a portion come back with decent grades, the resource grows without a single new hole in the ground.

The cost of sending those to a lab is a fraction of a new drilling campaign, and the company has already proven that approach works.

Drill planning and permitting is underway, with the 2026 targets set to be tested throughout the year. Most juniors at this stage have a maiden resource OR walk-up exploration upside. MRD has both.

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Why These Commodities Matter Right Now

Each of these minerals has its own supply crisis, and MRD sits across all three. The detail on China’s controls and the price moves is covered above.

Here’s what sharpens the picture even further:

Heavy Rare Earths

From January 2027, US defence procurement rules tighten so that permanent magnets used in defence systems cannot contain material mined, refined or processed anywhere in a restricted supply chain, effectively forcing contractors to verify the origin of elements like dysprosium and terbium.

The scramble for non-Chinese supply has a tight deadline.

There aren't many ASX-listed names with a JORC heavy rare earth resource in a tier-one jurisdiction. When that deadline lands, the pool of projects that Western governments can actually back is a lot smaller than most people think

Scandium

Aerospace modelling suggests scandium-aluminium alloys could deliver around US$9 million in lifetime fuel savings for a narrow-body aircraft, based on higher-loading alloy scenarios.

At CES 2026, humanoid robot manufacturers debuted platforms built on scandium-aluminium frames. The use cases are expanding while global supply sits at 25 tonnes a year.

And yet almost nobody produces the stuff. The entire world makes 25 tonnes a year. MRD is sitting on 18,855 tonnes.

Gallium

At US$300 per kilogram with the GaN semiconductor market growing at 27% a year, gallium carries real by-product value on top of MRD’s rare earth and scandium economics.

MRD’s contained gallium of 24,584 tonnes represents about 34 years of current world production.

MRD's contained gallium of 24,584 tonnes represents about 34 years of current world production. Canberra has already put A$200 million behind a gallium processing plant at Alcoa's Wagerup refinery in WA, backed by Washington and Tokyo.

Gallium is near the top of every allied government's shopping list right now.

Five Reasons We’re Backing Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD)

1. Three Strategic Commodities at $31.9 Million

We can’t find another ASX-listed company with JORC resources in heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium from the same deposit. If one exists, we haven’t seen it.

At $31.9 million, the market is barely paying for one of these commodities, let alone all three.

The heavy rare earth resource alone - 44,610 tonnes of contained HREO including 4,272 tonnes of dysprosium and 719 tonnes of terbium at a time when European prices have quadrupled - would justify exploration interest as a standalone project.

Then you add a scandium resource at ~US$3,500 per kilogram oxide and 24,584 tonnes of gallium. The combined in-ground value dwarfs the current market cap, even if you apply heavy discounts for stage and recovery.

We’re always looking for companies where the market is pricing one commodity and missing the rest. MRD has three commodities and the market seems to be pricing none of them properly.

2. VTM at $180 Million vs MRD at $31.9 Million - Where Is the Upside?

This is the comparison that got us over the line.

Victory Metals (ASX: VTM) operates the North Stanmore project at Cue in Western Australia. They describe it as Australia’s largest clay-hosted heavy rare earth project and carry a market capitalisation of roughly $180 million.

Here’s how they stack up against MRD’s maiden resource and what MRD has in the ground:

VTM currently has a larger tonnage in its rare earth resource at 321 million tonnes. But MRD’s maiden resource covers roughly 15 kilometres of a 63-kilometre corridor with 80% of the tenure untested.

Seven primary gravity targets are already defined, covering 33 kilometres of untested strike. The resource has clear room to grow and the company is funded to begin testing it.

On the HREE ratio, MRD’s 41% compares well with VTM’s 39% average. And MRD carries gallium and scandium on top - two strategic commodities VTM has not reported - plus a bilateral partnership with a US nuclear laboratory.

At $31.9 million versus $180 million, MRD trades at about 18 cents in the dollar relative to its nearest comparable, before adjusting for gallium, scandium or the Livermore partnership.

Even applying a 50% discount for MRD’s earlier stage and smaller current REE resource, the implied market cap sits around $90 million.

The upside from here comes down to two things: growing the resource and proving you can get the minerals out of the ground. MRD will be working on both throughout 2026, and if the results land, $31.9 million is going to look cheap in hindsight.

3. Lawrence Livermore - A Partnership With No ASX Peer

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is one of three US nuclear security laboratories. It was founded in 1952 and runs on a US$3.7 billion annual budget with 9,340 staff.

In December 2022, it achieved the first demonstration of nuclear fusion ignition in a laboratory. It is one of the highest-credentialed scientific institutions on the planet.

MRD signed a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) with them in late 2025. Under the MTA, MRD shipped Block 1 core rejects to the laboratory.

A follow-up batch of approximately 200 kilograms has been prepared. The full Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) is being drafted now. The scope covers working out exactly how to extract MRD’s rare earths, scandium and gallium efficiently, tailored to the specific chemistry of this deposit.

That kind of tailored process engineering would normally cost anywhere from $5-20 million through commercial consultants. And under the CRADA, MRD owns all the IP that comes out of the program.

That matters because China doesn’t just control the rare earth deposits - they control the processing. Even projects sitting on US soil still ship their ore to China to get it refined. Developing your own extraction flowsheet, outside that supply chain, is the whole game.

MRD is the only ASX-listed critical mineral company progressing toward a CRADA with Livermore. In FY2024, LLNL had 59 active CRADAs across the entire laboratory, out of 9,340 scientists and engineers. Livermore picked MRD’s ore because it contains the exact heavy rare earths the Pentagon is stockpiling.

LLNL has committed to advocate to the US Department of Energy for funding on MRD’s behalf. The precedent is Lynas Rare Earths (ASX: LYC), which received approximately US$250 million in US government support for its Houston heavy rare earth processing facility.

Lynas got that money because its supply chain fed directly into US defence contractors. MRD’s HREE resource, rich in dysprosium and terbium, sits in the same lane, at a time when the Australia-US Critical Minerals Framework is funnelling money into exactly these kinds of projects.

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4. The 2026 Calendar Is Stacked

MRD has more near-term catalysts than most juniors at this stage get in years. Here's what we're watching:

The maiden resource itself is the first catalyst. Today’s JORC-compliant heavy rare earth resource of 122.56 million tonnes with a 41% HREO ratio, landing at a time when dysprosium and terbium are under Chinese export controls and European prices are at multiples of domestic, gives the market a concrete number to value against peers.

Re-assay of some 22,000 archived drill pulps - the cheapest way to grow a resource without drilling a metre. MRD's entire rare earth discovery came from re-examining old data, and the same approach across the broader tenure could define new targets at minimal cost.

Resource expansion drilling across seven gravity targets covering 33 kilometres of untested strike. The 3-kilometre gap between Block 1 and Block 2 - a structural dilation zone where thicker, higher-grade heavy rare earth clay zones tend to develop - is a particularly interesting target.

The CRADA with Lawrence Livermore is being drafted. Once executed, expect an ASX announcement. The 200kg follow-up sample batch is already prepared.

Metallurgical testwork on combined recovery of rare earths, scandium and gallium from the same process. Early testwork has shown that heavy rare earths leach more strongly than light rare earths in MRD’s regolith, which is just what you want to see - the highest-value elements come out first. Strong met results here would be a major value catalyst. The goal by year-end is a proof of concept - a mixed rare earth carbonate or individual metal oxides that demonstrate the process actually works.

Permitting is underway with a year-end 2026 target. The near-surface, free-dig nature of the deposit means a simpler approvals path than a hard-rock project.

All of this is landing in a market where heavy rare earth prices are surging under Chinese export controls and Western governments are throwing money at securing new supply.

5. The Policy Tailwinds are Real and Getting Stronger

MRD’s timing lines up with a wave of government money flowing into just the kind of project it’s building.

The US and Australia have committed up to US$8.5 billion between them to back Australian critical minerals projects. The Australian government has already backed a A$200 million gallium plant at Alcoa’s Wagerup refinery, with US and Japanese money alongside it.

The US Defence Production Act Title III - the same funding mechanism used to fast-track supply chains during wartime - is open to critical mineral projects, and MRD's CEO Allister Caird has flagged it as a viable route for the company.

A WA-based project that’s 25km from the deep sea port at Esperance with a resource spanning the exact heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium that both governments have identified as strategic priorities fits the framework like a glove.

And the pressure from China's side keeps building. The gallium export ban suspension expires in November 2026. Heavy rare earth export controls were added in April 2025. The trend is one-way, and every escalation from Beijing makes projects like MRD more important to Washington and Canberra.

The board has also recently strengthened with the appointment of experienced chairman David Wall, who brings the corporate experience to help take MRD from explorer to the next stage.

Our View

We spend a lot of time looking at small-cap resource companies. Many of them have one commodity and a market cap that already reflects the best-case scenario. MRD is the opposite.

Three critical minerals from the same deposit, a maiden resource that covers barely a quarter of the corridor, a partnership with one of the most serious laboratories on the planet, and a $31.9 million price tag. At a time when Western governments are falling over themselves to fund non-Chinese supply of exactly these materials.

We’re in because this looks mis-priced to us. The nearest comparable trades at $180 million with one commodity. MRD has three.

The risk with any junior is that the story sounds better than the ground delivers. We know that. Early-stage exploration can disappoint, met work can throw up problems, and timelines always slip. That’s the game.

But we like what we’re looking at. The catalysts are lined up, the commodity tailwinds are blowing hard, the Livermore partnership has no ASX peer, and $31.9 million looks light for what's in the ground.

We're backing MRD and we'll be all over this one throughout 2026.

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