They did that for two years. The lab tested for copper, lead, zinc and silver, and copper and zinc lit up along a 2.4 kilometre line with the metal still running at both ends when the crews packed up.

Nobody tested for gold. And two kilometres along the same line of rocks sit a pair of old gold mines that were worked by hand in the early 1900s.

Fifty years later, that whole strip is still waiting for its first drill hole.

Today Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) put a field crew back on it. The company calls the target Watsons, and it sits inside Black Hammer, 10X’s 390 square kilometre project in the Macquarie Arc.

The Macquarie Arc is a strip of old volcanic country running up through the middle of NSW. It's where Newmont dug Cadia, one of the biggest gold-copper mines on the planet at around 50 million ounces of gold and 9.5 million tonnes of copper, and where Evolution Mining pulls gold out of Cowal.

At 14 cents a share, 10X is a $5.5 million company with $3.5 million in the bank from the June quarterly, which leaves about a $2 million value on the 390 square kilometres.

Watsons is the first of three targets 10X picked from a list of 12.

We've been on the register since earlier this year. 10X's other NSW project is Peak View, near Cooma down in the south of the state, and its maiden drilling there at a prospect called Balerion got six holes in during August.

While they wait on the three assays still at the lab, the crew has driven north to Black Hammer, the project we've been wanting to see them get into since day one.

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10X, For Anyone Who Missed February

10X listed in December 2025 and we got in a couple months later. It's run out of Perth by executive chairman Brett Grosvenor, an engineer who has spent 25 years building big mining and power projects and getting them switched on.

The company has a tight capital structure at 37 million shares on issue, which means the price doesn’t need much volume to shift on the back of news.

Peak View is the high-grade one, with copper, lead, zinc, silver and gold packed into a compact zone of old volcanic rock and historical drilling that hit 22% zinc and 119 g/t silver in the same hole. Black Hammer is the big one by area. There's gold ground in WA as well.

The Balerion core had sulphides in it, which is the first thing you want to see, and the assays for holes four, five and six are due in the coming weeks. That's when we find out whether the old drilling grades hold up.

Black Hammer Time

The reason anyone cares about the hills around Oberon is what came out of them a century ago. Miners dug small workings across the ground in the early 1900s, and the records from the Tuglow Copper Mines show grades up to 14% copper, 26.4 g/t gold, 283 g/t silver and 13.1% zinc.

They dug what they could reach by hand and stopped. In the 100 years since, no one has put a drill hole under the workings to see what was left behind.

10X went through every report and map on the tenements and came up with 12 spots worth a look. It ranked them on how big each could be, and how cheaply it can be tested from surface before anyone pays for a rig.

Three came out on top.

Watsons

Watsons is where the 1972 crews found the copper and zinc in the dirt. The hottest patch is a block about 400 by 500 metres in the middle where copper, lead and zinc all ran high together, and the trend runs 2.4 kilometres with the anomaly open at both ends.

Copper-bearing quartz veins poke out of the ground along the trend. The Shooters Hill and Chatham Valley gold mines are two kilometres along strike.

10X has a land access agreement over most of the target and the crew is mapping and sampling now with a handheld XRF, a gun that reads metal content on the spot, so the hottest samples go to the lab first and are tested for gold.

Porters Retreat

Porters Retreat has gold sitting in the river that runs through it.

The Retreat River runs past an outcrop of monzonite. Monzonite is an intrusion, molten rock that pushed up through the crust and cooled where it sat, and the same type of intrusion fed Cadia.

The gold in the river is angular, meaning the pieces still have sharp edges and the water hasn’t carried them far, so the only obvious thing to have shed them is the intrusion they sit next to.

The intrusion has pyrite and chalcopyrite in it at surface. Chalcopyrite is the main copper mineral, so the copper is there to see before anyone digs. Lab work on rock samples 10X collected last year came back with the chemistry you see in the big low-grade copper-gold systems Cadia belongs to.

Magnetic surveys show anomalies beneath and beside the outcrop, which suggests the intrusion at surface is the top of a much larger body underground.

Vermithor

Vermithor started life in a filing cabinet.

10X went to the archive and ran a 1991 airborne magnetic survey through modern software, finding a circular anomaly about a kilometre across.

The software turns the old data into a 3D shape, and at Vermithor that shape runs roughly 1.2 kilometres deep.

At other deposits in the district, magnetic bullseyes like this have turned out to be the sulphide minerals that carry copper and gold. That's how Vermithor made the list. Drilling is the only way to find out whether this one is.

The Footrot copper-gold prospect is within 5 kilometres. Nobody has sampled Vermithor, let alone drilled it.

The Metals 10X is Hunting

The last people to work this ground properly were the 1970s crews, and the metals in it are worth a great deal more now than they were then.

Copper is around US$6.60 a pound after setting an all-time high in early August. BHP was built on iron ore but now makes more money from copper.

The problem for BHP (and everyone its size) is that nobody is finding new copper. Of the roughly 400 million tonnes added to global copper resources since 2005, the vast majority came from extending mines that already existed.

Gold is around US$4,400 an ounce, off its January peak and still up close to 30% on the year. In the Macquarie Arc gold and copper come out of the same systems.

Zinc sits around US$3,850 a tonne, its highest since mid-2022 and up about 36% on a year ago, with the investment banks expecting mine supply to fall this year.

Why We Like the 10X Set Up

The order of events from here is Watsons fieldwork, then priority samples to the lab for gold and multi-element assays, then geophysics over whatever the surface work supports, then drill targets.

Porters Retreat and Vermithor follow as land access lands, with the Balerion assays arriving in the middle of it.

For a $5.5 million company that is a steady run of news over the next few months, and the $3.5 million in the bank pays for all of it without going back to the market.

10X is spending small money to rank big targets on a $2 million enterprise value, in a belt where copper and gold discoveries get bought. With 37 million shares on issue, there is very little stock around to absorb a good result.

If any one of the three delivers a drill result that matches the surface story, we like our chances of the market repricing 10X well beyond where it sits today.

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

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

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That’s more than a billion US dollars a day (call it $1.6 billion in ours).

One day of chip sales at Nvidia buys any one of about 1,800 of the 2,000 companies on the ASX outright, with a few hundred million left over.

Every one of those chips is wired with copper and runs in a data centre the tech giants are signing up nuclear reactors to power, and this week we had news on both at our end of the market.

Copper hit an all-time high, and Powerhaus Uranium joined the portfolio, led by a team that has sold two uranium companies already. More on them below, let’s get to it.

What caught our eye this week:

• Copper bulls continue the charge to an all-time high

• MRD claims the world’s biggest scandium resource

• Powerhaus Uranium becomes our newest portfolio addition

• Two catalyst-loaded companies front a packed corporate lunch

• FUN’s deeper drill program nearly doubles in Malawi

• The rig is spinning for ELK as directors buy up

• WhiteRock Lithium goes bananas on debut

• The drill campaign for 10X wraps up at Balerion

• A German buyer takes a quarter of EVG’s Maniry

• X2M runs 350% on an AI data centre deal

• 170 metres of mineralisation in Nevada for 49M

• DroneShield posts a record half, but still registers a loss

STOP RIGHT THERE - It’s Gold Comp Time

Whatever you were about to do next can wait, because tomorrow our gold competition closes and someone on this list is going to win a full ounce of gold.

At current prices that’s north of $6,200. Pick a number, and if it’s the closest to the pin, the ounce is yours.

Click below and tell us where you think the price of gold is on December 1 to be in the running.

Enter the comp by clicking here.

Send this to a mate too. If they win off your tip, they’re buying the beers till Christmas.

The Copper Bulls Are Charging

Robert Friedland got up in front of a business school crowd in LA last year and told them the world has no idea how much copper it’s about to need.

“You people have no idea whatsoever what we’re facing. You’re dreaming,” he said. Darryl Kerrigan would have been proud.

Friedland is the billionaire behind Ivanhoe Mines and two of the great copper discoveries of the modern era, Oyu Tolgoi in Mongolia and Kamoa-Kakula in the Congo, and his presentation quickly became a maths tutorial.

The world uses about 30 million tonnes of copper a year and only four million of that comes from recycling, so to keep global growth ticking along at 3%, the industry has to dig up as much in the next 18 years as it has in the past 10,000.

He’d have loved this week. Copper hit an all-time high above US$6.80 a pound, and it’s up close to 50% on this time last year.

Supply keeps getting interrupted at the worst possible time. Grasberg in Indonesia, the second biggest copper mine on earth, is still running at around half capacity after last September’s mudslide, and earlier this month the smelter that processes its ore sprang a boiler leak and shut for weeks.

Flooding has hit Friedland’s Kamoa-Kakula, and Zijin (his partner in the mine) said this week its copper target for the year is under pressure. LME stockpiles have nearly halved since May.

All those problems get fixed eventually, but the glaring one that can’t is that a major copper deposit hasn’t been found in 20 years (and boy do we pray we’re on the one that breaks the streak).

The big mines pull a little less copper out of every tonne of rock each year, and a new mine takes a decade or more to permit and build. Even BHP, which said last week it’s steering more than half its future spending into copper, has its extra tonnes landing in the mid-2030s.

We’re on the hunt for a copper junior to add to the portfolio (and the pool room). Watch this space.

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MRD has the Biggest Scandium Resource on Earth

"The World's Largest Publicly Reported Scandium Resource" was plastered across the top of Wednesday’s announce from Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD), and it had the desired effect, up 16% on $1.6m stock traded that day.

Grass Patch is MRD’s clay deposit 25km northeast of Esperance where MRD nearly tripled the size of its scandium resource to 946 million tonnes at 50.1 ppm scandium.

That works out to 72,637 tonnes of scandium oxide and backs up the bold announcement header. To put in perspective, the whole world made about 80 tonnes of the metal last year.

The extra tonnes came from 3,271 old samples sitting in storage from a decade of drilling for nickel and copper. MRD sent them back to the lab to be tested for scandium and the resource grew 2.5x for the cost of the assays (and we're quietly hoping there's more in the shed).

You can find our full write up here.

We added MRD to the portfolio in March based off the three critical minerals it had in one deposit (scandium, heavy rare earths and gallium).

We were under no illusions as to the challenge of extracting scandium out of the clay in their deposit, because hydrochloric acid leaves nearly three quarters of it in the rock.

Then Chris Larder joined as CTO and brought with him Selectro, a leach process he'd spent 10 years building and MRD has now lodged a patent application over. Selectro recovered 80% of the scandium in its first test on raw Grass Patch clay and took most of the heavy rare earths and about half the gallium with it. The acid method got 27.6% from the same sample.

Lab work earlier this month found the rare earths at Grass Patch sit in phosphate minerals. Phosphates can be floated off the waste clay before any chemistry starts, a cheap step that processing plants everywhere already run, so Selectro should have a richer concentrate to work on when the next round of testwork runs.

Of the few scandium names on the ASX the one getting the attention is Sunrise Energy Metals (ASX: SRL). Sunrise is building its mine at Syerston in NSW with a US$400 million loan from the Pentagon and carries a $2.8 billion valuation. Robert Friedland from the copper section above is its co-chair and biggest shareholder.

Sunrise’s dirt runs 414 ppm against MRD’s 50, so we won’t pretend the two deposits are twins. MRD holds more of the metal and trades at $50 million.

MRD finished the week up an impressive 43% on last week’s closing price.

Our New Addition: Powerhaus Uranium

Siobhan Lancaster told us you can dig a small hole in a riverbed at her new project in Argentina and pull out uranium that’s yellow against the dirt. Her team did it on their first site visit from about knee depth.

Lancaster was on the Extract Resources team that found Husab in Namibia and sold the company for $2.2 billion while Fukushima was melting down. She then ran 92 Energy, which hit uranium on its fourth hole in Canada and was taken over inside three years of listing.

Argentina was Philippe Portella's idea. He's a geologist who spent 35 years hunting uranium for the French, and when Lancaster asked him where the next giant deposit was hiding, he said Patagonia. Her first reaction was "that's a bit interesting, I'll have to have a think about that."

The thinking ended in Lancaster leading Powerhaus Uranium (ASX: POW), the third uranium explorer she’s built and our newest portfolio addition, which listed on Tuesday at 20 cents with a $17 million market cap and $9 million in the bank.

You can read our full write-up here.

Governments (and major tech companies) are building reactors, with the US aiming to quadruple its nuclear fleet by 2050 and Microsoft paying to restart Three Mile Island so its data centres never lose power. Uranium is at its highest price since 2008, after a decade where the industry barely explored and barely discovered.

The flagship for POW is Malbec, around 2,000 square kilometres of ground in Chubut, a province in Argentine Patagonia. The uranium sits in sandstone, the same style Kazakhstan has mined for decades at the lowest cost on earth. Surface samples have run up to 771 ppm and rock chips a short drive away up to 3,183 ppm, and nobody has ever put a drill hole through any of it.

That changes around October, when 20 to 30 holes for 5,000 metres go in with the uranium term price at US$97 a pound. Hidden Bay in Canada’s Athabasca Basin comes with the deal, on the doorstep of the world’s richest uranium mines.

POW finished its first week at 24 cents, up 20% on the IPO price. The past two times the POW team put a drill into uranium, somebody bought the company.

Two Catalysts Walk into a Lunch

We got a lunch invite this week and turned up to a room of brokers and investors, all there to hear two companies with big news due inside the next few weeks.

Albion Resources (ASX: ALB)

CEO Peter Goh went first and took the room through the drilling about to start at Gidgee, ALB's gold project in WA's East Murchison.

The tenement package sits surrounded by JORC resources, with Horizon Gold’s 2.3 million ounces at 1.9g/t on the same fault line to the south and Wiluna’s 7 million ounces up the road. The old holes on ALB’s ground came back with strong grades, and the rig starts shortly.

ALB trades at 6 cents for a market cap around $8 million, and this drill campaign is already paid for.

Botala Energy (ASX: BTE)

Kris Martinick followed and was upfront that the next fortnight decides a lot for Botala, with flow rates from its Botswana gas pilot due in a week or two.

A flow rate is how much gas a well gives up once the water is pumped off the coal seams, and a good one is what gets a gas field financed.

Botala’s current gas resource comes from under 5% of its ground, in a corner of southern Africa that keeps running out of power. BTE trades at 6.1 cents with a market cap around $25 million.

We walked out well fed with two more names on the watchlist, and we’d make room on yours. In a couple of weeks, both of these stories will look different, one way or the other.

FUN Goes Deeper at Mkanda

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) expanded its aircore drilling program at Mkanda this week, with the new rig reaching rutile the hand augers never got to.

The current resource of roughly 300 million tonnes is already one of the world's biggest for rutile, and it was built entirely from hand auger holes that stopped around 8 metres down. Most of them stopped at the water table with rutile still running under the workers' feet.

The aircore rig is averaging 22 metres in the same soft ground with rutile running to the bottom of the holes. Whatever sits between 8 and 22 metres gets added to the resource once the assays come back, and aircore is cheap drilling.

Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM) ran this play next door at Kasiya, where aircore drilling tripled the resource on its way to becoming the largest rutile deposit in the world.

FUN sits 20km down the same corridor chasing the same style of mineralisation, into a rutile market that has been short for years.

Priority assays land in November and feed an updated resource.

Drilling Update for Elk Range

Last week the rig started turning at Elk Range Mining’s (ASX: ELK) Friday gold project in Idaho, and this week we got video proof.

CEO Edward Keys, who has made camp on the floor of the mill on site, took to YouTube to walk through what the first eight diamond holes are chasing.

The last owners put a hole under the old mine that ran 110 metres at more than five grams and finished in 133 grams a tonne, then sold the place for a fraction of the US$40 million they’d spent. Keys is drilling straight back into that ground.

The eight holes add up to nearly 3,000 metres and every hit that matches the old numbers counts toward a maiden JORC resource.

This week we also saw two more directors buy shares on market, which takes the total to three. Confidence like this so soon after an IPO is rare, hats off to management.

WhiteRock Goes Bananas on Debut

We flagged WhiteRock Lithium (ASX: WLC) in last week's wrap as the lithium IPO to watch, and it ran harder than we expected. It listed at $3.25 and was knocking on $4.90 within days.

The flagship is called the Banana Project (we’d have backed it for the name alone). It’s a big slab of 100% owned ground in Quebec’s James Bay region, where some of the best lithium discoveries of the last boom were made. Every diamond hole drilled there so far has hit lithium-bearing pegmatite, and early test work points to simple, cheap processing.

Simon Hay runs it. He built the Goulamina lithium mine in Mali, which has proven a hard place to keep a mine after it’s built, and we suspect he’ll enjoy Quebec a lot more.

A $400 million lithium explorer is bigger than the stocks we usually write about, but Hay has built a mine before and every hole at Banana so far has hit. It's on the watchlist.

10X Wraps Up the Drilling at Balerion

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) pulled the rods on the six holes it drilled for its maiden program at Balerion this week.

Visible sulphides turned up in five of the six, and the last hole cut a 6.5 metre shear zone carrying zinc, lead and silver-style sulphides that looks like it thickens at depth. The assays land in four to six weeks and will settle that.

We've been staring at the core photos all week like everyone else, and they look good, but we've been burnt by shiny rock before.

In the meantime the team turns to Black Hammer, where the old-timers pulled grades up to 14% copper and 26 g/t gold.

A German Buyer Signs for a Quarter of Maniry

Evion has spent more than a year in meetings with Europe’s lenders, and most of them ended with some version of the same polite brush-off. Lovely project, call us when someone’s agreed to buy the graphite.

This week, someone did. You can find our full write up here.

A German graphite house, an established outfit that has supplied and processed flake across Europe for a long time, signed a binding deal to take about a quarter of everything Stage 1 at Maniry will dig up, every year for the first five years of the mine’s life.

Graphite that has never touched China is scarce, and the buyers who need it are locking it in years before a mine pours its first concentrate.

Each shipment sells at the market price or at a floor that covers digging it up and paying the bank, whichever is higher, so Beijing can flood the graphite market again and the bills still get paid.

Our portfolio company Evion Group (ASX: EVG) has been stacking these pieces up for a while. The mining permits landed in July after a four-year wait, and Brussels has named Maniry a strategic project, which puts the lending arms of the EU and German governments at the table.

A bank lending against a hole in the ground wants to know who’s buying what comes out of it, and now Evion can point to a signed German.

The feasibility study puts a value on Maniry at more than 10 times what the whole company trades for today. A loan offer is the next domino, and if it lands, Evion has a mine to build.

X2M Rips 350% on an AI Data Centre Deal

X2M Connect (ASX: X2M) started the week at a fifth of a cent, touched 1.2 cents by Thursday, and closed at 0.9.

Anyone holding on Monday finished the week up 350%, with close to $10 million worth of stock changing hands along the way.

The trigger was a binding agreement to deliver and manage an AI-enabled GPU data centre, with an estimated project cost north of $250 million over three to five years.

X2M expects to book that full cost as revenue and clip a margin on top, plus recurring platform and management fees for the life of the facility.

X2M has spent a decade connecting metering devices for water and energy utilities, and the pitch is that the same smarts can squeeze more compute out of every megawatt inside a data centre.

This deal is the first conversion from a roughly 150MW pipeline of Australian sites, most of them in Queensland. The agreement is conditional on a development approval, and X2M hasn’t put a megawatt figure on the facility.

49M Pulls 170 Metres of Gold in Nevada

One from outside the portfolio that caught our eye this week. 49 Metals (ASX: 49M) wrapped up its maiden drill program at Gold Mountain in Nevada and saved the best for last, 170.7 metres at 0.9g/t gold, the thickest hit the project has seen.

Another hole cut 67.1 metres at 1.7g/t around a core that ran as high as 20g/t.

Worth being clear that 170 metres is the length down the hole rather than the true width of the zone.

The company hasn’t published true widths yet, but with a 45 degree hole drilled into steep structures, our rough read is the true width is around half the downhole number, call it 60 to 80 metres. Still a serious chunk of mineralised rock.

The scorecard for the program reads 22 holes drilled, 22 hits of gold or silver. You don’t see that every day from a first pass.

Gold Mountain sits on the Walker Lane trend, one of the most productive gold belts in the US.

What the company first read as a handful of narrow structures is shaping up as a much broader system with high-grade feeders running through it, and it’s open in every direction drilled so far.

The grades outside those feeders are modest, and joining the dots will take plenty more drilling. But at high gold prices, bulk systems like this get a second look.

Follow-up drilling is planned before the end of the year, so this is one for the watchlist. 49M finished the week up 30% at 13c.

DroneShield Delivers a Record and Cops a Selldown Anyway

Last week we flagged DroneShield (ASX: DRO) as one to watch into results. It reported its best half ever and the shares fell anyway.

The company sold $126 million worth of counter-drone kit in six months (a record), but it’s spending money faster than it makes it and the half ended in a loss.

The stock dropped 10% on the day, because after doubling and doubling again, a market darling gets marked down for any imperfection it shows.

It’s also why our own drone exposure sits at the picks-and-shovels end through portfolio company KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK). Suppliers get paid for every unit that goes out the door, and with shipments starting next month, KTEK’s revenue arrives with the boom.

What to Watch Next Week

Gold ran to a three-month high this week and gave some back on Friday after the new US Fed chair talked tough on inflation and the market priced in an American rate rise as a coin flip for next month.

Higher US rates reliably knock gold around, so we’ll be watching (we’re hoping for a hold, but we’re eternal optimists).

Results are landing thick and fast across the ASX, and boards like to raise money on the back of good news, so expect a run of small-cap capital raisings in the coming weeks.

Tech and biotech had a quiet one, and in our experience a quiet week at this end of the market usually means a busy one is coming.

And the gold comp closes tomorrow. Get your guess in and send it to a mate before the door shuts.

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, 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 Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 625,000 ELK shares, 1,554,000 FUN shares, 200,000 10X shares, 625,000 POW shares, 4,500,000 EVG shares and 2,083,333 MRD performance rights at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, ELK, FUN, 10X, POW, EVG and MRD at the time of writing.

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

“The World's Largest Publicly Reported Scandium Resource” is the line MRD plastered across the top of this morning's announcement, and it had the intended effect.

Grass Patch, 25km northeast of Esperance, holds 946 million tonnes at 50.1 ppm scandium. That works out to 72,637 tonnes of scandium oxide, which is how the metal gets sold. And the whole planet only made about 80 tonnes of it last year.

Most of that 80 tonnes goes into two things.

Solid oxide fuel cells, the boxes that sit beside AI data centres and power the racks, run on a scandium ceramic. Those cells took close to half the world’s scandium last year.

Most of the rest went into aluminium. A pinch of it gives an alloy that welds without cracking, which is why it ends up in aircraft frames and defence platforms.

China mines about 80% of the world’s scandium and processes almost all of it. In April last year Beijing started requiring a licence for every kilogram leaving the country, so China now decides who gets to buy it.

That is the metal MRD now holds more of than anyone.

The Grass Patch mineralisation starts at surface and runs about 70 metres deep. Strike is more than 25km. It’s soft clay the whole way down, so it gets dug with an excavator and skips the blasting and crushing, which strips out two of the most expensive steps in building a mine.

Fifty ppm is a lower grade than Sunrise Energy Metals (ASX: SRL), the best performing stock on the ASX last year. SRL is building its mine on 414 ppm dirt at Syerston in NSW, and anyone who has looked at both deposits will spot the gap straight away.

Grass Patch gets away with it because an excavator does the mining and because of a leach process called Selectro (more on that soon).

We added MRD to our portfolio in March for three critical minerals it has in one deposit. What it didn't have was a way to get most of the scandium out of the clay. Fifty ppm across a billion tonnes is a big number on paper, but hydrochloric acid leaves nearly three quarters of it in the rock.

Then Chris Larder joined as CTO and brought Selectro with him, the leach process he’d spent a decade building and MRD lodged a patent on last week. In its first test it pulled 80% of the scandium out of raw Grass Patch dirt. Hydrochloric acid got 27.6% from the same sample.

The tonnes make the headline and Selectro is what turns them into a possible mine, and that pairing is why we’re happy holding a $42.5 million company at 3.2 cents as we type.

Investor Webinar

Mount Ridley is holding an investor webinar on Thursday, 27 August at 10:00am AWST (12:00pm AEST). Managing Director Allister Caird will run through Grass Patch, Selectro, and take questions live.

It’s an MRD event rather than one of ours. Registration is free via the link below.

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_WPMqVaqSTNemqQJgmyMZfQ

The Tonnes Came Out of a Storage Shed

Every explorer has boxes of old drill samples sitting somewhere. MRD's had scandium in them.

Between 2014 and 2022 the company drilled 410 holes at Grass Patch looking for nickel and copper, and the base metals never came in. The pulps, which are the crushed leftovers the lab sends back, went into storage. Nobody assayed them for scandium because nobody was looking for it.

MRD pulled 3,271 of those pulps out and sent them to ALS in Perth to test for scandium. The resource was 368 million tonnes in January. It's 946 million today, and the company got there without turning a drill bit.

We’ve watched plenty of $40 million explorers raise money to drill holes that go nowhere. MRD grew its resource two-and-a-half times for the cost of assays.

The old holes were good ones, too. One came back with 20 metres at 115.3 ppm scandium from four metres down, another with 22 metres at 90.1 ppm, both well above the 50.1 ppm average.

Across both blocks the clay mostly runs 40 to 60 ppm, with patches over 80 that sit in continuous bands. Those two holes are the best of a consistent lot.

A lot of the old holes ended in scandium. Aircore rigs stop when they hit hard rock, so the hole finishes wherever the clay does, and the scandium was still there at the bottom.

The system is open below them and open to the south-west for about 4km off Block 1 alone, so there is more scandium down there before Mount Ridley tests anything new.

Roughly 80% of the tenure has never been tested for scandium at all, and seven gravity targets covering about 33km of strike sit outside the current resource, already mapped.

One Leach Circuit for All Three Metals

Three critical minerals sit mixed through the same weathered clay at Grass Patch, not in separate zones you would have to mine apart.

Alongside the scandium sits a 122.5 million tonne heavy rare earth resource at 889 ppm total rare earth oxide with a 41% heavy split, and a gallium resource running to 838.7 million tonnes across the broader project.

All of it comes out of the same pit, and all three are metals the US and Europe are trying to source outside China.

Most explorers holding that combination end up making a hard choice. You design your processing plant around whichever metal pays best, you build it for that metal, and everything else either drops out as a low-value byproduct or stays in the tailings dam where it earns nothing.

The second Selectro test, run earlier this month, suggests Mount Ridley gets to skip that choice. It pulled 80% of the scandium, 77 to 83% of the principal heavy rare earths, 70 to 77% of the light rare earths and around 56% of the gallium out of the same untreated feed in a single leach circuit.

The hydrochloric acid baseline, the traditional method, run on portions of the identical composite sample, recovered 27.6% of the scandium and no gallium at all.

If scandium prices run because the US keeps putting money into supply, Grass Patch leans into scandium. If the heavy rare earths do the running because dysprosium and terbium stay in short supply, the same pit and the same circuit lean towards those. Gallium comes along either way.

Mount Ridley can follow whichever market is paying best at the time. Most explorers lock in their commodity bet years before they produce anything.

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Washington is Writing Cheques for Scandium

Every kilogram of scandium in circulation today arrives as a byproduct of something else. There is no dedicated scandium mine operating anywhere in the world, so supply stays flat no matter what demand does.

On August 10 the US Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital signed a conditional 25-year loan of up to US$400 million with Sunrise Energy Metals, and took first call on everything Syerston produces before the project has produced anything.

Syerston is designed to make 60 tonnes of scandium oxide a year against global production of about 80 tonnes, and the market now values Sunrise at $2.8 billion.

We first covered Surise in April, then again in July, when it had already risen more than 2,000% in a year and signed a supply option with Lockheed Martin. What it shows is the price the market puts on a Western scandium story once it starts to work.

Mount Ridley sits at $42.5 million, roughly one 66th of that, holding the largest reported scandium resource on the planet.

Sunrise is ahead, with an ore reserve and a flowsheet, plus a US government loan behind it. The gap between $2.8 billion and $42.5 million is the whole reason we own MRD.

What We Are Watching

Mount Ridley has put out four announcements this month, the phosphate mineralogy work, the Selectro results, the patent lodgement and now this resource.

Several work programs are running at once, so the next few months should keep producing news.

Density testwork sounds like the dullest line in the announcement and it is the one that lifts this resource out of the inferred category, the softest classification the JORC code allows.

Phase 2 of the re-assay program is already underway across the rest of the Grass Patch pulps, and after what Phase 1 delivered we like our chances.

Flotation testwork comes next to check the mineralogy, and then Selectro gets run over the upgraded ore to see how much further those recoveries stretch.

Scoping study talks are running with several engineering firms to cost a demonstration plant. Mount Ridley has also started testing the Selectro chemistry on other deposit types, and if it works on someone else’s deposit, MRD can license it.

A batch of Grass Patch ore is sitting on a bench at Fraunhofer in Germany right now. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has signed a materials transfer agreement, and Lawrence Livermore is still in the mix.

It’s a lot of serious laboratory attention for a $42.5 million company.

Managing director Allister Caird and his team found the biggest scandium resource in the world in boxes of drill samples the company had already paid for. We're happy to sit tight and wait for the rest of the shed.

General advice warning

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

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

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China’s building reactors by the dozen, and the US has set itself the job of quadrupling its nuclear fleet by 2050.

Microsoft is paying to switch Three Mile Island back on so its data centres never lose power, and Amazon, Meta and Google have all signed reactor deals of their own.

And all of it comes back to one fuel the world suddenly wants a lot more of than it’s digging out of the ground.

Uranium.

Meet our latest portfolio addition: Powerhaus Uranium (ASX: POW). It starts trading at 10am AWST today.

POW has ground in Argentina and Canada, with Argentina the main prize.

Managing Director Siobhan Lancaster told us you can dig a small hole there, reach in, and pull out uranium that's yellow against the dirt.

Lancaster was part of the Extract Resources team that found the Husab deposit in Namibia and sold the company for $2.2 billion, then ran 92 Energy, which made a uranium discovery in Canada on its fourth drill hole and was taken over inside three years of listing.

Now she’s holding yellow rock at a project that gets its first drill hole within weeks.

Alongside her sits a deep bench of all-stars who have been on discovery teams for some of the standout uranium finds of the past decade. They've found it (and sold it) before and now get to start again from the ground floor.

Listing today at 20 cents, POW has a market cap of $17 million, with $9 million raised in the IPO and most of it headed straight into the ground. Strip out the cash and the market is valuing the whole company at single-digit millions.

While Australia's government will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting nuclear is the fuel of the future, the rest of the world has already made up its mind.

So have we.

Uranium is at its highest price since 2008 and POW has picked up ground where it sits at surface. It’s hard to top that.

Let’s dig in.

The Reactors are Getting Built This Time

Germany spent 20 years phasing nuclear out and switched off its last three reactors in 2023. Within a year it was buying French nuclear power across the border to keep the lights on.

China waved through eight new reactors worth about US$25 billion at the end of July.

Donald Trump signed executive orders last year targeting a quadrupling of nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050, with US$80 billion behind 10 new reactors and more money to rebuild domestic enrichment.

Reports of nuclear’s death, it turns out, were greatly exaggerated.

And from 2028, Russian uranium is banned from the US, pulling a slab of supply out of the Western market.

Over in Europe, France is pouring concrete on six of its reactors, with an option on eight more. Britain is about to sign off the money on its next plant, Poland's building its first reactors, and the EU has lifted its long-term nuclear target for the first time in years.

India runs less than 9 gigawatts of nuclear today and has set itself a target of 100 by 2047.

That means building close to 100 reactors' worth of capacity in two decades. It even passed a law opening the sector to private money for the first time and ending the government's monopoly on building reactors.

A reactor runs for decades once it's switched on, and it needs fresh uranium every year of its life. The utilities behind this list will be signing fuel contracts long before the concrete is set.

Big Tech Starts Buying Reactors

In 1979 a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down. It’s still the worst nuclear accident in American history, and for a long time was used as the counter-argument to the benefits of nuclear.

Microsoft just signed a deal to restart it, and is contracted to buy everything it produces for the next 20 years. First power is expected next year.

The technology has moved a long way in 50 years. Nuclear now sits alongside wind and solar as one of the safest ways to generate power (measured by the grim-sounding stat of deaths per unit of electricity produced).

That’s part of why AI companies are comfortable going all-in. The other part is that a data centre runs flat out 24 hours a day, and tech bros like Google’s head of energy have admitted a carbon-free grid will take “more than just wind, solar, and lithium-ion storage”.

To underline the nuclear stampede, consider what’s happened in just the past two years:

• Amazon locked in 1.9 gigawatts of reactor output in Pennsylvania through to 2042, and tipped US$700 million into a developer of small modular reactors

• Meta signed 20 years of output from a reactor in Illinois, with commitments of up to 6.6 gigawatts across four suppliers

• Google ordered seven small reactors of its own, with the first due to switch on by 2030

• OpenAI signed a 20-year lease last Monday on an Ohio data centre that will scale to 8 gigawatts, the largest AI facility planned anywhere in the world.

All up, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google have signed 13 nuclear deals for close to 10 gigawatts of power, all of it since 2024.

Every one of those reactors needs a whole lot of uranium.

Why the Price Keeps Climbing

When Siobhan Lancaster listed 92 Energy five years ago, uranium was selling for roughly US$32 a pound.

Today the term price sits at US$97, its highest since 2008, and she puts the difference down to a decade where the industry barely explored and barely discovered.

So while the reactors have kept multiplying, the mines have stayed still.

Uranium gets bought differently to oil or gold so those numbers need a quick explanation. Power utilities sign their fuel deals years in advance, locking in five to 10 years of supply at a time at the term price. The spot price covers one-off parcels, and it’s sitting lower, near US$88.

The term price is the one that counts, because that’s where the reactors buy their fuel.

The World Nuclear Association has uranium demand hitting around 390 million pounds a year by 2040 as its base case, and 520 million if things run hot. Mines dug up roughly 132 million pounds in 2024.

The world will need three to four times the current uranium supply in just over a decade, and mines can take 10 years or more to permit and build, so the gap can't close quickly no matter what the price does.

It's about the most lopsided supply and demand setup we can find on the ASX, and it's why we went looking for a uranium company to back.

During the cheap years the utilities got slack and stopped locking in supply, and by 2025 they'd only secured 48% of their future needs, down from 56% the year before. Now they're all scrambling back at once, into a market that can't fill them fast.

The banks that trade uranium for a living have put out their forecasts. We don't make price calls at Equities Club, so here's what the pros are saying:

Macquarie, Morgan Stanley, RBC and Canaccord are bullish too, though they mostly show it by backing uranium producers like Cameco instead of publishing a price forecast.

Two Countries Feed the World’s Reactors

The world’s supply of uranium is controlled by only a few.

Kazakhstan digs up close to 40% of the world’s supply (and it barely digs at all). The method they use is called in-situ recovery. They drill wells into porous sandstone, pump a mild solution down, let it dissolve the uranium out of the sand, and pump the loaded liquid back to surface.

Barely any rock gets moved, which is why it’s the cheapest way to produce uranium anywhere in the world. Kazakhstan’s state producer mined it for US$18 a pound last year.

It's also the method POW is chasing in Argentina, in the same style of sandstone (more on that later).

Canada’s Athabasca Basin supplies the high-grade end, home to Cameco’s McArthur River and Cigar Lake, the richest uranium mines going. Namibia holds Husab and Rössing, the two big open pits in the desert.

Past that short list, the world has leaned on stockpiles built up over the years that are running down.

With supply that concentrated, one bad week can spook the whole market, which we saw in July.

Cameco shut mining at Cigar Lake, the highest-grade uranium mine on earth, for two weeks after the mill it feeds ran out of sulphuric acid. The shortage traced all the way back to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is where a huge chunk of the world's sulphur ships through.

We covered Hormuz when it shut (like everyone else with a publish button), and we’ll admit uranium wasn’t on our list of casualties.

The acid problem reached Kazakhstan too where Kazatomprom is the world's biggest uranium producer and runs its wells on sulphuric acid. Its cost of production jumped 37% in six months mostly due to the acid shortage, and the plant it's building to make its own acid won't be ready until late 2027 at the earliest. So it's keeping production flat until then, even with uranium at an 18-year high.

The biggest producers on earth can't lift supply. That leaves the door wide open for whoever finds the next deposit.

Argentina Just Changed the Rules

Siobhan Lancaster sat down with Philippe Portella, a geologist who’d spent 35 years hunting uranium for French nuclear group Areva, and asked him where the next giant uranium deposit was hiding.

Argentina, he said. A massive Kazakh-style roll front system that nobody had gone after.

Lancaster told us her honest reaction was “Argentina, that’s a bit interesting, I’ll have to have a think about that.”

Fair enough too. Argentina used to be radioactive to investors. Pun intended.

The country has defaulted on its debt three times this century. In 2002 the government cut the peso loose from the US dollar and froze bank accounts, and inflation skyrocketed. Building a mine there was a bet on the government as much as the ground.

But president Javier Milei has spent two years decontaminating the place, and the centrepiece is a law called RIGI. It hands large projects up to 30 years of locked-in tax and regulatory stability.

It’s a written promise that the rules won’t move under your feet, and so far it’s worked.

BHP and Lundin signed up their US$9.7 billion Vicuña copper project last month, and Rio Tinto has signed up its Rincon lithium project. All up, 16 projects worth close to US$30 billion have been approved so far, with another 25 waiting.

In December the Economy Ministry said that it wants to turn Argentina into the "Saudi Arabia of uranium".

Governments announce things all the time, but this one created a new department the same week to run its nuclear push.

Argentina has mined uranium before, from seven small historic operations, and it runs three nuclear reactors today. The ministry puts the country's known uranium at around 36,000 tonnes, and the modern exploration tools this team used to find Husab in Namibia and Gemini in Canada have never been run over any of it.

Chubut Province, where POW's Argentine projects sit, has banned open-pit mining and cyanide since 2003. In-situ recovery uses neither, which is why Powerhaus bought ISR-style ground there.

The Five Reasons We’re Backing Powerhaus

1. A Board That Has Done This Twice Before

Powerhaus is the 92 Energy team and the Extract Resources team joining up for another crack, and Lancaster’s CV is the spine of it.

At Extract she worked on the $2.2 billion sale of Husab, a deal that got over the line with Fukushima unfolding in the middle of it. If you can sell a uranium company for billions while the industry’s worst accident since Chernobyl is worldwide news, you can sell one in this market.

She then founded 92 Energy with Richard Pearce, now Powerhaus’ chair. She ran it, he chaired it, they were drilling within two months of listing, made a discovery on the fourth hole, and the company was taken over inside three years.

Portella is technical director, and his career took in the Kazakh roll fronts and Argentine uranium. He’s personally worked the very deposit type Powerhaus is drilling for.

Steve Blower sat on the discovery teams for three separate Athabasca uranium finds, IsoEnergy’s Hurricane, Denison’s Gryphon and 92 Energy’s Gemini.

Andrew Penkethman ran the feasibility study at Husab and drilled out the resource, and now leads Ardea Resources.

Sashi Davies was Extract’s head of marketing and knows the utilities and traders who buy uranium, having worked with the likes of Boss Energy.

This group has taken uranium companies from first drill hole to takeover twice. Now they’re starting a third time, from 20 cents.

2. A Very Big Target, at a Very Small Price

The flagship is Malbec, around 2,000 square kilometres of southern Chubut, held through four granted permits and 16 applications.

Groundwater picks up dissolved uranium as it seeps through porous sandstone, carries it along, and then hits a patch of ground where the chemistry flips.

At that boundary the uranium falls out of the water and stacks up in a long curved band. Geologists call it a roll front.

Kazakhstan is riddled with them, some running for hundreds of kilometres, and they feed 40% of the world’s uranium.

And the Kazakh comparison has independent backing. The IAEA, the UN's nuclear agency, has published a cross-section putting Chubut's geology side by side with the Kazakh basins.

The uranium sits at the boundary between two types of sandstone, and the colour of the sand tells you which type you've drilled into. So every hole tells you which side of the boundary you're standing on, and you step the next one towards it.

Powerhaus is targeting a formation about 100 metres thick, with the uranium expected to start shallow, from under 50 metres down to around 250, the depth and soft ground that ISR runs best in.

And roll-front mineralisation has already been exposed on the same trend just north of Malbec, with the host formation interpreted to run straight under Powerhaus ground.

The first holes ever drilled into it go in early October, a 5,000 metre drill campaign to be exact, and the whole thing sits inside a company priced at little more than its cash.

3. Uranium You Can Already See

There’s uranium sitting at surface on Powerhaus ground.

The team was following up an anomaly from an airborne survey flown back in the 1970s. They walked the ground on the first site visit, got to a riverbed, and there it was, yellow uranium mineral about 30 centimetres down.

The sampling since has come back as high as 771 parts per million U3O8, and shallow trenches show the mineralisation carrying down to at least two metres.

A short drive away at El Tropezon, rock chips have run up to 3,183 parts per million, and a channel sample cut 1,370 parts per million over half a metre, all sitting on a 1970s airborne anomaly that has never had a hole put through it.

A caveat on those numbers. Grab and rock-chip samples are hand-picked from the best-looking material a geologist can find at surface. They show uranium is there and where to drill. The drill program will tell us how much.

4. The Drills Start Within Weeks

Powerhaus starts surface sampling, mapping and geophysics at Malbec Central straight after listing, then moves to a program of 20 to 30 holes into the roll-front targets, lined up for early October once the exploration permit lands.

The permit has already been submitted, and the 5,000m drill campaign will follow. Sonic drilling is set aside for the shallow calcrete targets. For a company that only started trading today, first assays are a matter of weeks to a couple of months out.

Plenty of explorers list and then ask you to sit tight for a year before anything spins. This one will know by Christmas whether the uranium at surface keeps going at depth, with the term price at an 18-year high while it finds out.

5. A Second Shot in the Athabasca

Powerhaus has bought Hidden Bay in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin, the same province that hosts Cameco’s best mines.

It's home ground for this team. Steve Blower's three Athabasca discoveries include Gemini, the one that got 92 Energy taken over.

It sits about 20 kilometres from the Rabbit Lake deposit and on the Dragon Lake fault, the structure that controls the Rabbit Lake, Horseshoe and Raven deposits.

A hole drilled by the previous owner in 2024 cut anomalous uranium of 0.38 metres at 227.6 parts per million inside a graphitic-pyrite shear zone. That’s the style of ground that hosts the basin’s biggest deposits, NexGen’s Arrow among them.

Powerhaus completed the purchase earlier this month, and at today's price you're paying for Argentina with Canada thrown in.

What Could Go Wrong

It's important we're straight about the risks too.

Every grade in this article comes from grab samples, rock chips, shallow trenching or old surveys, and Powerhaus has no resource to stand behind any of it yet. The first holes at Malbec decide whether the surface uranium goes anywhere.

The whole portfolio is built around ISR because Chubut bans open pits and cyanide, so a discovery that only worked as an open pit would stay in the ground. Provincial mining law also moves with the politics, and Chubut politics have a history.

Milei’s settings are friendly to capital today, but you’ve read the history above, and RIGI has never been through a change of government.

And like every small-cap explorer alive, Powerhaus will be back for more money down the track to turn targets into a resource and, one day, a mine.

We weighed all of that against uranium sitting at surface and a team that has sold two uranium companies. We’re comfortable being early.

What We’re Watching

The team lands in Argentina within a fortnight of listing, weather permitting, so the news should start early. Here’s the checklist we’ll be tracking:

• Boots on ground at Malbec, with surface sampling, mapping and geophysics kicking off straight away

• The drilling permit for Malbec Central, already submitted and expected in the coming months

• The rig turning on the first roll-front holes, slated for around October

• First assays after that, the numbers that decide whether the surface uranium keeps going at depth

• Geophysics at Hidden Bay, working up drill targets on the Canadian ground

We’ll cover every step of it here.

The Bottom Line

Sometime in the next few weeks a rig will pull up on a patch of southern Argentina where a handheld detector already goes off at your feet, and start drilling to find out how deep it goes.

The roll fronts it’s chasing are the kind Kazakhstan has mined for decades at the lowest cost on earth, and when they work, they run for kilometres through the sandstone.

If the drills hit uranium and keep hitting it along the channel, POW stops being a $17 million company in a hurry.

We’re in at 20 cents, with the cash covering more than half the market cap, while the term price sits at an 18-year high and the reactors keep multiplying faster than the mines.

Argentina has spent two years rolling out the red carpet for mining money, and it would love nothing more than a uranium story it can point to.

The last time Siobhan Lancaster stood on ground like this early, it ended in a takeover. The time before that, it ended in a $2.2 billion sale.

Now she’s standing on it again, holding yellow rock, with the drills weeks away.

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 625,000 POW shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by POW 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.

A German graphite house has signed a binding deal to buy at least 10,000 tonnes of flake graphite concentrate a year from the Maniry project, for five years from first production.

At the USD $1,448/t average graphite basket price used in Maniry’s DFS, that minimum commitment equates to roughly USD $72 million in gross sales over the initial five-year term.

Roughly a quarter of everything Stage 1 will dig up, now sold before the first sod is turned

Every tonne of it sells at the market price or at a price covering Maniry's production costs and bank payments, whichever is higher.

Evion has spent more than a year in meetings with Europe’s lenders, and we’d wager most of them ended with some version of the same polite brush-off. Lovely project, call us when someone’s agreed to buy the graphite.

Someone just has.

EVG isn't naming the buyer, what they can say is the buyer an established German outfit that has supplied and processed natural flake graphite across Europe and beyond for a long time.

Non-Chinese flake graphite is scarce, and the buyers who need it are locking it in years early.

EVG trades at 2.1 cents, which puts the whole company at around $18 million, a $13 mil EV when you include the near $5 mil cash position. Against what has been signed in the last month, the market has some catching up to do.

The Maniry Project

Maniry is a flake graphite deposit in the far south of Madagascar, 100% owned by EVG. The mining permits arrived in July, nearly four years after the paperwork went in, making Maniry the first critical minerals project approved under the country’s new mining code.

Graphite is the anode, the side of the battery that holds the charge while your EV sits on the driveway. Each electric car carries 50 to 55 kilograms of it, against eight to 13 kilograms of lithium.

Most graphite is synthetic, cooked from petroleum coke at 3,000 degrees on Chinese coal power, which is a strange way to build a clean car.

Natural flake graphite comes out of the ground with a fraction of the carbon footprint, and European carmakers under orders from Brussels to cut battery emissions are paying up for it. Maniry is the natural kind.

The deposit holds 40 million tonnes of ore at 6.5% graphite, with a reserve of 16.2 million tonnes at 6.58% inside it, which is the part proven to be mineable at a profit.

The feasibility study laid out a 21-year mine producing around 39,000 tonnes of concentrate a year in Stage 1, stepping up to 56,000 tonnes from the fourth year. Stage 1 costs US$79.2 million to build and the expansion another US$24.6 million. The study values all of it at US$204.8 million after tax.

The study put a 3.8-year payback on the project, meaning the mine earns back its build cost in under four years and spends the next 17 making money.

Put those figures against EVG’s $18 million market cap, or a $13 mil EV when you include the $5 mil cash, and the gap is wide enough to drive an EV truck through.

What the Germans Signed

Each shipment is sold at the greater of two numbers.

The first is the published market price for comparable concentrate, delivered to German ports. The second is a floor pegged to what it costs Maniry to dig the graphite up and pay the bank.

If Chinese spot rips, EVG gets the market price. If Beijing floods the market again, the floor still covers the bills. The house never loses.

The long-form contract is due within six months. Graphite only ships once the board votes to build the mine, and that vote waits on the funding. The build conditions carry no deadline, which is standard for a deal signed this far ahead of first production.

Around three quarters of Stage 1 is still unsold, on purpose. Round says talks with other customers and strategic partners are continuing (a strategic partner being a customer who invests in the mine as well as buying from it), and they now negotiate against a signed German contract.

The Graphite Market

China mines around 80% of the world's natural graphite and controls close to 98% of the anode market once synthetic is counted.

Beijing restricted exports at the end of 2023 and the West panicked about supply, before Beijing flooded the market anyway. Prices fell and every Western graphite project hunting for finance stalled.

The controls on shipments to the US are suspended until November 27 this year, and nobody knows what Beijing does after that. Probably including Beijing.

That whipsaw is what Maniry's floor price was built for. The producer gets repaid whatever the spot price is doing.

Europe has kept hunting for flake that never touched China, and Brussels named Maniry a strategic project under its Critical Raw Materials Act in June 2025, the only graphite project in Africa on the list. That status brings a seat at the table with the European Investment Bank and KfW, the lending arms of the EU and the German government.

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Building a Mine in Madagascar

Madagascar has dug graphite for more than a century and digs more of it than anywhere on earth (bar China).

Rio Tinto and Sumitomo run the island’s two biggest mines and pay around a quarter of the government’s tax take between them, so the state has every reason to keep its miners happy.

The new government approved a foreign-owned graphite mine within nine months of taking office, under a mining code that lets EVG own Maniry outright and lock the tax regime in five-year blocks.

The Financing Path

A mine this size gets built with bank debt, and a bank lending against a hole in the ground wants to know who's buying what comes out of it.

The Germans just answered.

The feasibility study has been done since 2022. The permits landed in July. The offtake was the piece the lenders kept asking for, and the next thing to land is a loan offer. After that comes a final investment decision, and after that, a 21-year mine.

There's a buyer even closer to home too. Evion's half-owned Panthera joint venture in India has been making a profit selling expandable graphite into the US and Europe since early 2025.

Expandable graphite is flake treated to swell under heat, the material that seals a fire door shut, and it fetches more than double the price of raw concentrate. Panthera can take Maniry's flake as feedstock, so EVG half-owns one of its own future customers.

What we’re watching

The long-form contract is due within six months, so the word “definitive” turning up in an announcement before February is the first thing on the list.

A second buyer is next, and Round says those talks are live.

The big one is a funding announcement from the EIB or KfW. A number or a date on the debt package gives Maniry a build date, and at 2.1 cents the market is still pricing EVG as if the mine may never get built.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

On Thursday, Australia reached a debt level with an eye-watering 12 zeros on the end, marking a speed-run of IOUs handed out since April 21, 2006.

That was the day perennial PM bridesmaid Peter Costello declared Australia debt-free, calling it “the day we pay off the mortgage”.

It seems almost quaint now, and in stark contrast to our current treasurer being ‘community-noted’ on X in response to his claims of austere fiscal management.

We enter the mire of politics only to re-emphasise what it usually means for gold, which ripped this week to be back above US$4,600. Australia is now paying roughly $18 billion a year in interest, and the US just crossed US$40 trillion in debt (and climbing, adding about $90,000 every second).

It has plenty of investors sprinting to gold as a safe haven, which may soon become a stampede if the rate of borrowing continues.

Outside the shiny stuff, here’s what caught our eye this week:

• ELK turns the rig at Friday with the gold price surging

• MRD patents Selectro, and ZMI chases the same metal out of smelter waste

• Unitree’s 460% IPO, and why the robots need rutile

• Uranium’s term price says utilities are worried about supply

• Copper overtakes iron ore at BHP for the first time in history

• Moderna’s 177% day as ASX biotechs expect a bid

• CSL loses US$2.6 billion and has its best day in 20 years

• DroneShield now the most shorted stock on the ASX

Let’s look at gold first, as Washington leans on its own bond market.

Gold’s Back

Gold clocked its third straight week of gains and its highest price since early June this week, as the US intervened in bond markets to help put downward pressure on the US dollar.

As mentioned, the US is carrying a mountain of debt, and the rate it's paying to borrow hit its highest level since ‘07 this week. To put in context, the interest payments are second only to social security on the US government's budget line items.

In response, the Treasury said it was doubling the rate at which it was buying its own bonds back.

The US borrows money by selling bonds to investors. Now it is buying some of those bonds back, and because it doesn’t have a spare pile of cash sitting around, it is issuing more bonds to help fund it.

Put simply, the US is taking on new debt to buy back old debt.

It’s because buying bonds creates more demand for them, which pushes their price up and their yields down. And lower yields mean cheaper borrowing costs for the US government.

It’s a convoluted way of trying to make America’s enormous debt pile cheaper to service without spending less or taxing more, neither of which politicians particularly like.

Many in the market read it as a government struggling with its own borrowing costs and putting its thumb on the scales instead (i.e. panicking).

Gold ripped in response, while the US dollar and bond yields fell.

In our portfolio we’ve focused on historical mines drilling proven ground that some old-timers never quite finished digging.

We’re bullish on Elk Range Mining (ASX: ELK), which has its rig turning at its Friday mine in Idaho as we type (more on that below).

The other one some have forgotten is Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL), which starts drilling in late September beneath Mt Egerton in Victoria, a mine that produced 1.29 million ounces at around 12 grams per tonne before water shut it in 1906.

With borrowing looking like a runaway train and gold responding in kind, any hits at the above projects could be well rewarded.

ELK Turns the Rig at Friday

Our new addition, Elk Range Mining now has the rods spinning in the Gem State (Idaho), so called due to its abundance of precious and semi-precious minerals.

One historical drill hole from beneath its Friday mine ran at more than five grams of gold a tonne over 110 metres, with that hole ending in 133g/t before the drillers called it a day.

Nobody has been back to find out how much deeper it goes, with Elk now picking up right where they left off.

Phase 1 is eight diamond drill holes for nearly 3,000m of drilling with two more on standby if early results warrant it. ELK will be able to see the veins up close from the solid core it pulls out of the ground, helping it work out which way the gold-bearing structures are heading.

The info gleaned from that then helps decide where Phase 2 drills go later this year, when the rig shuffles underground into tunnels the last owner cut.

Every hit confirming the old numbers also gets Friday closer to its first JORC resource, the ASX standard for how much gold a company can claim is in the ground.

The previous owners spent US$40m on the site before offloading it to ELK for a fraction of that when their ramp-up to production stalled, and the owners before them tallied up the resource under an overseas code.

CEO Edward Keys is on the ground in Idaho, or rather on the mill floor where he’s set up a sleeping bag, and his excitement emanates from his pores in every conversation, such is his confidence after leaving Brightstar Resources to run this new endeavour.

The IPO selling we flagged last week looks to be flushed out with the stock finishing back at 20c on Friday and the screen looking strong.

It’s now a $25 million company with $10 million in cash, drilling a historically producing high-grade system with gold worth more than twice what it was the day the last truck left.

You can read our full drilling write-up here.

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MRD Locks up Selectro

We wrote last week of Selectro passing its first test at Mount Ridley Mines’ Grass Patch project, and now the company has lodged a patent application over the leach process its CTO spent more than a decade developing.

For those who missed it, Selectro pulled 83% of the heavy rare earths, 80% of the scandium, 72.5% of the light rare earths and 56% of the gallium out of raw dirt from Mount Ridley Mines’ (ASX: MRD) project just north of Esperance.

This sits in contrast to the standard hydrochloric acid method, which was run on the same material under the same conditions, and recovered no gallium at all.

MRD owns the technology through its subsidiary Mount Ridley Tech, and the patent filing gives them 12 months to extend protection around the world.

Selectro can be considered a company asset in its own right, pulling four critical minerals out of one feed stream. It also runs on cheaper chemicals than acid leaching and recycles them in a closed loop, so the potential is boundless.

MRD can run the process on Grass Patch or license it to another company’s deposit. Either way, it’s a path to revenue.

Conversations with third parties about test work and collaboration have started, according to managing director Allister Caird, and with the patent lodged MRD can have those conversations without any risk of losing the recipe.

A year ago this was a rare earths explorer with a big deposit near Esperance. Now it has a deposit and a process other people might want to pay for.

Uranium: The Price Nobody is Watching

The rate at which uranium mines are being built is lagging the rate of nuclear reactors by some margin, and is why many are already paying big to lock in fuel for the coming decade.

While uranium spot sits around US$87.75 a pound, almost nobody buys uranium at spot. Power companies buy their fuel in deals that are signed years in advance and lock in deliveries five to ten years before they’re needed.

The price they’re paying for that necessity right now is US$97 a pound, a 10.5% premium.

It shows that utilities don’t think enough uranium will exist in the coming years, and the Bank of America and RBC echo their thoughts, predicting US$130 a pound by 2027, and lifting its long-term target to US$110 respectively.

Supply will stay tight as Kazakhstan produces around 40% of the world’s uranium and is keeping production at current levels, while Cigar Lake in Canada lost output to a sulphuric acid shortage in July.

It comes as the World Nuclear Association says global nuclear capacity will double by 2040, taking annual uranium requirements from about 69,000 tonnes now to more than 150,000.

The US, Canada and China are all deep in the reactor arms race, with the Americans committing US$17.5 billion to 10 new reactors, Canada planning for the same number by 2040, and China recently approving another eight.

Anyone who makes a uranium discovery in a stable jurisdiction over the next few years will have utilities and financiers lining up, and the market is already rewarding the juniors that look like they might.

We’re actively looking for companies to add to our portfolio.

Unitree Lists, and the Robots Need Titanium

China’s biggest humanoid robot maker made a lazy 460% gain on day one of trading on the Chinese stock exchange on Wednesday.

Opening at US$22 a share, the company finished the day a tick under US$125, and propelled its founder Wang Xingxing to a US$16 billion net worth.

Unitree sells robot dogs from US$2,700, its G1 humanoid for US$13,500 and shipped more than 5,500 humanoids last year.

The cheap humanoids on the market today are built from aluminium and steel, but makers are looking for better options.

Engineers who pulled apart a G1 this year suggested its steel joint parts be swapped for titanium to shed 35% of the weight

Unitree's bigger, higher-performance robot (the GD01), is already built with titanium alloy in the parts that carry the load.

Titanium is preferred for use in robots’ load-bearing joints because nothing else matches its strength for its weight.

Forbes recently cited a forecast of global humanoid shipments that expected them to climb from 20,000 last year to 1.2 million by 2030.

Say each of those carries 2kg of titanium. Making that 2kg takes close to 4kg of natural rutile, the mineral titanium comes from, so 1.2 million robots would need about 4,800 tonnes of it a year.

The whole world digs up around 450,000 tonnes of natural rutile a year, down 44% from 2017. The gap has been filled with processed, lower-grade alternatives, and buyers in aerospace and welding, who need the purest titanium, only use natural rutile.

Robot makers chasing the lightest, strongest parts will want the same high-grade material, and the US produces none of its own titanium metal.

We're backing Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN), which now sits on one of the six biggest natural rutile deposits in the world at its Mkanda project in Malawi. US investor WNDRCO has already put $8.6 million into the company to get that rutile into American supply chains.

A top-six global rutile deposit with American money on the register and assays due this quarter, all for a $39 million market cap, is the sort of mismatch we spend our time looking for.

Copper is the Main Game at BHP

For the first time in history, copper has made BHP more money than iron ore.

It delivered 54% of the group’s earnings (US$18 billion) for the year to June, with BHP clearing roughly 70 cents of every dollar of copper it sold before the taxman and the accountants took their cut. Iron ore had a record year in the Pilbara and still came second.

It’s all downstream of a ripping copper market, which now sits above US$14,000 a tonne after its seventh straight week of gains. It hit record highs earlier this month, up 45% year-on-year, and could keep going.

Chile, the world’s biggest producer, expects output to fall 2.6% this year because of problems at its mines, and China’s smelters are cutting production because they can’t get enough raw ore to feed them.

BHP is now putting more than half of its future spending into copper, with projects in Chile, Argentina and South Australia lined up to lift production by around half by the mid-2030s.

Rio announced similar in February, leaning on its Mongolian copper mine as Pilbara costs crept up.

For all the copper bulls out there (and us writing this wrap), your argument just got stronger. The two biggest miners on the ASX are steering their money into the same metal and, by all reports, shopping for more because they can't find enough of their own.

Juniors with drills turning on real copper targets are the cheapest way into that shortfall, and we expect the majors to keep paying for discoveries.

CSL Loses US$2.6 Billion and Has its Best Day in 20 Years

CSL reported a US$2.6 billion annual loss this week, the biggest in its history, and the stock responded by jumping 17% before lunch and clocking its best single day move in more than two decades.

It makes no sense on the face of it, but let us explain.

CSL collects blood plasma and turns it into medicines, with a vaccine arm on the side, and is Australia’s biggest healthcare company. It started the week valued at around $65 billion.

This week it wrote US$7.1 billion off the books (most of it against a Swiss kidney business it paid close to US$12 billion for and has regretted ever since), which is where the loss comes from. No money left the company.

The day-to-day business actually made US$3.1 billion in profit, a touch less than last year but more than analysts expected.

CSL also told investors to expect profit to grow around 5% next year when the market had pencilled in 2%, and said its core plasma business grew 7% in the second half.

After two years of bad news and a share price halved, it was the first sign the bleeding may have stopped.

The write-downs were flagged in CSL’s May update so didn’t shock anyone and share prices are usually forward looking, moving on what is expected to come next.

The same thing happens at our end of the market when a stock sells off on a decent drill result because everyone saw it coming.

CSL is still down around 21% for the year, so one good day hasn’t fixed two bad years.

The biggest healthcare name on the ASX turning up is good news for every biotech below it though.

Moderna Just Had the Best Day in Biotech History

Moderna earned worldwide brand recognition during Covid so you’d be forgiven for thinking it had peaked.

On Wednesday, it defied the deniers and put on 177% in a single session, behaving more like a micro-cap who hit it big than a US$25 billion company that skyrocketed to almost US$70 billion by the end of the day.

It was off the back of one groundbreaking trial result.

The trial followed more than 1,100 people who'd had a melanoma removed. Half got the standard drug and half got the standard drug plus Moderna's vaccine, and the vaccine group stayed cancer-free for meaningfully longer.

It runs on the same technology as Moderna’s Covid shot, and it’s the first time the tech has passed the final stage of testing against cancer.

Doctors take a patient's tumour and work out what makes it unique, then Moderna builds a vaccine that teaches that person's immune system to hunt those cells down.

Basically, they may have found a way to stop melanoma coming back once it's been cut out. A remarkable result for all us sunburnt Aussies.

Traders took profits on Thursday and the stock gave back 18%, normal after a move like that. Moderna’s closest rival, BioNTech, rose 22% on the day and the Nasdaq biotech index hit a record high.

Biotech on the ASX has been a hard place to make money this year, with the sector still down about 19% despite rallying 22% off its June low.

A result like Moderna's brings investors back to biotech, and on the ASX the small caps with good trial results and cash in the bank are the first ones that will get looked at.

One to Watch Next Week

DroneShield (ASX: DRO) opens its books on Wednesday and shows the market what it earned in the first six months of the year.

The sales number is already out, $125.8 million, up 74% on the same period last year. What investors will find out Wednesday is how much profit was left after costs.

The company has $206 million of orders already signed for this calendar year, which is close to everything it sold in all of 2025, and it's telling the market to expect $250 million to $270 million by December.

Even so, more investors are betting against DroneShield than any other stock on the ASX. Short sellers borrow shares and sell them hoping to buy them back cheaper, and right now more of DroneShield’s shares are sold that way than any other company in Australia.

Every NATO country is spending at least 2% of its economy on defence and heading for 5%, but DroneShield's share price has almost halved this year while its sales went up 74%, because its profit guidance came in well short of what the market had pencilled in.

We’ve backed our own defence play in KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK), which is setting up to build drone components in the US, where Washington is paying to create a manufacturing base it doesn’t yet have.

Wednesday will show us how much of that defence spend is reaching the companies that make the kit.

The Week Ahead

Gold is the one we’ll be glued to. It’s done most of the heavy lifting for small-cap explorers this year, and with ELK drilling at Friday Gold Mine and BHL weeks away from its own program, we think both could move.

We’ll also be watching the chip space, where the big US names have been setting the tone for every AI play and supplier.

Three IPOs hit the boards this week, one for each of the commodities we’ve been banging on about:

• White Rock brings a big lithium story to market with the price climbing off its lows and EV demand picking back up.

• Powerhaus Uranium lists with uranium running and utilities scrambling to lock in long-term supply.

• Axiant comes to market chasing gold, with the metal near record highs and central banks still buying.

We’ll be paying close attention to all of them.

Till next week.

General advice warning

The contents of this document are intended to provide general securities advice only and have been prepared without taking account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. Because of that you should, before taking any action to acquire or deal in, or follow a recommendation (if any) in respect of any of the financial products or information mentioned in this document, 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 Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 625,000 ELK shares, 1,554,000 FUN shares,187,500 Blackhorse shares and 2,083,333 MRD performance rights at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, ELK, BHL, FUN 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 Licence (AFSL) No 519872.

Elk Range Mining (ASX: ELK) has wasted no time since listing on the ASX, starting drilling at the Friday Gold Mine in Idaho.

The first hole is already in progress, chasing gold the old drilling already found and pushing deeper to find out how far down the system runs.

Top of the list is the standout hole from the old campaigns, 110m at 5.34g/t gold. The final two-and-a-half feet of that hole graded 133g/t, and the drillers ran out of steel with the grade still climbing.

What’s sitting below that hole is the reason we backed ELK at 20 cents. This program is the first time anyone has gone looking for it.

The rig started there, twinning the old hole to confirm what it hit before pushing well past the old depths to see how far down the gold keeps running.

It’s good timing as gold jumped more than 3% overnight to its highest level in around two-and-a-half months, after the US Treasury moved to pump extra cash into the financial system.

Gold has now ripped above US$4,500 an ounce, and the market is pricing all of this at 18c a share, a $15 million company valuation with $10 million of cash in the tin.

Management told investors the float money would go straight into drilling, and it only took them days after listing to make good on it. CEO Edward Keys flew to Idaho before the stock listed, came home just long enough to ring the bell, then flew straight back. He’s there now, sleeping on the floor of the mill while the rig turns up the hill.

As he put it from site: "We are excited to have rods spinning at Friday and to get down to the work we set out to do."

Why We’re Backing ELK Range Mining

You can find our full write-up on why we’re backing ELK here

What the Drilling is Chasing

The gold system at Friday has sat largely untested for more than a decade, but the drilling crew knows this hillside better than anyone alive. Many of them worked at Friday when it last ran, and a few of them mined it.

Five years after pulling ore out of this ground, they’re back drilling underneath their own workings to find out how much they left behind.

Phase 1 runs to roughly 2,850 metres across eight holes, with two more on standby if the early results look promising.

All of it is diamond drilling, which pulls a solid cylinder of core from the ground. That core shows the veins up close and the angle everything runs at. It comes up with its orientation marked too, so ELK learns which way the gold-bearing structures are heading.

By the end of the eight holes, they’ll have the first proper picture of this system anyone’s had in 100 years of mining it.

That will decide where Phase 2 drills later this year, when the rig moves inside the mine and works from the tunnels the last owner cut.

The old database holds more than 380 holes, and there’s plenty to aim at in it. Historical drilling returned 151m at 2.69g/t gold, including 54.1m at 5.62g/t, and a short interval running 57.6g/t.

Those are down-hole lengths, so the true widths are smaller, but the grades still put Friday in rare company. “Monster grades that were not followed up” is how Keys describes them. He’s a geologist, so we’ll take his word on the monster part.

An intersection as good as that would be the best hole most gold explorers ever drill. ELK is starting with a database full of them and a mine already sitting on top.

However, those old ounces won't count on the ASX until ELK's drilling confirms them and moves Friday towards its first JORC resource, the modern Australian standard for reporting what's in the ground.

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Drilling Under a Mine Already Paid for

Friday is a permitted underground gold mine that was pulling ore as recently as five years ago, before the previous owner parked it and moved on.

That owner sank more than US$40 million into the site along the way, covering the underground development, a processing plant, roads and a camp. The market currently prices the company that owns all of it at $15 million.

So nearly every dollar of the $10 million ELK raised goes into drilling on private, patented ground with every permit already in place.

Buffalo Gulch and Deadwood sit further along the structure that fed Friday, giving ELK district-scale ground to work through once the first resource is banked.

In Short

Friday was last mined with gold near US$1,887 an ounce. Gold has surged above US$4,500, so the same ground is worth more than twice what it was the day the last truck left, and high-grade drill hits get rewarded quickly in this market.

ELK shares sit at 18c, under the 20c float price, while the drilling that float paid for is underway at a historically producing, high-grade gold system with district-scale ground around it.

Executive director Leanne Kite put her own money into 250,000 shares on market within days of listing.

The market rarely lets you in below an IPO price with the rig already turning.

Somewhere on that Idaho hillside, a crew that mined this ground five years ago is now drilling to find out what they walked away from. The first answers will start landing in October.

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 625,000 ELK shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by ELK 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.

Fund managers sitting on gains like that can’t help themselves. They go looking for the next winner, and the search always ends up at the end of the market we like (small-caps) eventually.

Down our end this week we had a gold IPO, a processing method that beat the industry standard, copper at a price nobody has ever seen, and Sam Weiss backing a micro-cap.

What caught our eye this week:

• Elk Range Mining lists and signs its driller, while a director starts buying on market

• Mount Ridley Mines runs Selectro against acid leaching, and it wins

• Uranium’s long-term contract market hits 2008 prices

• Fortuna Metals has a price target more than double its share price

• KTEK Aerosystems lands licence that opens US market

• Pathkey.AI signs the man who built Altium, and its first paying customer

• Copper trades at a price it has never seen

• AVITA Medical turns a record quarter into a 40% week

• Evion Group picks up a graphite tailwind in Washington

• Exultant Mining intersects sulphides at Balerion

Let’s get to it.

ELK Lists and Signs its Driller, While a Director Starts Buying

The newest name in the Equities Club portfolio started trading this week. Elk Range Mining (ASX: ELK) is an Idaho gold play whose last owner spent more than US$40 million on the ground before Elk picked it up for a fraction of that.

Our launch write-up is here, and it’s already one of our most-read pieces this year. Gold starts kicking again and it seems everyone suddenly wants a look.

The prize is the Friday Gold Mine, a permitted underground operation that was pulling ore as recently as five years ago, when gold sat near US$1,887 an ounce. It’s above US$4,340 now, more than double the price the last time a truck drove off the site.

One historical hole ran better than five grams a tonne over 110 metres, and the grade was still climbing when the drill stopped. Friday sits on the same shear zone as Buffalo Gulch and Deadwood, so there’s district-scale room to grow.

The last owner’s US$40 million went towards a permitted mine with a decline already driven into the hillside, a processing plant, roads and an on-site assay lab. Most juniors burn years and most of their raise getting that far.

Elk inherited the lot, with $10 million in the bank earmarked almost entirely for drilling.

Days after listing, Elk signed Black Cloud Drilling for a maiden 2,850 metre program. They’ll be drilling eight holes aimed at confirming the old high-grade numbers and chasing the system deeper.

The rig should start turning this coming week, with assays arriving from October.

Executive director Leanne Kite also watched the sellers hit her stock on debut and went the other way, spending $47,500 on 250,000 shares in a sign of confidence.

ELK closed the week at 19c after the debut sellers washed out. From here the story belongs to the drill bit, and it starts turning within days. Stay tuned.

Selectro Passes its First Test at Grass Patch

A month after Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) handed Chris Larder the chief technology officer job, his processing method got its first run over Grass Patch ore.

You can find our write up here.

Larder spent more than a decade building Selectro, a method for pulling rare earths and critical minerals out of ore. This week MRD ran it head to head against standard acid leaching on ore from its own project north of Esperance in WA.

The metal you want is always locked inside the rock, so the industry crushes the rock and soaks it in a chemical that leaches the metal out. For deposits like Grass Patch, they’ve always used hydrochloric acid.

Larder’s method is called Selectro. It does the same job with different chemistry, and the reagent gets recovered and reused each cycle, so it’s cheaper than buying acid by the tanker.

Selectro won on every commodity MRD tested this week.

On dysprosium and terbium, the two heavy rare earths that go into EV and wind turbine magnets, Selectro averaged above 80% recovery against 38% for the acid.

Grass Patch holds one of the largest scandium resources anywhere, and Selectro recovered 80% of it against 27% for the acid.

Then there’s gallium. China refines almost all of the world’s supply, and standard acid leaching recovers none of it at Grass Patch. Selectro pulled out 55%.

Any deposit chasing better recoveries could license Selectro, with MRD clipping the ticket on every project that runs it. And Western governments are pouring billions into rare earth supply that runs through anywhere but China, so the shopping list for better processing is long.

MRD jumped 24% to 3.1c on the day the results dropped, with $800k of stock traded. It touched 3.6c later in the week and closed at 3.2c, up a very respectable 28% on last Friday’s 2.5c.

Utilities Are Paying 2008 Prices for Uranium

The uranium spot price has sat around US$86.50 a pound since February. The buying is happening in the long-term contract market instead.

The people who run reactors buy their fuel years ahead through long-term contracts, and that price just hit US$90 a pound at the end of the March quarter, its highest since 2008. The demand comes from AI data centres that need power around the clock and the tech giants signing small modular reactor deals to feed them.

Kazakhstan digs up around 40% of the world’s uranium, and the underinvestment that followed Fukushima left a skinny project pipeline behind it.

Utilities paying 2008 prices tends to pull the rest of the sector up behind the producers, and the deals have already started at the small end of the ASX. Adavale Resources (ASX: ADD) sold its South Australian uranium assets this week to Orpheus Uranium (ASX: ORP), which is building out its ground around Marree.

Expect more of it while the term market keeps paying up.

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Pitt Street Doubles Fortuna’s Valuation

We’ve been bullish on Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) since it joined the portfolio, so it’s good to see a research house break the company down and arrive at their own numbers.

Pitt Street Research put a 21c implied value on FUN this week, more than double the current price of 9.2c. The number came after the research house ran the ruler over the maiden resource at Mkanda.

Their approach values Fortuna at 25% of neighbour Sovereign Metals’ market cap, reflecting that Mkanda ranks inside the top six contained rutile deposits globally while sitting years behind Kasiya on study work and resource confidence.

The note also walks through the WNDRCO cornerstone investment and the 96.66% TiO2 metallurgy, plus the 5,000m aircore program now turning. All catalysts we have covered as they landed.

You can find a link to the full report here.

KTK Gets the Green Light into America

Five weeks after lodging the application, KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) has Dutch sign-off to ship drone parts out of its Netherlands facility to the US.

The approval opens the door to the biggest drone market on the planet. You can read our piece on it here.

The US accounts for close to 40% of global drone spend, driven by a defence budget that dwarfs everyone.

KTK is a $30 million market cap company now able to sell into it.

KTK makes the composite airframes and electromechanical assemblies that go inside other companies’ drones (both military and commercial), built at its European facilities. Those parts could already move freely around Europe, but selling them into America needed this licence.

The route runs from the Netherlands to KTK’s Los Angeles site, where the parts get assembled before going out to American customers. Deliveries are set to restart in September, when revenue could start to build.

KTK is also working with Dutch authorities to extend its earlier licence covering Israel.

We’re backers of KTK, it already supplies tier-one drone makers, and September deliveries are the next date circled on our calendar.

Sam Weiss Backs Pathkey.AI

Sam Weiss spent 17 years turning Altium from a small Sydney software company into a A$9.1 billion sale to Japan’s Renesas.

This week he joined micro-cap Pathkey.AI (ASX: PKY) as strategic advisor and cornerstoned its $2.8 million raise.

Pathkey’s platform is called Chipforge, and it uses AI to design custom computer chips, which is work that normally takes a big team of specialist engineers and a whole lot of time.

Chipforge sells to companies that could never fund their own design team. Weiss built Altium one step over in the same design chain.

Chipforge signed its first paying contract this week too, a proof-of-value program with an Australian automation company where the customer runs its own chip design through the platform. The dollars are small (which is how first revenue usually works), and Chipforge hasn’t even had its full release yet, but someone’s already paying to use it.

Put the backer and the first customer together and you can see why PKY ran from 3.1c to 3.8c on the week. With Weiss in the tent, PKY has one of the country’s proven software operators helping shape what comes next.

Copper: Record Highs and a Supply Wall

Copper has been mined for 10,000 years or so, and it has never been worth more than it was on Thursday. The price touched US$6.77 a pound this week and is up roughly 50% over the past year.

A single large data centre swallows 40,000 to 50,000 tonnes of copper in its cabling and cooling. Every electric car carries a few times more of the metal than the petrol one it replaces, and then there’s the grid that has to be built to charge them all.

American buyers have also been stockpiling ahead of looming import tariffs, pulling metal out of warehouses everywhere else and tightening the market further.

Robert Friedland, the billionaire behind Ivanhoe’s giant Kamoa-Kakula mine, has been banging this drum for years. He calls copper ‘the new oil’ and describes demand as essentially infinite. Lately he’s added US-China trade tensions gumming up supply chains to the list.

Discovery rates have fallen about 70% since the 1990s, and only 5% of the deposits found over the past 35 years turned up in the past decade. Grades keep sliding and permitting can drag past two decades, which leaves the market tight for a long while yet.

So every tonne already in the ground gets dearer while the world waits on mines that take a decade or more to build. Small explorers who hit something real, or already hold a resource, get rewarded fastest in a market like this one, and it could run for years.

Spray-on Skin Pays its Way

In the late 1990s, Perth burns specialist Fiona Wood worked out how to turn a small patch of a patient’s own skin into enough cells to treat a serious burn, all in around half an hour.

Nearly 30 years later, her invention is biotech’s mover of the week.

AVITA Medical (ASX: AVH) owns RECELL, the spray-on skin built on Wood’s work, and it just posted its best ever quarter. Revenue hit US$21.7 million, up 18% on a year ago, and operating costs fell 6% while it happened.

Management lifted full-year guidance to US$86 to US$89 million and told the market to expect cashflow breakeven in the final quarter of 2026.

The stock had shed around 70% of its value over five years while it chased the American market, so a dated breakeven call was always going to move it.

US Medicare, the government insurer that pays a large share of America’s hospital bills, has proposed its payment rates for 2027. They include a national physician payment for RECELL and higher rates for the hospitals that use it.

If adopted, spray-on skin gets a clearer path into everyday use across American hospitals.

AVH closed last Friday at $1.54, ran as high as $2.30 midweek and finished at $2.21, up more than 40% for the week and more than 70% since the result landed.

EVG Picks up a Policy Tailwind in Washington

The US Senate voted 90 to 6 this week to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) for three years to the end of 2028, with new provisions directing that critical minerals from AGOA countries get priority treatment.

Madagascar is one of the 33 beneficiary countries for 2026, and it’s where portfolio company Evion Group (ASX: EVG) is developing its Maniry graphite project.

America imports the vast majority of its graphite concentrate and all of its downstream graphite products. That includes the expandable graphite Evion’s Panthera joint venture already ships into the American market from India.

Evion has spent the year building its Washington connections. The company was accepted into the US Department of Defense Cornerstone Consortium in June and appointed The Hon. Arthur Sinodinos AO as strategic advisor the same month, so it now has people across both procurement and trade policy.

The extension still needs House approval and a presidential signature before it becomes law, but Maniry sits squarely in the path of where American graphite policy is heading.

10X Intersects Sulphides at Balerion

The fourth and fifth holes of the maiden program at Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) both hit the sheared contact zone at Balerion, and both came back with visible sulphides carrying zinc, lead and copper.

The bands are narrow (most of them centimetres wide), and they sit right where the historical drilling pointed. Both holes are down-dip of old high-grade hits, including 0.8m at 22.0% zinc, 11.6% lead, 1.2% copper and 155g/t silver.

The sulphides are visible in the core. The grades come back from the lab, and those assays are four to eight weeks away. The rig is on the sixth and final hole of the program now.

10X carries a $6 million market cap with around $3 million in cash, so the market is paying about $3 million for Balerion and everything else the company holds.

The Week Ahead

The main event for us this week is a drill rig on an Idaho hillside. Elk Range should start turning this week, and the first target is the bottom of a hole where the grade was still climbing when the last crew went home. Five grams over 110 metres is what the old logs say. Now we find out.

MRD’s next job is proving Selectro at scale, and KTK’s September deliveries are getting closer. FUN’s aircore rigs are chasing whatever sits below the water table at Mkanda.

On commodities, gold and copper are still the two we keep coming back to, and uranium is starting to elbow its way into that conversation.

Halfway through August, and into one of the busiest periods of the year for small caps, we’re quietly optimistic about the months ahead.

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, 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 Equities Club Pty Ltd (”Equities Club”) believes information contained in this document is based on information which is believed to be reliable, its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed and no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given or implied and no responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way for any representation, act or omission is accepted by Equities Club or any officer, agent or employee of Equities Club or any related company.

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 4,500,000 EVG shares, 200,000 10X shares, 625,000 ELK shares, 1,554,000 FUN shares, and 2,083,333 MRD performance rights at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, EVG, 10X, ELK, FUN and 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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It’s called Selectro, and it could soon change the profit line of projects well beyond MRD’s.

Selectro recovers rare earths and critical minerals at a higher percentage than can currently be done. Higher recoveries mean more metal from every tonne you process, and more metal to sell.

Larder thought it could be rolled out on MRD’s Grass Patch project in Western Australia, replacing hydrochloric acid leaching the industry has always used.

Grass Patch holds heavy rare earths, the metals inside the magnets in EVs and defence systems, alongside the light rare earths that do the volume in that same magnet trade. It also holds gallium (which China refines almost all of), and one of the largest scandium resources in the world.

This morning MRD released the first results of Larder’s process on Grass Patch.

Across all the commodities, rare earths, gallium and scandium, the Selectro method hit the traditional method for six.

Selectro more than doubled the traditional method’s recoveries, and on gallium, where the acid returned nothing, it recovered more than half the metal.

At a time when the West is spending billions trying to build rare earth processing that runs through anywhere but China, MRD could be clipping the ticket on every project that uses it.

What is Selectro

The basic problem in mining is that the metal you want is locked inside the ore. To free it you need to soak the crushed rock in a chemical that leaches it out. For the type of deposit MRD has, everyone uses hydrochloric acid.

Selectro does the same job, but has tested better on a few fronts:

• More metal out. Double the acid’s result on the same sample. Up to 83% recovery on heavy rare earths, and 77% on lights.

• Cheaper. The reagent itself costs less per unit, and it’s closed loop, which is a smart way of saying the reagent gets recovered and reused each cycle.

• Unlocks gallium. Acid recovered 0% of it. Selectro got 56%, for a metal that's under Chinese export controls.

Cheaper and more effective is a rare place for a new processing technology to land. Plenty of clever recovery methods die as science experiments because the circuit gets too complex to build. Larder kept his simple.

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The Scoreboard: Selectro vs Acid

Recovery is the share of metal you get out of the rock and into something you can sell. The higher the recovery, the more money from every tonne you dig up and process.

It’s a hurdle plenty of projects never clear. Finding a deposit is one thing, being able to economically dig it up and process it for sale is another.

We’ve gone through what MRD’s Grass Patch contains below and compared the processing recoveries of each metal, and Larder’s decade incubating the Selectro process is delivering recoveries beyond what we expected.

The tests ran on a composite of five diamond core samples from MRD’s drilling, and the second test beat the first.

Heavy rare earths

The traditional acid leach managed between 0% and 51% on the heavy rare earths in this sample, averaging 38% on the two that count most, dysprosium and terbium.

Dysprosium and terbium, the two most valuable heavy rare earths thanks to their role in the magnets inside EVs and defence systems, averaged above 80% using Selectro.

To give some context to Selectro's 80% recovery at Grass Patch, which is above Australia's next rare earth mine, Arafura's Nolans, which has raised near $2 billion and will start construction next month.

Light rare earths

Selectro pulled 70% to 77% across the full suite of light rare earths, and the acid managed 28% to 36% on the same rock.

The two light rare earths that count here are neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr). NdPr is the backbone of the permanent magnet market, they do big volume while the heavy rare earths do the lifting on price. Using Selectro, both cleared 70%.

Gallium

Gallium goes into semiconductors and defence systems. China produces nearly all of the world’s refined supply and has it under export controls.

Grass Patch holds an 838.7 million tonne gallium resource. Run it through the industry’s standard acid leaching and you get zero. The acid recovers nothing.

Selectro cleared 55% in both its tests.

Caird’s been talking to people inside US defence, and he told us they have no gallium supply for military applications. The Department of War is pouring a lot of effort into fixing that.

Recovering over 50% with first-pass results that haven’t been optimised, for a metal the West has no secure supply of, makes both Selectro and Grass Patch a lot more attractive.

Scandium

A metal used in aerospace and defence to help strengthen alloys, and only produced as a by-product of other metals, returned 25% recoveries using the traditional method.

Grass Patch holds one of the largest scandium resources anywhere, 368 million tonnes at 57.3ppm. But the caveat on it has always been recovery, because a resource you can't process economically is worth nothing.

Selectro returned 80% of the scandium out of the test sample. If that holds at scale, MRD is sitting on scandium it can sell.

The Scandium Problem

Every tonne of scandium produced today comes out as a by-product of something else. No one currently produces it as a stand-alone metal.

Global production runs between 15 and 40 tonnes a year at the moment and forecasters have demand north of 100 tonnes through the decade.

It’s been such a topic of conversation that the US government is already writing cheques, lending US$400 million to a scandium operation in NSW just last week. We covered it in the most recent weekly wrap.

MRD’s processing method returning up to 80% scandium changes the unit economics for its own project. And it can license the method out while the US government is handing out hundreds of millions for the metal.

Commercialising Selectro

Processing is where critical minerals projects go to die. As Donald Trump put it earlier this year, rare earths are not rare, what’s rare is the processing, and China controls around 90% of the world’s capacity.

Getting the metals out of the rock at a cost that works is what Western governments are spending billions on.

MRD now owns a process aimed straight at that problem, proven on its own rock first.

Larder brought it to them in December last year, after the gallium resource announcement, wanting to test it on MRD's rock. He and Caird spent the best part of eight months talking before the IP came across through his employment deal.

Selectro is already mobilising other metals of commercial interest beyond heavy rare earths, scandium, and gallium, and MRD believes it may be suitable for a range of deposit styles well past Grass Patch.

If MRD is able to prove that Selectro works at scale, the licence for the processing method suddenly goes to the highest bidder.

With projects costing billions of dollars in capital, the ability to reduce the operational cost makes Selectro hard for the majors to ignore.

What Comes Next

Selectro has been tested on small samples so far, the next step is a bulk sample to prove the method runs at scale.

Part of it will be floated first, following the phosphate result we covered last week, so the coming tests run on concentrated feed for the first time.

The market spent the past year valuing MRD on what sits under Grass Patch.

It may very well turn out that Selectro, developed in a lab over the past 10 years by CTO Chris Larder, becomes more valuable to MRD than what it has in 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, 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.

The mine is permitted, roads are in, its opening is cut into the hillside, and there’s an assay lab on site. (handy, when you're about to drill 6,000 metres)

One historical drill hole from beneath it ran at more than five grams of gold a tonne over 110 metres, with the grade still climbing when the drill bit stopped.

Whatever sits below it has never been tested.

The company that now owns all of the above lists on the ASX today. And strip out its cash and the market is pricing the Idaho Gold Project at about $15 million.

Meet our latest portfolio addition: Elk Range Mining (ASX: ELK).

Elk lists today at 20 cents with a market cap near $25 million and $10 million in the tin. Nearly all of that money is earmarked for drilling, because the last owner already paid for everything else.

We sat down with CEO Edward Keys before backing this one, and he didn't ease into the pitch: “We like gold, we like the US, and we're going to use our technical expertise to unlock a district-scale opportunity.”

Keys is a geologist with more than 20 years hunting gold, and he's helped take small explorers all the way to serious companies, some running from $20 million valuations to $500 million while he was there. Elk's hired him to do it again.

Behind him sits a board of mining engineers and known company builders. And on the grades sitting in the old drill logs, Keys didn’t hold back: “Had this asset existed in WA, it would have been hammered and carpet bombed years ago.”

Elk hits the ASX just as the gold price kicks back into gear after a generational run.

The gold’s already found at Elk Range, and it’s high-grade. The job now is working out how much of it there is.

Let’s dig in.

Idaho has Been Pulling Gold for 160 Years

There’s a woman named Robin on Elk’s site crew in Idaho. She’s a fourth-generation Idahoan, she knows every bolt under the shed of the old mill, and she often shares photos from the gold rush days, when everyone built their own cabin and dug their own ground.

When Keys spent four weeks on site before the float, she was his welcome party.

Gold built Idaho. The 1860s rushes pulled tens of thousands of prospectors into hills that weren’t even a state yet. The Boise Basin alone (a patch of hills north-east of the capital) gave up close to three million ounces, about $20 billion of gold at today's price.

To underline how much mining runs through the veins of Idaho, they’ve got a miner on the state flag, and above his head the motto: Esto Perpetua. Let it be perpetual. After 160 years of gold, seems a fair call.

Hecla Mining, America's oldest precious-metals producer, has worked Idaho ground since 1891. A company stays put in one state for 130 years only when the ground and the rules both work, and both state and federal permitting tracks here are well worn.

Elk’s ground sits on a deep crack in the earth’s crust called the Orogrande Shear Zone, which once worked a bit like plumbing. Hot fluid carrying gold rose up through the crack and cooled on the way. The gold dropped out wherever it found a weak spot to settle.

What's left is a string of deposits along the crack like beads on a wire, and Elk holds kilometres of the wire.

Miners were on the ground at what became the Friday Gold Mine by 1903, and the gold here has been mined for more than a century. But it has always been mined the way Robin's people mined it: family claims, small crews, following the vein you can see and digging as you go.

Australian juniors are built back to front from that. Drill first, drill hard, map the whole system to a resource, and only then talk about mining it.

In 160 years, nobody has worked this ground that way. Elk is the first, and it's why a hole running five grams over 110 metres could sit in a filing cabinet for decades with no hole drilled beneath it.

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The Money Printers Are Buying Gold

Nobody on earth understands paper money like a central bank. They're the ones printing it, and for two years now they've been swapping it for the one thing nobody can print.

That’s what carried gold above US$4,300 an ounce, up nearly 70% in two years. Anyone predicting that price two years ago would have been laughed at.

You might remember the queues. For weeks last year, ordinary Aussies lined up for hours outside ABC Bullion on Sydney’s Martin Place to buy bars and coins. All of it, ironically, a short walk from the Reserve Bank and its money printer.

The price has cooled since, and the queue thinned with it. The Iran war pushed oil and inflation back up and traders started betting the Fed’s next move is a hike. Bonds pay interest and gold doesn’t, so plenty of punters understandably took the interest and went home.

Our view on the US debt hasn’t changed. Washington has added US$1.3 trillion in the first seven months of the year and the debt pile is closing on US$40 trillion.

The interest on it alone costs more each year than the entire US military.

People have been saying America’s bill has to come due for years, and every year it gets bigger and dearer to carry. The war isn’t helping, because as long as oil keeps inflation up, the interest rates on all that borrowing stay up with it.

That borrowing is what pushed gold up in the first place, and it's only worsened since the price pulled back a bit.

The banks that trade gold for a living have published where they think it goes next. Against a spot price near US$4,340/oz, their targets look like this:

Every number in that table sits above today's price. And a few of the calls were made before the recent bounce, so treat them as a rough guide.

And through the whole pullback the central banks kept buying, with this year’s haul on track to match last year’s. Gold has just overtaken US Treasuries as the world’s number-one reserve asset, and nearly nine in 10 central banks say they plan to buy more.

So while the queues on Martin Place came and went, the people printing the money keep choosing gold over their own product. (We’re with the printers)

All of this is the backdrop Elk arrives on the ASX into, with a built gold mine, in the metal the steadiest buyers on the planet won't stop accumulating.

The Five Reasons We're Backing Elk Range

1. 110 Metres of High-Grade Gold

Around 386 holes have been drilled at the Friday Gold Mine over the past 100 years, and the core from them adds up to more than 44km of rock (longer than a marathon), and all of it pulled from one hillside.

A previous owner even tallied the lot into a resource estimate more than a decade ago. It was done to an overseas code, and nobody ever brought it up to the JORC standard used on the ASX.

So the homework is done, and some of the numbers sitting in it are outrageous.

One hole ran better than five grams of gold a tonne over 110 metres and ended still in mineralisation, so the drillers ran out of steel before they ran out of gold. The last two-and-a-half feet of that hole graded 133 grams per tonne, and Elk’s going straight back to it with its first drilling.

Another averaged nearly three grams over 151 metres, and inside that sat a 54-metre stretch above five grams.

The richest assays in the old records run into the hundreds of grams.

For anyone new to gold grades, plenty of mines around the world make good money on a couple of grams a tonne. Friday’s better hits carry two and three times that.

Those figures are lengths measured down the hole rather than the true width of the gold, and were reported under that overseas code, so need validating before any of them count as a resource here.

Validating them is the first job of Elk’s drill program. Drilling where the old holes never reached is the second.

2. Drilling to Commence Shortly After Listing

Elk’s drillers are “chomping at the bit” to get started, Keys said, and many have history with the project. They worked at Friday when it last ran, and a few of them mined it.

The first 3,000 metres go in from surface soon after listing aimed at the high-grade zones. They’ll confirm the old numbers and chase the gold below them.

The second 3,000 metres get drilled from inside the mine, using the underground development the last owner spent all that money on.

That program runs through the Idaho winter, which would normally shut an explorer down for months. But to Keys’ point, “it doesn’t snow very often underground.”

Part of Friday sits on what the Americans call patented leases, which is effectively private ground, so Elk can drill there without waiting on further permits.

Exploration takes the biggest slice of the money raised, and the cash is in the bank to fund all of it.

The gold structure drilled at Friday runs about a kilometre and stays open in both directions, meaning nobody has found where it ends. Surface work traces the wider system along a 3km trend, and soil sampling and magnetic surveys have thrown up drill-ready targets that have never had a hole put in them.

After a century of mining, the district is remarkably still only half-explored. Now Elk walks in with modern methods and $10 million to spend.

3. Three Deposits, One Structure

Elk holds more than just Friday. Along the same shear zone sit the Buffalo Gulch and Deadwood prospects, where previous owners also found and recorded gold.

Buffalo Gulch is the standout of the pair. The old timers outlined gold sitting in the weathered rock at surface, and in all the years since, nobody has drilled underneath it to find the structure that fed that gold up from below.

Gold camps grow along structures like the Orogrande. The miners at Friday in 1903 were standing on the same crack that runs under Buffalo Gulch and Deadwood, which Elk owns kilometres of.

Friday will get drilled first, and the rigs move up the belt to the other two targets in spring.

By then the crew will have logged 6,000 metres of Friday core, so they’ll know what this system’s gold looks like before they go hunting for more of it. And because the camp and crew are already sitting at Friday, drilling the next target is just a matter of moving the rig up the road, with no new camp to build or team to hire.

There are still old family claims dotted along the structure too, and Elk wants to consolidate more of the district over time.

4. Producing Gold Five Years Ago

This mine was producing gold as recently as five years ago, when the price was US$1,887/oz. (it’s US$4,342/oz today)

Friday ran through Covid, with crews underground pulling ore and the on-site mill processing it, and everything they used is now part of what Elk just bought.

That's the part that's hardest for a junior to replicate. The last owner's US$40 million bought a permitted mine with a mine entrance and decline already driven into the hillside. It also bought roads in, a camp and workshops, and an assay lab on site.

It bought an experienced crew as well, because the care and maintenance team stayed on through the quiet years.

That mill is small and near new, running 135 tonnes a day, and while Elk has no plans to restart it, it sits there as a working asset that could one day earn its keep treating ore for others in the district.

The state around all of this is about as friendly as mining gets. Idaho is a Tier 1 jurisdiction and one of the safest places in America to pull gold out of the ground.

In May the US Export-Import Bank, the federal government's own lender, wrote a US$2.9 billion loan for Perpetua Resources' Stibnite gold project in the same state.

It's the biggest loan the bank has ever written under its Make More in America program, proving Washington now helps pay for the gold mines it wants built.

Elk is nowhere near that scale yet, but it shares the address and the tailwind.

So the money Elk raised skips the years a junior normally spends building roads and driving tunnels, and goes straight into drilling a mine that was working recently enough that the people who ran it are still on the payroll.

5. A Board That's Done it Before

Gold projects live and die on the people running them, and the people are the reason we’re writing this article at all. We sat down with the team behind Elk before backing them, and their skill set is what tipped us over the line.

Keys you’ve already met. He’s spent 20 years hunting gold across Canada, Australia and the United States, and the explorers he did his senior work at, Brightstar Resources and Prodigy Gold, both grew into serious gold names while he was there.

His chairman, Campbell Baird, is a mining engineer who ran Focus Minerals while its gold production grew from 5,000 ounces a year to 175,000. These days he's running Asante Gold's two producing mines in Ghana, with a stint as acting COO of Bellevue Gold in between. Busy man.

Executive director Leanne Kite spent 13 years at Woodside, then led investor relations at $3.5 billion Liontown Resources while its share price nearly doubled.

Dr Frazer Tabeart has 30-odd years of geology across five continents, 16 of them at Western Mining running exploration teams everywhere from the Philippines to Mongolia.

And the board’s other engineer, Rafael Moreno, runs Brazilian rare earths company Viridis Mining, up from $1.50 a share to more than $4.30 on his watch.

A junior explorer usually lists with one or two of those skills and spends years hiring the rest. Elk’s got the lot on day one.

What Could Go Wrong

None of the past drilling counts here until Elk’s own drilling confirms it (its first port of call), but the early story rests heavily on the first holes at Friday.

The other risks are standard small-cap terrain. The project came with milestone obligations still to be met, and building a resource and eventually a mine will take more capital down the track, so there are raises in Elk’s future like there are in every small-cap.

We’ve weighed all of the above up and backed it with conviction, but this section is in every article we write for a reason.

The Bottom Line: The Rig is Close

Sometime in the next few weeks, a drill rig will start turning on a hillside near Elk City, and be aimed at the bottom of a hole where the grade was still climbing when the last crew went home many years ago.

What's still down that hole is the whole reason we own Elk at 20 cents. The mine above that hole is already built and paid for, in a state that wants the industry there. The last owner spent more than US$40 million on this project, and the market is now pricing the whole thing at about $15 million AUD.

Many juniors list and ask you to wait a year or more for the drills to start. Elk lists this morning and the rig is only weeks away.

A century of Americans proved the gold is there, and now a team of Australians gets to find out how much.

Esto Perpetua, as the locals would say. We like our chances 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 625,000 ELK shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by ELK 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.

It sat in the open at Diggers & Dealers on the Perth Mint stand. A single gold bar that Guinness certified as largest ever made. It’s refined to 99.999 per cent purity and weighed over half a tonne. Spare a thought for the moving company.

Gold responded to the garish display in kind, jumping 6.5 per cent this week and having its biggest run since January. It meant the bar was worth a few million more by Friday than when they wheeled (or helicoptered) it in.

Gold has also just overtaken coal as Australia's number two export behind iron ore in value. It's tipped to bring in roughly $68 billion this financial year.

Twenty years ago you'd have been laughed out of the room for suggesting that.

Down our end of town this week, gold ran hard, copper hit all-time highs, Elon Musk bet on himself (again) with a Texas chip city, and Bank of America turned uranium bull.

Here’s what caught our eye:

• Our newest portfolio addition lands tomorrow

• Diggers & Dealers 2026, our week in Kalgoorlie

• The ASX notches multiple record highs in a week

• Gold charges 6.5% on US jobs news and central bank buying

• Adisyn runs 26% as graphene covers a full 200mm wafer

• Musk unveils Terafab, a US$16.8 billion chip plant in Texas

• Bank of America turns uranium bull

• Copper hits new all-time highs on US stockpiling and a DRC export ban

• Mount Ridley confirms rare earths in phosphates, flotation next

• The US throws scandium cash at a NSW mine

Let’s get to it.

Deja Vu: Our New Portfolio Addition Tomorrow

Our newest portfolio addition lands tomorrow.

Regular readers might be claiming deja vu, because we wrote that same line last week, and a few of you emailed asking what happened. Nothing on our end, the ASX had some final boxes to tick and the listing got pushed.

The paperwork’s all done now and tomorrow at 10am WST it hits the boards.

We keep the list of our portfolio companies deliberately tight and this gold junior has us as excited as anything we’ve added in a long while.

The full write-up will be in your inbox in the morning, covering what they own and why we bought in, risks included.

Gold's ripping, and tomorrow morning you'll see how we're playing it.

Diggers & Dealers 2026

We spent the week in Kal for Diggers & Dealers, now in its 35th year. Our three days there were presentations and laps of the exhibition halls, with a steak sandwich and a beer or two to break up the day, as tradition demands.

Numbers seemed down on previous years, and you could feel a bit of fatigue around the place, which took some doing with copper at all-time highs and lithium finding its feet again.

Diggers is a gold show at heart, and gold stocks had been sold off hard after the big run earlier in the year. The mood in the halls echoed the recent pull-back in gold, half-tonne bar or not.

Joe Hockey opened the event with the keynote, and the former treasurer was better value than we expected. He was big on AI, firmly behind the resource sector, and on China he told the room “you can’t allow yourself to be bullied”, from a bloke who spent years dealing with Washington at its wildest.

His predictions carry some form too. He called Trump winning 2016 while most of Washington (and the world) still saw him as a reality show host.

And he had a crack at flogging his book on the way through. Joe once famously declared the age of entitlement was over. The age of the ex-pollie book deal, it seems, has no end date.

Then everyone flew home, and gold put on its best week since January. Diggers 2026 may have run a week early. Put the same conference on next week and every booth would be up and about.

The ASX Keeps Making History

The ASX 200 notched multiple record closes mid-week, with most of it flowing straight from the petrol bowser.

The ‘he says, she says’ spat between US and Iran spent the week a little less icy than the week before, and oil fell on the chance there could be a thaw. Cheaper oil naturally works its way into inflation numbers, and makes it easier for the RBA to do nothing with rates when it meets on Tuesday, which most economists expect.

A central bank sitting on its hands is the dullest news going, but the market loves it. Boring beats surprises every time.

Following that, copper set an all-time high and gold surged. BHP and Rio are such a big slab of the index that when they catch a bid, the whole board follows them up, and our screens spent the back half of the week green.

You only get a handful of weeks like this in a cycle.

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Gold is Bouncing Back

On Friday, we found out 23,000 Americans lost their jobs in July, a month the economists had pencilled in for 85,000 new ones.

Money flees to gold when there’s bad news and bad predictions like that. Within the hour, bets on a US Federal Reserve rate rise had faded, and gold rose 3% in a single session to finish above US$4,350/oz, capping its biggest week (up 6.5%) since January.

China’s central bank also bought gold for a 21st straight month in July, its biggest monthly purchase since October 2023. Central banks worldwide took a record 289 tonnes in the June quarter, about 1.6 times the pace of a year earlier (whatever China’s planning for, it involves a lot of gold).

A bunch of ASX gold names had themselves a week:

• Brightstar Resources (ASX: BTR) led the pack up 33%

• Minerals 260 (ASX: MI6) climbed 29%,

• Capricorn Metals (ASX: CMM) added 22%,

• Regis Resources (ASX: RRL) shot up 20%

• Ramelius Resources (ASX: RMS) rose 19%

• Alkane (ASX: ALK) put on 15%.

Some very handy one week gains for shareholders.

A good week to be holding gold exposure, and a very good week for our timing for a new gold addition to the portfolio.

Adisyn Runs 26% on its 200mm Wafer

There’s a disc the size of your dinner plate sitting in a lab that half the chip industry is going to want a look at.

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) pulled it out of the deposition chamber this week. It’s a full 200mm industrial wafer covered edge to edge in graphene, and 200mm is the format chip factories from Texas to Taiwan feed into their lines every day. We broke it down here.

The short version of why anyone cares is that the wiring inside advanced chips is copper, and as chips keep shrinking that copper is running out of road. The industry settled on graphene as the fix years ago, and the catch has always been that making it meant temperatures no chip could survive.

Adisyn cracked that in June, on a piece of copper the size of your thumbnail, and said the job from there was scaling it up.

Well, consider it scaled.

Eight weeks later, all 12 test points across the surface came back confirmed as graphene by independent analysis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A chipmaker can pick this wafer up and run it through machines they already own, and Adisyn’s target is still a binding deal with one of them. That conversation gets easier when you can slide the wafer across the table.

The company keeps delivering on its promises (we’ve been keeping score). They told us they’d grow it cold, and did. They told us they’d scale it, and the wafer turned up.

Next on the list is the larger 300mm format, the one TSMC and Samsung run for the newest AI chips.

The market liked the news too, with AI1 finishing the week up 26%. We added them to the portfolio in April at 6.8c. They’re trading at 17c today.

Terafab: Musk’s US$16.8 Billion Chip City

Samsung’s Pyeongtaek campus in South Korea is one of the biggest chip complexes on the planet, all 31 million square feet of it. This week Elon Musk proved everything really is bigger in Texas, unveiling plans to build one three times the size of Samsung’s.

Tesla and SpaceX are calling it Terafab, a semiconductor plant with an initial US$16.8 billion going in and more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space planned.

Elon humbly calls it “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far”, and the full multi-phase build could run to US$119 billion, which puts it in the company of the Great Mosque of Mecca on the all-time construction bill. Elon's faithful would say the comparison holds up.

Elon believes chip demand between his companies will soon pass one terawatt of compute a year, which is more than today’s entire global supply. The chips are earmarked for Optimus robots and Cybercab robotaxis, with SpaceX’s orbital data centres also in the mix.

Today those companies queue at TSMC for their chips, alongside Nvidia, Apple and just about everyone else. Elon’s decided he’d rather own the factory than be in line holding a number.

A chip normally gets made in one country, packaged in a second and tested in a third. Terafab plans to do the lot in Texas, which is American chip onshoring at a scale no government program has attempted.

A build-out this size drags the whole semiconductor supply chain along with it, ASX names included. As we mentioned, our portfolio company Adisyn (ASX: AI1) is developing graphene for the chips themselves, while Pathkey.AI (ASX: PKY) owns Chipforge, an AI platform built to shorten chip design cycles that normally run 12 to 24 months.

When the world’s first trillionaire (now a lowly 800-and-something times billionaire) is pouring US$100 billion-plus into chip manufacturing, the small end of the supply chain gets looked at with fresh eyes.

Uranium: Bank of America Calls US$130 a Pound

Bank of America gave the uranium bulls something for their WhatsApp chats this week, calling US$130 a pound by 2027. Spot sits at US$85 today, so they're tipping a 52% run.

Their case is the one behind everything now, AI. The data centres need power around the clock, so everyone wants reactors. Washington has ordered a quadrupling of US nuclear capacity to 400GW by 2050 and put US$80 billion behind 10 new reactors, and tech giants are signing nuclear deals to keep their data centres fed.

The American power companies that run the reactors have only bought about half the uranium they’ll need over the next decade, and they had more covered this time last year. From 2028 the Russian aisle closes for good when the full import ban kicks in, so the big uranium shop is coming whether they like it or not.

If you’re sitting on uranium in the ground, US$130 is a much nicer number to be valued against than US$85, and uranium juniors have a history of running hard when spot does.

The one place sitting this out is Western Australia. The state’s newly sworn-in mines minister used his first Diggers & Dealers appearance to rule out lifting WA’s uranium mining ban, with the state holding some of the country’s largest untapped deposits and the price where it is.

India's high commissioner said he'd welcome WA uranium, but the state government wasn’t moved.

Plenty of people in Kalgoorlie were shaking their heads at that, and we were among them. WA will dig up just about anything else on the periodic table, and it's increasingly bizarre to hold the line here while tech giants pay for new reactors to power AI.

Copper Hits All-Time High

More copper landed at American ports in July than any month since records began, as importers race against a tariff. Washington’s about to do its own version of LeBron’s The Decision™ and every trader with metal on the water wants it through the gates before the door shuts.

Over 200,000 tonnes made it in last month, and every tonne that lands in a US warehouse is a tonne the rest of the world can’t touch.

No wonder copper set another all-time high in New York this week, with the Comex contract touching US$6.73 a pound, now up about 19% for the year.

While the metal piles up in America, supply keeps going backwards. Winter storms have knocked the Chilean mines around and Codelco has shelved its El Teniente expansion. The sulphuric acid shortage we flagged last week keeps biting too (the input nobody thought about until it went missing).

Then on Thursday the Democratic Republic of the Congo dropped its own bomb on the market. No copper concentrate leaves the country unless it's refined on Congolese soil. London copper jumped to within striking distance of January's record after word filtered out.

Goldman Sachs now has US$13,735 a tonne pencilled in for the end of 2026, and Citi went and topped them with a US$15,000 prediction within a year. As we’ve said before, new copper mines take a decade or more to build and demand keeps climbing.

Small-caps with good copper projects will keep getting rewarded, and we’re on the lookout for the right one.

At Diggers this week we got chatting with Solstice (ASX: SLS), a name we first mentioned back in February after a cracking drill hole. They were 93c then. They walked around Kalgoorlie this week at $2.36, with more results due any day now.

We’ll be watching those assays closely.

Mount Ridley Finds its Host Minerals

A machine in a lab just spent its week crawling across a pinch of dirt from north of Esperance, one grain at a time, naming every mineral it met.

The dirt belongs to Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD), one of our portfolio companies, and the machine is called a TIMA (an electron microscope that names the minerals rather than just weighing them).

The grains came back with good news. Grass Patch's rare earths sit almost entirely in three phosphate minerals, led by one called xenotime, a known carrier of the valuable heavies that end up in EV and wind turbine magnets.

Better still, phosphates can be floated, skimmed off into a rich concentrate before any of the expensive chemistry starts, so MRD could end up with a smaller, cheaper plant.

MD Allister Caird pointed to peers getting strong results from flotation on comparable deposits, and MRD has fast-tracked its own testwork to find out. Bench-scale results land next, feeding into the Phase 1 metallurgical program already underway.

The Pentagon Goes Shopping for Scandium

America last mined scandium the same year it put a man on the moon. On Friday, Donald Trump, who coincidentally signed the executive order sending America back to the moon, announced the Pentagon is lending US$400 million to a scandium mine in country NSW.

Sunrise Energy Metals gets the money to expand its Syerston project near Fifield, billed as the world’s first primary scandium mine. Lockheed Martin signed on last year to buy up to 15 tonnes of scandium oxide from it over five years.

Scandium strengthens the aluminium in fighter jets and spacecraft, and nearly all of it comes out of China, Russia and Ukraine, with close to 100 per cent of the processing in foreign hands.

NSW holds the highest concentration of scandium in the world. The Albanese-Trump critical minerals deal signed in October promised at least US$1 billion for projects in each country, and Syerston just became the biggest name on the list.

The Week Ahead

Short and sweet this week, because the main event is tomorrow morning.

Our newest portfolio addition hits the boards at 10am WST, and the full write-up will be in your inbox before the open. We’ve been sitting on this one for a while, and after the week gold just had, we’re glad the ASX finally let it out.

See you in the morning.

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 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 of AI1, 500,000 KTK shares, and 2,083,333 MRD performance rights at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AI1, KTK, 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 Licence (AFSL) No 519872.

We also told you what had to happen next, the process had to scale from that little square up to a full-sized industrial wafer.

In culinary terms, the test kitchen had proved the dish but needed it to work in a restaurant turning out a thousand plates a night.

Less than two months later, Adisyn (ASX: AI1) has walked out of that kitchen carrying a dinner plate. A full 200mm industrial wafer, the format behind hundreds of chip production lines worldwide, covered edge to edge in graphene.

The wafer was tested at 12 points spread right across the surface, and every one of them came back with graphene confirmed, verified independently at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Nobody has ever publicly shown graphene grown this cold across a full industrial wafer before. Anywhere.

And the door it opens leads into hundreds of chip production lines around the world…

What Adisyn Actually Did

The wafer is a disc 200 millimetres across, about the size of that dinner plate, and the format is what's fed into production lines from Texas to Taiwan every day. Adisyn's was copper, the same metal its graphene grows on.

Adisyn grew its graphene across the most valuable wafer in the company’s history, below 300°C again, and covered 300 times the area it managed in June.

A fab (the industry’s word for a chip factory) won’t take your word for the bits you didn’t test, and a coating a few atoms thick can be flawless in one corner and missing in the next. So 12 points were marked out across all four quadrants, each was measured five times, and samples from all 12 went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for independent analysis.

Two machines did the checking. Raman spectroscopy bounces a laser off the surface and reads the light that scatters back, which tells you it's proper graphene at every point tested. Transmission Electron Microscopy is a camera so powerful it can photograph the atoms.

One of the tests confirms the material, and the other shows you the layer sitting in the image. All 12 points passed both.

Why the 200mm Wafer Result is the Front Door

The newest AI chips are built on larger 300mm wafers, so a fair first question is why the older format has us this excited.

Your car helps answer it. There are more than a thousand chips in many new cars, and most of them came off a 200mm line. The chip that flips your iPhone screen sideways when you turn it came off one too.

The supposedly legacy format is also growing. SEMI, the industry's own data house, has global 200mm capacity at record levels above 7.7 million wafers a month, with 13 new production lines coming online through 2028 and capacity heading past 8.2 million a month by 2030.

Call it roughly 92 million wafers a year, with every one of them the format Adisyn has now proven its process on.

It plugs Adisyn directly into the interconnect market and the wiring inside every advanced chip, which is worth around US$31 billion today and growing.

The fabs running those lines are also the likeliest first customers. A specialty fab wins work by making chips its rivals can't, and Adisyn's graphene hands them a new offering to sell.

And what they'd be selling is better wiring. Almost every advanced chip made today runs on copper wiring, and as chips keep shrinking, that copper is hitting its limit. The wires are now so fine they run hot, and power that should be doing useful work leaks away as heat.

Graphene promises to carry the signal with far less of the heat problem, which is why the industry wants it inside the next generation of chips.

What the Wafer Milestone Unlocks

Kohavi says hitting the milestone early shortens the timelines for industry collaborations and integrations. Which is a formal way of saying the chipmaker conversations just sped up.

Until now, every conversation with a chipmaker was likely stalling at the question of “Can this survive a full wafer?”

Now Adisyn can slide the wafer across the table.

300mm is where TSMC and Samsung operate. From here Adisyn chases the 300mm result while the 200mm conversations with chipmakers progress, and the company’s target remains a binding commercial deal with a global chipmaker.

Where Adisyn Sits Today

A quick catch-up for anyone new here.

We first wrote Adisyn up in April at 6.8c. Inside a week it ran to 20c, topped the ASX gainers board and added around $130 million in market value.

Adisyn is attacking two huge markets with the same material. Inside a chip the graphene grows as the wiring that carries the signal. On the outside of a drone it becomes a coating that swallows radar instead of bouncing it back, so a full-sized aircraft reads on a screen as something closer to a bird.

Since April the company has locked in an exclusive worldwide licence on the stealth tech out of Tel Aviv University, raised $14 million with Israel's biggest investment house and Regal cornerstoning, brought on the former commander of Israel's Iron Dome to advise the drone arm, and banked a US patent over the core process.

Then in June came the breakthrough, graphene grown below 300°C and verified by one of the world’s leading graphene researchers at UNSW.

Today that same graphene covers a full industrial wafer.

Who Notices a Result Like This

We filmed this with chairman Kevin Crofton three months ago, back when the graphene covered a single centimetre coupon. His read on how the TSMCs and Intels react when a result like this lands has aged well.

Our View on Adisyn (ASX: AI1)

TSMC, the biggest chipmaker on earth, has already named graphene as the way past copper. Adisyn owns the patented recipe for growing it at a temperature chips can survive, and now it's the first company in the world to publicly show it done across a full industrial wafer.

Adisyn is still pre-revenue, and the giant chipmakers test a new process half to death before it goes anywhere near a production line.

Whatever comes next runs on the chipmakers’ timetable, which is slow, and the 300mm result still has to be delivered.

But the patented recipe belongs to Adisyn, and the giants are the ones who need it. The company's entire market value is still roughly the cost of fitting out one corner of a TSMC fab.

Management told us they’d grow graphene cold, then went and did it. They told us they’d scale it, and this week the wafer turned up.

The next promise on the list is a chipmaker’s signature, and betting against this company keeping their word has been a losing trade all year.

The dinner plate is out of the kitchen. Now we find out who’s hungry.

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.

Two years ago he wrote a 165-page manifesto arguing that only a few hundred people on earth truly understood where AI was heading, and he was one of them.

He called it Situational Awareness. Then he (somewhat ironically in hindsight) named his hedge fund after it.

The fund was an all-in bet on AI, juiced with borrowed money. For two years it worked. Returns over 1,000%, and US$20 billion under management by the start of July. He was 24 years old, and had never worked at a hedge fund.

Then this month AI stocks rolled over and his biggest holdings halved in a few weeks. The banks wanted their money back, and on Thursday Ken Griffin’s Citadel bought the portfolio.

And because markets have a cruel sense of humour, the stocks bounced almost the moment they hit Citadel's books, with some closing 30% off their lows within the day.

Leopold went from manifesto to margin call inside two years.

We’re not here to dance on the bloke’s grave. Down our end of the market, everyone knows someone who borrowed against a sure thing. Like Leopold, they usually had the thesis right too. The market just took their money before it proved them correct.

And plenty moved fast at the small end of town this week too.

Here’s what caught our eye:

• A new name joins the Equities Club portfolio

• Adisyn builds a wall around its tech, landing its second US patent allowance

• Tungsten play Group 6 Metals makes a wild return to trading

• Gina Rinehart writes a cheque for gallium, the metal America doesn’t have

• Evion sends geologists back onto a Nevada fluorspar mine

• KTK's first quarterly has a scary number in it, and the number is wrong

• Another IPO doubles on debut with barely a share free to trade

• Jade Gas gets stood up on settlement day

• Amazon joins Alphabet in the US$200 billion club as the AI build-out rolls on

• Copper’s tightening, and Robert Friedland reckons the warehouses could run dry

Let’s get to it.

A New Name Joins the Portfolio This Week

This week we're introducing a new portfolio addition, a gold story we've been working on for months (and keeping quiet about it hasn't been easy). Without giving the game away, here's what you're getting:

• A gold project in the US with historical high-grade hits that made us sit up the first time we saw them

• A permitted mine and processing infrastructure already in place, a head start most early-stage listings would kill for

• Tens of millions of dollars of prior spending by previous operators, all inherited on day one

• An entry price we like against what recent gold floats have fetched

Full breakdown lands in your inbox before market open. If you’re subscribed, keep an eye out. If you’re not, enter your email below.

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AI1 Builds the Wall Higher

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) picked up its second US patent allowance this week, and the shares rose 8% on the news.

For anyone joining late, AI1 spent six years working out how to grow graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick, on the wiring inside advanced chips, using machines chip factories already run.

Copper wiring is hitting its limits as chips shrink, and graphene has been the industry's chosen fix for a decade. AI1 was the first to make it at temperatures a chip survives.

The first patent, allowed in May, covers the way AI1 makes that graphene. The new one covers the graphene-coated wiring itself, however it gets made.

So say Samsung spends the next five years and a few hundred million dollars working out its own way to coat chip wiring in graphene. Their own chemistry, their own machines, with none of AI1’s process anywhere near it. If what comes out the other end matches the specifications in AI1’s claims, Samsung is still writing AI1 a cheque.

The lawyers put it as “irrespective of how the coated surface or interconnect is produced”, which is a dry way of saying there’s no back road around it.

Any chipmaker wanting to license the technology will want protection over the recipe and the finished article before signing anything, and as of this week AI1 has both. We went through the patent claims line by line in Friday’s article.

AI1 is a portfolio company of ours and one we’ve seen double since it joined the portfolio. Both patents still need their formal grant, and with the examiner's call already made, the official stamps usually land within a few months.

Gina Buys into Gallium

It’s been a busy week for Australia’s richest person. Gina Rinehart spent part of it suing the ABC and the rest backing a critical minerals play in the US.

Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting wrote a $7.95 million cheque this week for a slice of G50 Corp (ASX: G50), part of a $26.25 million placement that leaves Hancock holding about 5.4% of the company on completion.

Every project G50 owns sits on American soil, starting with Golconda in Arizona, an old zinc, lead, gold and silver mine where they’ve been pulling up high-grade gold and silver along with something far rarer, a gallium discovery.

Over in Nevada there's White Caps, an old gold mine that Freeport McMoRan last drilled in the early 1980s and nobody has properly touched since.

Gallium is a metal most people have never heard of, and it sits inside the chips running radar systems, defence electronics, LEDs and phone chargers, so there's a fair chance some is in the plug next to your bed right now.

America produces none of its own, China controls most of the world’s supply and banned exports to the US in late 2024, so an American company drilling out gallium on American soil is suddenly holding something Washington badly wants.

The raise funds more drilling and gallium test work, plus early permitting at Golconda. With Hancock on the register, G50 now has some of the most serious resources money in the country behind its US push.

EVG Puts Boots on the Ground at Carp

Evion Group (ASX: EVG) is sending geologists back onto its Carp Fluorspar Project in Nevada, and the ground they're walking has quite the story behind it.

Between 1958 and 1971 the old-timers pulled about 44,900 tonnes of fluorspar out of four shallow pits at Carp and sold it straight to Kaiser Steel as it came out of the ground. The grade was good enough that nobody bothered building a processing plant.

Sampling in 2024 returned grades even higher than what the old boys were digging, and nobody has run a modern exploration program over the system since the 1970s. The mine shut when cheap imports killed the economics of small US producers, and the fluorspar itself never ran out. The market just walked away from it.

Fluorspar is one of those unglamorous minerals the modern world quietly cannot function without. It goes into making semiconductors, lithium batteries, nuclear fuel, refrigerants and steel, and the US imports every single tonne it uses, most of it from China.

EVG’s next task is working out how big Carp really is, so Rangefront Mining Services, a geological outfit based in Elko, Nevada, has been engaged to map and sample the newly identified north-west corridor, the ground EVG believes extends the system well beyond the four historic pits.

Assays come back first, then surveys, and drill targets after that.

Washington has also woken up to its fluorspar problem, with the US Defense Logistics Agency just awarding a US$168.9 million contract simply to secure supply.

Half a century ago, Carp fed American industry with this mineral. EVG is about to find out how much the old operation left behind.

KTK’s Scary Number That Isn’t

KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK), one of our portfolio companies, handed in its first quarterly report since listing in May, and there’s a number in it built to spook people.

The report says KTK has 1.9 quarters of cash left. For a company that raised $10 million 10 weeks ago, that reads like something has gone badly wrong.

The number comes from a formula that takes the quarter just gone and assumes every quarter from here looks the same. For KTK, that means assuming a war and an IPO both turn up again every three months.

The war between Israel and Iran shut the corridor KTK ships through, so receipts came in at just $273,000, with finished product sitting there and the customer waiting on it. At the same time, the one-off bills of going public all landed at once.

Strip out the one-offs and the company puts its underlying costs at $0.8 to $1.0 million a quarter, against $4.62 million in the bank. That’s about five quarters of runway even if not another dollar arrives, and no dollars arriving is the bear case here, with deliveries slated to restart in September.

KTK’s actual problem is one most small caps would swap for. A customer that wants every airframe it can build, and a factory that can’t yet keep up. The new higher-capacity tooling goes through final qualification in August, with output building month by month from there.

Another IPO Doubles on Debut

Gwardar Resources (ASX: GRS) hit the boards this week after raising $6 million at 20 cents, traded as high as 47 cents, and closed its first session at 41 cents for a 105% gain on debut.

The company listed at a valuation of just $6.6 million, with 33 million shares on issue, and the register goes a long way to explaining the pop.

The top 20 shareholders hold an incredible 89% of the company, many with equal parcels, so there was barely any free stock available on day one and eager buyers had to pay up for what little was around.

Doolgunna, the flagship, sits in the Murchison in the district that delivered the DeGrussa copper-gold mine, with historical drilling at Goodins Find returning 15m at 1.36 g/t gold.

The other asset, Kurnalpi, covers gold ground 90km northeast of Kalgoorlie. Even after doubling, GRS is valued around $13.5 million, which remains tiny by ASX standards.

The move was pure demand for the float, with no new drill results behind it, and it extends the run of new resources paper getting bid hard straight out of the gate.

GRS’ next test is whether the valuation holds once early listing demand settles and all eyes are on the drill bit.

Tungsten’s Wild Return

We’ve watched plenty of wild sessions over the years, and we can’t remember one like Thursday’s.

Group 6 Metals (ASX: G6M) came back from a two-year suspension, opened at 8 cents, ran as high as $4.00, a 4,900% gain from the opening bell, and closed the week at $2.76.

When G6M went into suspension it was a struggling developer trying to get its Dolphin tungsten mine on King Island, Tasmania, up and running. The company that returned on Thursday is a producer making serious money.

The June quarter delivered a record 77,953 tonnes of ore processed, $61 million of cash receipts up 142% on the prior quarter, and $49.5 million sitting in the bank.

Underground mining kicked off at quarter end, bringing ore roughly double the grade the plant has been fed, expected from the September quarter.

While the lights were off, the tungsten price went vertical, from under US$500 per tonne unit a year ago to around US$3,000 now.

Six times higher, with China choking exports at one end and defence and aerospace buyers pulling hard on the other end.

Before anyone rings the holders to congratulate them, the company consolidated its shares during the suspension, so anyone who sat through the two years is up far less than the headline suggests.

Two years of locked-up demand met a company transformed, and the scramble to own it did the rest (and spare a second thought this week for whoever sold at 8 cents in the opening minutes).

Jade Gas Hits a Settlement Snag

Jade Gas (ASX: JGH) put out an announcement you don’t see every day on the ASX.

Jade is a coal bed methane developer in Mongolia, sitting on the country’s first formally approved natural gas reserves and a proposed $1.1 billion non-binding funding deal with a Chinese consortium to drill out Phase 1 of its Red Lake project.

Back in July the company announced an $11 million placement at 12 cents, and when settlement day rolled around, Jade had to tell the market that a number of the investors who put their hand up were unable to come up with the cash.

The stock closed the week at 8.3 cents, about 31% below the price those investors agreed to pay. Nobody enjoys paying 12 cents for an 8-cent stock.

Committing to a placement and then failing to stump up the money is about as bad a look as it gets in this market, and it usually says more about the register than the asset. We’ll be watching what happens next.

The Tech Giants Keep Writing Cheques

Amazon told the market this week it plans to spend around US$220 billion in 2026, most of it building the data centres and computing power behind the AI boom.

Its cloud business grew 37% to US$42.2 billion for the quarter, customers have already signed contracts worth US$496 billion for computing power Amazon hasn’t even built yet, and the company says demand keeps running ahead of what it can construct.

That follows Alphabet’s US$195 to 205 billion spending plan we covered last week, so between two companies alone, over US$400 billion is going out the door in a single year, with customers queued up and contracts signed years in advance.

Anyone still calling AI a bubble has to explain why the world’s biggest companies keep finding the demand to justify it. Even Leopold we spoke to in the intro makes the point. He got the direction right, but the leverage wrong.

We’ve been data centre and tech bulls for a while now, and weeks like this one show why.

All that money flows somewhere, into construction, cooling, electrical gear, fibre, chips and backup power, and on the ASX it firms up the ground under the smaller names feeding that build-out.

The winners from here will be the ones holding signed contracts, and punters have got better at spotting the companies that slapped AI on the cover of the investor deck and hoped for a re-rate.

Our own exposure sits with Adisyn (ASX: AI1), whose graphene chip wiring leans straight into the semiconductor end of this build-out. We’ve also been watching PathKey AI (ASX: PKY) closely, and there’s one more name coming soon with direct exposure to the US data centre thematic.

Copper Keeps Tightening

Rio Tinto reported a 43% jump in first-half earnings this week, with copper doing plenty of the lifting as the global data centre build-out chews through the metal.

Robert Friedland, the billionaire behind copper giant Ivanhoe Mines, put out a post this week we haven’t stopped thinking about. Copper in the US is trading at US$6.50 a pound, around US$14,000 a tonne on the LME, within a whisker of all-time highs during what is normally the sleepy part of the year.

The LME warehouses are where the world keeps its spare copper, and buyers in Shanghai and New York are emptying them faster than fresh metal arrives.

Friedland believes the exchange could run out of copper altogether. Nobody knows what the price does on the day the world goes looking for its spare copper and finds none, because nobody has ever seen it. Friedland's guess is new all-time highs in the coming months.

A quick lap of the world’s biggest copper miners shows why the cupboard keeps emptying:

• Rio’s own output fell 7% with Kennecott still down.

• BHP slipped 5% and flagged further declines in Chile.

• Freeport’s production dropped 18.2% year on year.

• Codelco’s new chairman says there is no possibility of hitting its old 1.7 million tonne target within five years, at the world’s largest copper miner no less.

• Ivanhoe’s production nearly halved. Deadly storms in Chile added fresh disruption, and the IEA is warning sulphuric acid shortages put more than a seventh of global output at risk.

Everywhere you look, less copper is coming out of the ground while demand keeps climbing, and that’s why we’re spending our time hunting copper juniors.

Any small-cap with a large copper asset or a fresh discovery is being rewarded handsomely in this market, and with supply this constrained we expect that to continue. (copper juniors, you know where to find us.)

The Week ahead

We’ve got a big week ahead.

We’ll be at Australia’s biggest mining conference, Diggers and Dealers in Kalgoorlie, and we’ll wrap up everything from the event next weekend.

We have a new portfolio addition joining the Equities Club portfolio. We only back a handful of stocks a year and this gold junior has us excited.

We’ve seen deals start to land over the past week, and we’ve been flat out on calls with companies. There is a lot happening out there and we think it will start to flow through in the coming weeks. And let’s hope The AFR is right…

Data centres, tech, drones, it’s all been busy out there. We’re gearing up for a big second half of 2026 and we feel like it’s just getting started.

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, 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 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 of AI1, 500,000 KTK shares, and 4,500,000 EVG shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AI1, KTK, and EVG at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

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

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

The first, allowed in May, was built around the way AI1 makes its graphene. This one protects the graphene-coated products themselves, whoever makes them and however they get there.

And a US allowance is the one you want. The chip industry’s biggest players live there, and so do the courts where patent fights are worth winning.

The claims in this second patent are written around the end product and its specifications, which means the protection holds even if a competitor arrives at the same result using a completely different process.

So say someone like Samsung spends the next five years and a few hundred million dollars working out its own way to coat chip wiring in graphene. Their own chemistry, their own machines, none of AI1's process anywhere near it.

If what comes out the other end matches the specs in AI1's claims, Samsung is still writing AI1 a cheque.

The lawyers’ version reads “irrespective of how the coated surface or interconnect is produced”, which is a dry way of saying there’s no back road around it.

Where AI1 Sits

A quick recap for anyone joining late.

AI1 spent six years working out how to grow graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick, inside the machines already running in the world's chip factories.

We added AI1 to the portfolio in April at 6.8 cents. It trades at 12.5 cents today, and it’s been a rare week since April that the company hasn’t given us something to write about.

April was the coupon: a full 1cm by 1cm square (about the size of your thumbnail) covered in continuous graphene, grown inside one of those machines (an industrial ALD unit) at a temperature a chip factory can survive.

Nobody had managed that before.

May was the first US patent allowance and the exclusive stealth drone licence with Tel Aviv University. Along the way came a $14 million placement cornerstoned by Meitav and Regal, and retired Colonel Tamir Zimber, the operational commander of Iron Dome, joining the drone subsidiary’s advisory board.

The drone work and the chip work run off the same graphene platform. One side of it coats an aircraft so radar sees less of it. This patent belongs to the other side, the wiring inside advanced chips.

Chips are the processors inside everything from your phone to your computer to your car to every AI data centre in the world, and the industry that makes them is on track for close to a trillion US dollars this year.

Every advanced chip on the planet has the same wiring problem. Copper has been shrunk so thin that resistance is climbing, and AI workloads now waste staggering amounts of electricity just pushing electrons through it, which is a strange problem to have created for ourselves, but here we are.

The chip industry settled on graphene as the fix over a decade ago, but nobody could make it at temperatures that don’t melt the chip.

AI1 cleared that hurdle on the coupon, and the job now is proving the result repeats across hundreds of samples under factory conditions.

What the New Patent Covers

The May patent covered AI1’s method and what it produces. The new one attaches to the products themselves: graphene coatings that hold an even layer over complex three-dimensional shapes, and interconnects, the microscopic copper wires that carry signals around a chip.

Everything AI1 is doing on the semiconductor side ends at the interconnect.

The protection itself lives in the claims, the list of specifications every patent is built around. If you build something that matches the list then you’re infringing on the patent.

Claims are understandably written in patent-speak, so here they are straight from the announcement, with our translation underneath:

• a median copper grain size under 0.9 microns

• fewer shorts and voids than a comparable interconnect exposed to 400°C or more

• interconnect metal substantially free of diffusion barrier coating materials

• graphene free of nitrogen doping, FeCl3 residuals and residual metal catalyst nanoparticles

Grain size is how the copper crystals form inside the wire, and it decides how well the wire moves electricity and handles heat.

Shorts and voids are the tiny manufacturing flaws that kill chips, and chip production runs hot enough to cause plenty of them. This claim is for wiring that comes through the heat with fewer flaws than standard copper manages.

Copper also has a bad habit of bleeding into whatever sits around it, so every copper wire in a chip gets wrapped in a protective layer to hold it in. That wrapping steals precious room inside wiring that’s already impossibly thin. Wiring that skips the wrapping altogether is covered too.

The last one is purity. Contamination has crippled rival graphene processes for years, because graphene carrying leftover chemicals or stray metal particles is useless inside a chip. The final claim covers the clean version, which is the one the industry has been waiting on.

Managing director Arye Kohavi:

“These characteristics are directly relevant to the challenges facing next-generation semiconductors. Copper grain size and reduced shorts and voids can influence electrical resistivity and thermal performance, while removing conventional diffusion barrier materials may create additional space as processors continue to scale.”

The patents are now the part of AI1’s moat you can read. But the precursor chemistry and years of accumulated know-how stay locked up as trade secrets, unpublished and never expiring.

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The Bigger Prize

AI1 could one day license this technology to several chipmakers at once, and a patent over the product itself gives the company far more to charge for than a patent over one manufacturing route ever would.

A prospective partner wants enforceable US protection over the method and the finished article before signing anything. As of this week, AI1 has both.

The Selloff and the Spending

More than a trillion US dollars has come off chip stocks this month (Intel alone is down more than 20%) as Wall Street asks whether record AI spending can hold its pace.

Alphabet used its latest result to lift its 2026 capex forecast in spite of it. Chip giant TSMC, which manufactures for just about everyone, beat profit and revenue expectations in July while flagging even more capital spending than planned.

Then there's the CHIPS Act money behind TSMC's Arizona fabs, the giant factories where chips get made, and the billions Micron and Samsung are putting into plants still under construction.

The government pays it out in tranches as construction milestones get ticked off, so much of it hasn't even landed yet. Every fab it builds will need next-generation materials from the day the doors open.

Each one of those fabs inherits the same copper problem AI1 is working on, selloff or no selloff.

What We’re Watching

Both patents still need their formal grant, and with the examiner's call already made, the official stamps usually land within a few months.

AI1 has flagged patent applications in other jurisdictions too, so expect the wall to keep rising beyond the US.

AI1 has covered a 1cm by 1cm coupon in continuous graphene, and a commercial fab builds on 300mm wafers. Getting from one to the other is the difference between a lab result and a product a factory can run, and it’s the milestone we’re watching closest.

AI1 is talking to potential partners and customers across both the chip and radar programs, and two granted-track US patents give those conversations a firmer footing than lab results on their own ever could.

A patent protects the technology without making anyone adopt it, and the wafer scale-up over the next 12 months is where AI1 starts making its case.

If the industry makes the jump, whoever moves first, the door they knock on belongs to AI1.

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.

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

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

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

Let’s get to it.

• Three new names join the Equities Club books in August

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

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

• Brain-tech IPO Ceretas more than doubles on debut

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

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

• MRD hands its new CTO 24 million ambitious performance rights

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

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

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

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

Three New Names Land in Our Portfolio in August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Four Years, One Signature, and US$263 Million

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Tankers and One Hundred Dollar Oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ceretas Doubles While Everything Else Sags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wesfarmers Bets $1.4 Billion That Lithium is Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uranium at US$86 and a Gap That Keeps Widening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pay Packet That Tells You What Mount Ridley is Building

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

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

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

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

• 2 million at a 6 cent share price

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

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

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

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

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

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

ECT Runs 30%, Then Goes Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twiggy Buys the Tungsten

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

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

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

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

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

Four Votes Carry a US$1.15 Trillion Defence Bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Horse Digging in at Sister Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Week Ahead

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

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

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

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

Till next week.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly four years of mornings.

This morning, it appeared: Mining Permits Granted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s dig in.

What Evion Can Now Do at Maniry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A Stage 1 capital cost of US$79.2 million

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The India Plant Already Banking Sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Money Talks Can Now Move

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We’re Watching Next

• The government decree which lands this week

• The new combined mining permit number.

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

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

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

  ---

Four Years of Mornings

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

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

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

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

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

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s get to it.

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

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

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

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

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

• Drone warfare rewrites the rules as defence billions pile up

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

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

• Janus doubles on a big fortnight of US orders

• Mount Ridley grows its scandium without turning a drill

The Middle East Reignites, and Oil Follows

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

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

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

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

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

You suspect Trump knows the feeling.1

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

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

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

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

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

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Evion Halts Ahead of a Maniry Milestone

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

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

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

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

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

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

Add it to your watch list now.

Fortuna Lands a Top-Six Rutile Resource

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biotech Bucks a Red Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drone Warfare Rewrites the Rules

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

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

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

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

The men learn anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AZ9 Drills its Best Copper Hole Yet

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Chinese Giant Pays Up for Tartana

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

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

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

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

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

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

Janus Doubles on a Big Fortnight of Orders

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a bad week at all for holders.

Mount Ridley Grows Its Scandium Off Old Hits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We’re Watching

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Metallurgy and the Test That Can Make a Mine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AZ9 is drilling one out at the right time.

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

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

Our Take into the Back End of 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Cheap gets fixed eventually, and the assays keep arriving.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside a Top-Six Resource (So Far)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Sovereign Comparison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why The World Needs More Rutile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

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

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

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

What caught our eye this week:

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

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

• Fortuna kicks off aircore drilling at Mkanda

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

• The banks keep lifting their gold forecasts

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

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

The Broker Book, One More Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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KTEK Laying Foundation to Launch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortuna Brings in the Bigger Rig

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gold Bidding War is on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

India Comes Knocking for Our Uranium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RGT Doubles on a Debt-for-Drug Swap

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Week Ahead

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

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

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

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

Till next week.

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