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

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

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

Here’s what caught our eye this week:

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

• Evion lands in Nevada fluorspar and turns a graphite profit

• Drilling gets to untested depths for Black Horse

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

• Sulphides hit in NSW for Exultant Mining

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

• Chip spending blows past a trillion dollars

• Swift TV keeps winning repeat Chevron orders

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

But First, We've Been Picking Brokers' Brains

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

FUN’s Rutile Comes in Cleaner Than the Producers

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

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

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

At that grade, Fortuna’s out in front.

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

Fortuna cleared the lot on its first pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find our write-up here.

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

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

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

AZ9 Hits Thick, High-Grade Copper in Mongolia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our full write up can be found here.

BHL Goes Deep at Mt Egerton

In 1906 the water won.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gold’s Pullback has Big Buyers Stacking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sulphide in Two of Three for 10X

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find our full write up here.

Drone Spending Keeps Climbing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chips Blow Through the Trillion-Dollar Mark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deals Are Landing For This Small-Cap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Pharma Keeps Paying Up to Fix One Blood Cancer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Week Ahead

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

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

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

Till next week.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hole Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Ground, and Where This Takes the Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Copper Backdrop

Azzuro picked a good year to hit copper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottomline

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

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

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

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

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

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

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stock trades at 9.2 cents today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which clears every one of them.

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

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

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

The Demand Story: Titanium and the Humanoid Build-Out

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

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

The companies building humanoids are already worth billions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

Today’s result answers the quality question.

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

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

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

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

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

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ground: High-Grade Hits, Never Followed Up

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

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

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

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

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

The Results: Metal in Two of Three Holes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hole That Got the Geos Talking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What's Next: The Five Holes That Count

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottom line

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

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

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

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The price has moved to match (more on that later), and America imports every tonne it uses.

EVG is sitting on a high-grade slab of it in the jurisdiction Washington most wants to buy from. Almost none of that is in the share price yet.

The Price and the Calendar First

EVG is trading at 3 cents, the same price the raise that funded the Carp deal was done at.

Right now the market is putting next to nothing on the project itself, the historic mine and every claim staked around it.

Most of that is the time of year. June is a notorious month for selling. Thinly traded small-caps often get sold as 30 June approaches, and stocks that have drifted tend to cop it regardless of what’s happening underneath.

Nothing about Carp has changed in the last month, and now there’s a plan to put value on it over the coming months.

Closing in on What the Old Miners Missed

Carp produced fluorspar once, back in the 1960s, but only from what the old miners could see at surface.

The grades EVG has since pulled from the ground sit higher than anything that mine ever sold, and the best of those came from the pits the old crews never finished.

Something's down there, and the program now running is the hunt for it.

A crew is already on site, collecting rock samples along a corridor on the north-west side of the main claim block. EVG only picked that ground out as a target recently, and it's the cheapest place to start.

Sampling only reads what's lying on the surface, and the deeper question of what sits metres below is the one drilling answers, but drilling is where the money goes, so you want the holes pointed at the right ground before the rig ever turns.

That pointing is the job of a magnetic survey, flown by drone or walked across the ground, reading the structures and how they run at depth.

Fluorspar at Carp sits in faults and folds, so tracing those structures traces the mineral itself, and the data builds into a 3D model that turns open ground into a handful of marked targets.

The mineral is noticeably denser than the limestone around it, so the right survey can pick out buried bodies of it the way you’d feel a brick hidden in a bag of feathers.

The drilling follows in two passes, reconnaissance holes first across the north-west targets, then deeper structural holes back at the old pits to chase the system down.

The rig only turns once the cheaper work has earned it.

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Already a Working Mine

Carp has been a mine before. Between 1958 and 1971 it produced 44,900 tonnes of fluorspar from four shallow pits, crushed and sold straight to Kaiser Steel with no other processing.

Fluorspar is graded by how much calcium fluoride, written CaF₂, is packed into the rock. The higher that number, the purer the material and the more it’s worth.

Carp came out at around 69%, enough to sell as it was. At that purity it goes to steelmakers as a flux, the additive that pulls impurities out of molten metal. A mine ran here for 13 years on that grade.

It closed in 1971 for a reason that had nothing to do with the geology. Cheap imported fluorspar flooded the US market and undercut small American producers, until an operation Carp’s size couldn’t make the sums work.

The mineral stayed in the ground, waiting for the economics to swing back. They have.

Verified results from 2024, signed off in May, came back as high as 88.15% CaF₂ across all four old pits, well north of the 69% the mine once sold at.

As purity climbs like that, the mineralisation stops being simple steel flux and starts heading toward acid-grade fluorspar, the premium tier behind batteries, chips, refrigerants and nuclear fuel.

Carp isn’t there yet, but that climb is the whole point. It’s also where the value sits.

Nevada ranks as the top mining jurisdiction in the world on the Fraser Institute's survey, the gauge explorers use for where it's safe to sink money into the ground.

The Mineral America Forgot to Worry About

For years almost nobody outside the steel industry could tell you what fluorspar did. That changed when the country that fed the world's fluorspar started hoarding it.

China mines and uses more fluorspar than anyone, and for years it sold the surplus on. Then it stopped being a net seller and became a net buyer, and the rest of the world was left scrambling for supply.

(It’s worth knowing there are two grades that matter here, because they sell into different worlds).

The lower grade is called metspar, the stuff steelmakers melt into the furnace as a flux.

The higher grade is acidspar, the pure end that gets turned into the acid behind batteries, chips and refrigerants.

Same mineral, dug from the same ground, but the cleaner it comes out, the more it’s worth.

Both have been climbing. The average the US paid for metspar went from US$151 a tonne in 2021 to US$400 in 2025. Acidspar ran from US$322 to US$470 over the same stretch.

Buyers paying more than double in four years is what a supply squeeze looks like before anyone’s built the new mines to fix it.

The US imports 100% of its fluorspar and has for decades, even with old mines sitting idle across the country.

Fluorspar shows up twice on the US military’s list of nine minerals with the highest shortfall risk in a major conflict, once as metspar and once as acid-grade.

The Defense Logistics Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that stockpiles materials for wartime, recently put US$168.9 million into a fluorspar supply contract. On the military side the mineral runs through armour-grade aluminium and jet fuel catalysts as well.

Carp is one of the few high-grade options in America.

Putting a Number on It

Right now Carp is a hunch with a strong history.

A mine that ran for 13 years, grades that have come back higher than it ever sold, and a read on a system that runs deeper than anyone has tested.

The sampling, the magnetics, the model and the drilling behind them are each there to turn that hunch into a defined deposit, one low-cost step at a time.

The market only ever pays for what it can measure, and every result that comes back gives it more to go on.

America imports every tonne of fluorspar it uses, the price has more than doubled in four years, and Carp is one of the few high-grade options on US soil in the jurisdiction Washington most wants to buy from.

Fluorspar has waited more than 50 years for the world to come back around. Now EVG finds out how much is down there.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

I guess ending 26 years of 4am alarms will do that to a man.

No such luck for us. Our screen, the one that trades, had us hooked all week as usual, and it served up a gold price getting pushed around. Bullion tested US$4,000, dipped under for a moment, then clawed back above it to close out a fourth week in the red.

But no need to panic. Gold’s still up better than 23% on a year ago and the banks haven’t backed off their higher targets (more on that later).

Plenty was still happening down the cheap end. Here’s what caught our eye this week:

• Mount Ridley grows its scandium resource off old samples

• Azzuro wraps its first drilling phase at Red Hill, assays due in July

• Gold wobbles toward US$4,000 but the bull case holds

• Pathkey bolts on an AI chip-design play after buying Chipforge

• Orcoda jumps 179% on a contract win against a falling market

• China hands out a lithium permit and the sector drops

  ---

Mount Ridley Finds Scandium in the Shed

Mount Ridley (ASX: MRD) keeps turning up scandium every time it digs back through its old drill samples.

MRD owns one of the biggest scandium deposits reported anywhere, around 367 million tonnes of it, on its Grass Patch ground near Esperance, with rare earth and gallium in the same ground.

This week it re-assayed another 481 old samples, and the deposit grew in all directions. The standout ran 22 metres at 134 ppm from 33 metres deep, about 46% above the existing resource average of 92 ppm. Other hits came in at 119 ppm and 104 ppm, and a number of holes still had scandium in them where the old drilling stopped.

MRD is doing this off pulps that have sat in the shed for years, with roughly 14,000 still to get through. It’s about the cheapest way to add tonnes there is.

Scandium is a critical mineral almost no one produces outside China and Russia. China put it under export licensing last year and choked the trickle reaching the West, which is why Australia, the US and Europe all want their own supply. It goes into aerospace alloys, fuel cells and 3D printing.

Demand for the metal is tipped to grow around 14.5% a year out to 2031 as those uses scale up. A deposit this size on Australian ground is what will turn the heads of Western buyers.

From here the new numbers feed into an updated resource estimate that could lift the JORC number. A second batch of re-assays is already back and under review, and the company is scoping a follow-up program to test a 13km stretch of untested ground to the south-west.

All of it funded off material MRD already owns.

Azzuro Keeps Hitting Sulphide at Red Hill

Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9), or Asian Battery Metals as most of you know it, has spent the past two months putting holes into Red Hill, its copper-gold project in Mongolia, and pulling up sulphide most of the way down.

Phase one wrapped this week, 15 holes for close to 1,900 metres.

The best hole cut nearly 37 metres of massive sulphide, then deeper down clipped a two-metre vein logged at a visual 33% chalcopyrite.

Five of the six holes chasing the sulphide found it, and the system now runs about 272 metres along strike, still opening up at both ends and at depth. They've been chipping at this thing since last year and every phase makes it look bigger.

Quick caveat on those grades. They're the geologists' eyeball read off the core, and the lab can tell a different story once it weighs in. Visual chalcopyrite has flattered to deceive before, so treat the percentages as a strong hint rather than a banked result until the assays land.

Azzuro’s still a minnow, trading at 1.7c for a market cap near $14 million. It went into the program with $5.2 million in the bank and we’d put it near $4 million now, so there’s cash to keep the rig turning. Which it will, having already moved across to the nearby Copper Ridge target.

A company this size landing thick sulphide while the world can’t get its hands on enough copper can re-rate in a hurry, if the assays back the visuals.

Most of those assays are due in July, with downhole electromagnetic surveys (which pick up conductive sulphide still sitting in the ground) starting shortly.

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Gold Looks Like the Sleeper of the Second Half

Six months ago you couldn't get through a barbecue without someone telling you gold was headed for US$10,000. It's come off the boil a bit lately, back to around US$4,071, and funnily enough that same crowd has gone quiet.

Gold is still up more than 23% on this time last year. Most people fondly remember the record it set in January, so a few months underneath it feels like a collapse when the price has really just had a rest.

We like gold more now that some people have lost interest.

The banks have all trimmed their forecasts since the slide, and every trimmed forecast still sits above where gold trades today.

• Goldman Sachs: US$4,900/oz by year end

• BMO Capital Markets: an average around US$4,625/oz across the second half

• Deutsche Bank: US$4,300/oz in the September quarter, lifting to US$4,800/oz by December

Goldman just cut its forecast and still landed about 20% above where gold sits now.

Central banks have been buying hand over fist for months (China’s been adding to its pile 18 months straight), and they don't lose sleep over what the price does in any given week. That's the floor under all of this.

Sentiment in gold can flip in a hurry though, and the last few months are proof of that.

There are plenty of gold names that ran hard on the way up and now trade at valuations that leave no room for a wobble. The ones worth owning are quality operators still trading at a fair price, and they're out there if you put in the work.

We've got our eye on a couple. More in the coming weeks.

Pathkey Bolts On a Chip-Design Bet

We flagged Pathkey (ASX: PKY) on the 3rd of May as one to keep an eye on, back when it was sitting at 5c. It closed this week at 7.1c, up more than 40%, and we think it's only just booting up.

This week PKY completed its buyout of Chipforge, a Singapore outfit building an AI platform that designs custom computer chips.

Designing custom silicon today takes 12 to 24 months and at least US$5 million a design, and most attempts fail on the first try, with an 86% first-silicon fail rate.

Chipforge’s pitch is that its agentic AI does the heavy lifting between design and verification, cutting that timeline by up to 70%.

Cadence and Synopsys, the two US giants that own chip-design software, are worth around US$190 billion between them and still run on tooling built in the 1980s.

Governments have committed more than US$115 billion to building out their own chip capacity since 2022, and the world is tipped to be short a million chip engineers by 2030. (Finally, a job the robots are creating instead of stealing.)

Chipforge holds an exclusive worldwide licence to chip-design IP from Nanyang Technological University, ranked the number one AI research institution globally.

PKY's pre-revenue and tiny, so plenty can still go wrong. But it's pointed straight at the silicon shortage the whole world is throwing money at, and it's already handed readers 40% since we first flagged it.

Orcoda Runs Against the Tide

The biggest small-cap move of the week came from an unlikely spot, a Brisbane logistics and software business. Orcoda (ASX: ODA) jumped 179% on a new contract.

The deal is with the Wagner Corporation, the Toowoomba clan who built an entire airport on farmland outside town. Orcoda's now running the workforce logistics and facilities management at Wellcamp Business Park, the industrial estate that's grown up next to that airport.

It kicks off in July, worth about $8 million a year, billed monthly on the number of workers housed on site.

Orcoda turned over about $17 million last financial year, so a single deal adding half that again is a proper step up, and it lands just as the company was nursing a hole left by a major customer who deferred work back in FY25.

The contract runs on Contractor360, Orcoda's workforce platform, lately rebuilt as an AI-led system that handles onboarding, rostering, accommodation and site access. Plenty of mining and construction outfits run big crews on remote sites and need similar, so Wellcamp doubles as a shop window for potential customers.

More often than not, the week’s small-cap winners are explorers riding a fresh drill hit. Orcoda got there on a signed contract and recurring revenue, which is a sturdier reason to be up 179%.

China Pulls the Lithium Lever Again

A single permit notice out of China knocked the lithium market this week, and the ASX lithium names wore it with everyone else.

The trigger was CATL’s Jianxiawo mine in Jiangxi, one of the biggest hard-rock lithium deposits going. Around 65,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year comes out of it, roughly 3% of global supply, and it’s sat idle since August last year when its permit lapsed.

That shutdown alone was enough to more than double Chinese lithium futures at one point.

Then this week Jiangxi authorities handed a CATL subsidiary a fresh land-use approval. That's an early tick in a long process, but traders jumped on it as the clearest sign yet the mine is coming back, and Chinese lithium carbonate futures fell about 10% over two sessions to a 10-week low.

Pilbara Minerals (ASX: PLS), Liontown (ASX: LTR) and Mineral Resources (ASX: MIN) all price off that Chinese carbonate number, so the drop washed straight onto our market within the day.

Small explorers feel it more than anyone, because they fund their drilling by raising money, and the price they can raise at tracks the lithium price. Knock 10% off in Jiangxi and a junior in Perth has to hand over more shares to bring in the same cash.

The small caps swing harder than the producers both ways, so weeks like this sting the rebounds fly.

There’s still no telling when the mine actually fires back up, and most analysts see lithium supply staying tight as battery demand climbs.

What it lays bare is how much of lithium’s recovery leans on this one mine staying dark, and how completely Beijing still works the switch, the same lever we’ve watched it pull on gallium, scandium and rare earths.

The Week Ahead

We're glad to see the back of June. It's been a rough month for small-caps, caught between the usual end-of-financial-year selling and the lingering hangover from the May budget and all the noise around tax.

The good news is news flow tends to pick up from mid-to-late July, so our portfolio companies should start dropping announcements, and the ASX should find a pulse again.

Gold looked to settle by Friday, copper held firm, and lithium wore the brunt of a mine that might be coming back to life.

And keep half an eye on the defence names, because the US and Iran are circling each other again, which has a way of putting a bid under that corner of the market.

Till next week.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

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.

Last time the US hosted, back in 1994, the average ticket cost about US$58. This year it’s nearer US$1,600, and seats for next month’s final in New Jersey are changing hands around US$16,000. A few have even been listed north of US$2 million.

Three host nations have poured money into stadiums and transport, betting the crowds pay it all back, and at those prices they probably will.

We’re writing this a little worse for wear. The Socceroos stunned Turkey on Sunday and the whole country was floating, then we got up before dawn to watch the Yanks bring us back to earth. Paraguay’s next on Friday, and we’ll be glued to that one too.

One result can turn a whole country, and markets are no different. A single number or headline and the price swings hard. We know that game well.

Back in small-cap land the news was a bit thin this week. A diamond rig finally turning below a million-ounce Victorian goldfield, a maiden rutile resource taking shape in Malawi, lithium roaring back to life, and the West drawing a line on Chinese rare earths.

Let’s get to it

• BHL puts a diamond drill rig into a historic million-ounce Victorian gold mine

• FUN commissions its own lab in Malawi as a maiden resource bears down

• Lithium claws out of a two-year hole and runs hard

• The G7 sets a deadline to break China’s grip on rare earths

• IVG reckons it can make battery-grade graphite without the acid, and pops 28%

• Billions pour into chips as Apple, Intel and Qualcomm redraw the map

It’s Diamond Drill Time in Victoria

Our 2025 Small-Cap of the Year and portfolio company Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) finally has a diamond drill rig on site, ready to punch below a historic mine that produced more than a million ounces of gold.

This is the program we’ve been waiting for. The rig is at Mt Egerton with roughly 4,000 metres across 10 holes lined up to test the system at depth.

Mt Egerton pulled 1.29 million ounces out of the ground at around 12 grams a tonne before water flooded it and shut the whole thing in 1906.

More than 90% of the drilling since has stopped above 150 metres, so the deep system (the bit that actually counts), has sat there untested for the better part of a century.

Victorian gold has a habit of getting richer the deeper you chase it.

Fosterville’s ultra-high-grade Swan zone, the discovery that turned it into a cash machine, wasn’t found until drilling pushed past historic workings.

Mt Egerton sits in the same structural corridor as Fosterville, Costerfield and Sunday Creek, and every one of them paid out for whoever chased the grade deeper.

Black Horse has also been given access to reopen the old Sister Rose adit, a horizontal tunnel dug into the hillside that miners once used to haul ore out before it was sealed up over a century ago.

Getting back inside lets them map where the historic workings sit underground, so they can aim the drill at the right spot below them rather than guessing.

Early results were modest, with only anomalous gold from the maiden holes. The depth test is the one that counts.

FUN Lab Commissioned, Resource in Sight

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) has commissioned its own laboratory in Lilongwe, Malawi, a sharp move with a maiden resource bearing down.

For anyone new to the story, FUN is chasing rutile in Malawi, the cleanest titanium feedstock going, and titanium is the light, strong metal aerospace and defence keep wanting more of.

Fifteen technicians have been trained to process samples in-house, with duplicates checked against an external lab for quality control.

Running their own assays cuts both the cost and the turnaround time for Fortuna, handy when you’re trying to feed rutile results into a resource and keep the drill bit moving through 2026.

Around 62% of the 6,000-metre hand auger program is now done, the 5,000-metre aircore program kicks off in early July, and the maiden inferred resource estimate lands the same month.

Resource competent person Richard Stockwell has been on the ground auditing both the drilling and the sample processing ahead of that estimate.

Mkanda sits about 20km south of Sovereign Metals’ Kasiya, the largest rutile deposit in the world, and Fortuna is going after rutile, graphite and potential rare earths across the same ground.

A maiden resource is the catalyst we’ve been waiting on as holders, and the company now has around $15 million in the bank after the recent investment from WndrCo, which funds the aircore program testing depth and the more than 600 holes still to report.

Plenty to keep the news flowing through the back half of the year.

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Lithium Bulls Are Back In Charge

Lithium spent two years in the gutter. It has now climbed out, and it is climbing fast.

The metal that gutted portfolios through the downturn is running hard again, and the holders who refused to sell are watching the screen turn green for the first time in a long while.

In China, lithium carbonate is up around 40% this year and roughly 175% on a year ago, sitting near 165,500 yuan a tonne, or about US$24,500.

Grid-scale battery storage is the new driver this cycle, a second engine bolted on next to EVs.

The forecasters who left lithium for dead are now quietly rewriting their numbers upward. Bloomberg has CRU Group, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and Citigroup all seeing stretched supply push prices past recent highs.

CRU sees carbonate averaging around US$33,900 a tonne next quarter, Benchmark reckons it could touch US$30,000 this year, and Citi has flagged about US$37,000 in Q3.

China is heading into its busier buying season, when battery makers step up their ordering. That has calmed earlier fears the market was carrying too much unsold stock, or that restarted Australian mines like Finniss and Bald Hill would flood it with fresh supply.

Some ASX names have already moved. PLS is up 36% this year, Wildcat Resources (WC8) is up 48%, and Galan Lithium (GLN) is up 23%.

Many others remain muted which may represent opportunity for those who want to back the analyst calls above.

The G7 Wants Out of Chinese Rare Earths

For two decades the West outsourced its rare earths problem to China and tried not to think about it. That's ending.

The G7 has agreed to source at least 40% of the materials for high-tech magnets from outside China by 2030, pushing for 50% as soon as they can manage it.

For anyone building a rare earths project somewhere the West trusts, that’s a tidal wave of future demand with their name on it.

China still controls more than 90% of global processing, and these are the materials inside half the things the modern world runs on, from the EVs in the driveway to the guidance systems steering missiles.

The G7 has now said out loud that it wants out, and the manufacturers and defence buyers chasing that target will be forming a queue outside every developer that can deliver before 2030. There aren’t many of them.

Lynas in Australia and MP Materials in the US already have price floors locked in, Lynas’ through a Japanese buyer and MP’s through the Pentagon.

Those deals set a minimum of US$110 a kilogram for the neodymium-praseodymium oxide that goes into magnets, around twice the market price before they were struck.

The US has gone further again with Project Vault, a US$12 billion critical minerals reserve.

A junior sitting on the right ground in a country the West trusts can suddenly raise money without scrapping for every dollar, with offtakers circling years before they normally would.

2030 is brutally tight for projects that mostly haven’t built anything yet. Processing is the part nobody likes to talk about, and most still have to prove they can turn rock into something a magnet maker will actually buy. Plenty will say they can. Only the best will.

InVert Graphite Says No To Acid

Almost nobody outside China has managed to build a battery-grade graphite plant, and the thing standing in the way is a tank of hydrofluoric acid.

Turning raw graphite flake into the material a carmaker will actually buy is the hard, expensive part, and the usual way to do it leans on hydrofluoric acid. It’s nasty stuff to handle, and a permitting nightmare in the West.

China processes roughly 98% of the world’s graphite, and the acid is a big part of why everyone else keeps stalling.

InVert Graphite (ASX: IVG) caught our eye this week, up as high as 57% before closing the week up 28% after announcing it’s acquiring RapidGraphite and a technology called RapidPulse.

RapidPulse is a process developed at Curtin University that the company says can do that conversion in seconds and hit around 99% purity without any acid involved.

Take the acid out and the cost of building one of these plants outside China drops hard.

Carmakers and governments are desperate for graphite from anywhere that isn't China, and a cleaner, cheaper process lowers the bar to handing them one, assuming it holds up once it leaves the lab.

IVG comes with the Morogoro graphite project in Tanzania and a potential route into downstream processing, and has raised A$2.5 million to fund the trials.

It’s early days for IVG and they are not a portfolio company for us, but it's one we'll be keeping an eye on.

Billions for Semiconductors and AI Chips

Intel spent years as American tech's cautionary tale, the giant that passed on the iPhone chip and then watched Nvidia run away with AI. It's clawing its way back now, and this week Apple and the White House gave it another shove.

Trump confirmed this week that Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build chips on American soil.

Intel shares jumped more than 10% on the day and are now up past 240% for the year. The US government is on the register too, after taking a stake back in August.

When Washington starts buying into chipmakers directly, the onshoring push has real teeth.

There are indicators everywhere that the big money is piling into chips, and it shows no sign of slowing.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), one of the biggest names in mobile silicon, is reportedly circling an AI silicon startup for between US$8 and US$10 billion. That's the going rate now for a genuine edge in AI.

We’re not going to pretend the local tiddlers are about to land Apple contracts.

But when the largest companies and governments on the planet are paying up for chips and racing to onshore supply, the ASX small-caps with exposure to that supply chain tend to catch the slipstream. That’s the corner of the market we’re watching closely.

The Week Ahead

We’re into the last full trading week of the financial year, which usually means thin volumes and not much news. June tends to be a soft month anyway, as people crystallise losses and buying dries up while portfolios get a once-over to setup for the second half.

So we’re not expecting much. Maybe a drilling update or two, but nothing major across the portfolio. If commodities take a breather and nothing flares up in the Middle East or the drone and tech space, we’d be happy enough heading into July.

Our eyes will be locked on the Socceroos on Friday. A win or a draw against Paraguay sends Australia through to the Round of 32 in second place, and even a loss leaves the door open as one of the best third-placed teams.

Fingers crossed. Till next week.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 187,500 BHL shares, 1,544,000 FUN shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by BHL and FUN at the time of writing.

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.

Only a few dozen pro football clubs trade publicly on exchanges overseas. The biggest is Manchester United at around AUD$5.9 billion, bigger than plenty of ASX 200 names.

You can also pick up shares in Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Ajax, Celtic and Benfica.

A derby loss, a sacked manager, a marquee signing or a cup exit can all move the price. And every star in this tournament is a club asset on loan to his country for the month. If he comes home with a hamstring, his club wears it.

Share prices moving on a single piece of news. We know that game well.

Back in small-cap land, the news was dropping everywhere. A chip-industry milestone a decade in the making, a drone supplier planting a flag in Los Angeles right as Washington puts more than $50 billion behind drone production, thick copper out of Mongolia, and a maiden resource taking shape in Malawi.

A scandium resource grew off samples that had been sitting in storage for years. And in Canada, a tiny copper hunter pulled grades that sent us back through years of announcements looking for a precedent. We came up empty.

What caught our eye this week:

• AI1 cracks graphene below 300°C, the chip industry’s white whale

• KTK signs lease in US as Washington opens chequebook on drones

• MRD doubles its scandium grades off old drill pulps, no rig required

• AZ9 hits thick, high-grade copper in Mongolia

• FUN advances Mkanda on every front after landing a SpaceX-calibre backer

• WCN drills copper grades we can’t say we’ve seen before

• SpaceX lists and Elon becomes a trillionaire

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AI1 Harpoons the Chip Industry's White Whale

Graphene grows at around 1,000°C. A finished chip starts cooking past about 450°C.

That gap has held up the chip industry’s most wanted breakthrough for a decade.

Every advanced chip, from the processor in your phone to the ones filling AI data centres around the world, runs on copper wiring.

That copper has hit its physical limits as the chips keep shrinking, and graphene is the material everyone agrees should replace it.

But the one material that could save the chip could only be grown at a temperature that destroys it.

Until now.

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) ran its process three times on three separate days, and grew graphene below 300°C every time. No chipmaker will build a billion-dollar production line around a coating that worked one Tuesday and never again.

Then AI1 did the thing most small-caps avoid. It handed the raw data to an outsider and invited him to pull it apart.

That outsider was UNSW’s Associate Professor Rakesh Joshi, who learned graphene working alongside the bloke who won the Nobel Prize for discovering it. Joshi checked every run and dozens of measurement points across each sample, and confirmed the process does what Adisyn says it does.

The machine AI1 uses to lay the graphene down is an ALD system, which is the standard tool inside every leading-edge chip factory on earth. AI1’s invention is the chemistry that makes graphene form at low temperature inside that machine, and it’s patented.

Owning the pizza oven doesn’t mean you can make the pizza. TSMC, Samsung and Intel own the ovens. AI1 owns the recipe.

This is a swing at an industry heading toward US$1 trillion a year.

We first wrote AI1 up for readers in April at 6.8c, and it’s up more than 150% since then. The stated next milestone is a binding deal with one of the giants.

You can read our full breakdown here.

KTK Plants Its Flag in the US

There's a new flag flying in Los Angeles this week, and an Aussie small-cap put it there.

KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) signed a lease on a production and engineering facility in the city and took immediate possession of the warehouse and office space. The US build-out is already underway.

KTEK makes composite airframes and electromechanical assemblies for military and commercial drones, running an asset-light model that keeps the design and engineering in-house and farms out the manufacturing.

It’s one of our portfolio companies, and it already supplies into tier-one defence programs. The LA site is about turning that foothold into a much bigger book of US customers.

The US has lined up around $54 billion to scale up drone production, the biggest push of its kind the country has run. And a lot of American customers want a supplier with production on home soil before they'll hand over an order.

Plenty of US defence work also carries domestic sourcing rules a foreign-only supplier can’t meet. The LA facility clears both hurdles and gives KTEK a second production hub alongside its existing operations in Europe and Israel.

KTEK has been growing its revenue quickly since listing late last year. A base inside the world’s largest defence market, right as that market opens the chequebook on drones, is how a junior supplier turns a few tier-one relationships into many.

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Old Holes, New Scandium for Mount Ridley

Years ago, explorers drilled a few thousand holes into a stretch of ground 25km north of the port at Esperance, hunting nickel and copper. The samples went into storage, and the world moved on.

Nobody tested them for scandium, because back then scandium wasn’t worth the lab fee. It was a niche metal almost nobody chased.

Then China put it under export controls last year, and every aerospace and chip buyer in the West suddenly needed a new supplier for a metal the whole world produces about 25 tonnes of a year.

So Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD), which now holds that ground as its Grass Patch Project, pulled 3,271 of the old samples out of storage and asked them a new question.

This week the answers came back. The current resource centres on a zone called Block 1, averaging 91.8ppm scandium oxide, and the reassays beat it comfortably, with near-surface hits of 9m at 152.89ppm and 20m at 116.39ppm.

The strongest grades sat about 13km southwest of the resource, on ground it doesn’t cover, and they improved the further out the samples came from. The system keeps going past the last hole.

Scandium sells for around US$3,350 a kilogram, and demand already runs at four times world supply.

These are aircore results, so they need proper drilling before anyone banks them. Phase 1 now rolls into the resource model, and Phase 2 is being scoped along that 13km corridor, with roughly 14,000 samples still sitting in storage.

Growing a resource off samples you already own, with no rig and no raise, is about as cheap as exploration gets. It’s one of a few reasons why MRD sits in our portfolio.

We broke down the announcement here.

Azzuro Hits Thick, High-Grade Copper in Mongolia

A 13-metre copper hit at over 2% is a strong result for any explorer, and this week it came from Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9), the portfolio company formerly known as Asian Battery Metals.

The assays landed from its Red Hill project in Mongolia.

Drillhole MU2601 returned 13.1m at 2.58% copper, with 0.96 g/t gold, 22.4 g/t silver and 0.76% zinc on top.

A hit like that at any size gets attention, and for a company carrying a sub-$20 million market cap it’s a result that can rerate a register.

The silver came in well above the earlier holes, adding metal credits to a system already throwing off four payable metals.

Red Hill is a volcanogenic massive sulphide system, which means the metal sits in dense pods of ore, and the pods come in clusters. Find one and the odds are good there's another nearby.

A second hole, MU2605, extended the massive sulphide another 124 metres along strike to the west-northwest, where the copper looks to be getting richer.

AZ9 has now traced the zone over roughly 272 metres of strike, and it’s open at depth and in both directions.

Assays are still pending on six diamond holes and three RC holes, due over the coming weeks, with a 3D gravity survey being modelled to sharpen the next targets.

The first two holes set the bar. Now the lab decides whether the rest clear it. Fingers crossed.

Fortuna Puts Rutile in the Bag

Exploration companies mostly deal in paper. Assay results, targets, estimates of what might be down there.

This week, Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN), our rutile explorer in Malawi, produced something you can hold. A lab in Johannesburg took a 5.4 tonne bulk sample of dirt from FUN's Mkanda project and turned it into 66kg of rutile concentrate.

The grade came in at 1.22% and the ore processes cleanly. Once the final results land later this month, that concentrate becomes the product Fortuna puts in front of downstream buyers.

For anyone new to the story, rutile is the feedstock titanium makers prize most, and titanium goes into everything from jet engines to humanoid robots.

The reason this corner of Malawi first turned heads sits 20km to the north. Sovereign Metals’ Kasiya is the largest rutile deposit in the world, and FUN’s ground shares its geology.

The next step is isolating a premium spec above 95% TiO₂, the standard Kasiya set. Sovereign has already proven its rutile good enough for high-end aerospace work, and Fortuna wants to show it can do the same.

FUN’s drills kept moving all the while. Their 6,000m hand auger program is about 40% done and the 5,000m aircore program kicks off late June.

The maiden Inferred Resource Estimate, the company’s first formal count of what’s actually in the ground, is pencilled in for late June or early July.

All of this comes a week after WndrCo, an early backer of SpaceX and Figma, tipped $8.6 million into FUN for close to a fifth of the company, leaving around $15 million in the bank and keeping them cashed up for a long stretch.

We’ve held FUN since it was a 4c stock, and a backer of that calibre turning up is the strongest sign yet that we read it right.

WCN: Copper Grades We Haven’t Seen Before

White Cliff Minerals (ASX: WCN) is a $50 million small-cap that caught our eye this week on the back of one impressive drill hole.

The standout: 19.81m at 6.64% copper, and inside that sat 3.05m at 17.68% and 1.52m at 21.1% copper. That last one is basically a fifth pure copper down the hole.

We’ve looked at plenty of copper drilling over the years, and grades like that over a near 20-metre interval are not something we can say we’ve seen before.

It’s part of the Danvers prospect at WCN’s Rae copper project up in Nunavut, Canada.

Danvers already carries a historic (non-JORC) resource of 4.16Mt at 2.96% copper, and it sits on the Teshierpi Fault Zone, where the company says there’s around 12km of strike still to test and copper already logged over 4km of it.

The plan is an early direct-ship open pit, meaning ore gets dug and shipped straight to buyers without building a processing plant first. Met work showing copper recoveries above 95% on a simple flotation flowsheet makes that case easier.

A second diamond rig lands this week, with assays running through to July.

SpaceX and the Trillionaire

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday, the day SpaceX went public.

The rocket maker floated on the Nasdaq under SPCX, the biggest sharemarket debut the world has ever seen. It pulled in US$75 billion, close to three times the US$25.6 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, the record that had stood since.

Around 20% of the offer went to retail, far more than you’d normally see, with some punters celebrating an allocation of a single share. For once, the little guy could actually get a look in.

SpaceX is rockets and the Starlink satellite network, plus a slice of Musk’s AI outfit xAI. It’s flown around 650 launches and is the one that turned landing a rocket and reflying it into routine.

The stock was priced at US$135, opened at US$150, ran as high as US$176 intraday, then closed at US$160.95, up roughly 19%.

That handed SpaceX a market cap of US$2.1 trillion, bigger than Musk’s own Tesla.

Convert that to Aussie dollars and it comes to about AUD$3 trillion for one company. Every business listed on the ASX put together is worth about the same.

Which is how Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Between his SpaceX and Tesla holdings, he’s worth around US$1.1 trillion on paper.

Strip it back and SpaceX is really three businesses. Starlink, the satellite network, turns a real profit and grows fast, with the rockets doing alright behind it. xAI, his AI arm, is still burning cash to get going.

Musk built the float around xAI anyway. It’s his shot at OpenAI and Anthropic, with data centres orbiting the planet and a potential market of nearly US$27 trillion.

SpaceX did around US$18 billion in revenue last year and lost almost US$5 billion doing it. But it takes a brave man to bet against Elon, and reusable rockets looked every bit as unlikely right up until they worked.

The talk now is whether he folds SpaceX and Tesla together. Dan Ives at Wedbush thinks they could combine inside a year, and the two are already building a chip plant together in Texas.

Musk has said any tie-up would be a brute to pull off, with both boards needing to sign it off.

The Week Ahead

WCN’s second diamond rig lands in the coming days, with assays running to July.

AZ9 has nine more holes at the lab, and MRD is scoping Phase 2 along that 13km scandium corridor.

FUN puts a number on Mkanda for the first time in late June or early July, and AI1’s next move is a binding deal with one of the chip giants.

That can all keep till Monday, though. This afternoon the Socceroos walk out against Turkey, twenty years on from the golden generation we saw in Germany in 2006.

Aloisiiii, the shirt whipped over the head, Guus working his magic, and half the country up past midnight for Cahill.

Nobody’s giving this lot much of a chance, but nobody gave that mob one either. Get around them.

Till next week.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 900,000 AI1 performance rights, 1,544,000 FUN shares, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, 1,150,000 AZ9 shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, AI1, FUN, AZ9 and MRDat the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

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

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

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) just grew its scandium hand out of a storage shed.

MRD’s Grass Patch Project sits about 25km north of the deepwater port at Esperance in WA, and already holds a sizeable scandium resource.

The company dug a batch of old drill samples out of storage and sent them back to the lab to be re-assayed for scandium. Those holes were drilled years ago, back when the ground was being chased for nickel and copper. The scandium in them was never measured at the time.

The numbers came back well above what is already defined. Block 1, the company's central scandium zone, holds 155.2Mt at 91.8ppm Sc₂O₃.

The reassay beat that comfortably, with hits like 9m at 152.89ppm and 20m at 116.39ppm, both near surface.

The hits landed about 13km southwest of the current resource, on ground the resource doesn't cover yet.

For those new to scandium, it goes into aluminium alloys for aircraft, defence platforms, fuel cells and 3D-printed parts, and for years it sat as a niche metal almost nobody chased.

That changed in April 2025, when China put it under export licensing and Western buyers in aerospace and semiconductors had to start finding supply somewhere else.

MRD is a portfolio company of ours and sits at 2.5c with a market cap around $35 million, a small company sitting on a large mineralised system it’s only now starting to map properly.

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What Came Back

Phase 1 of the reassay covered 3,271 old air core pulps from across the Grass Patch Complex.

The scandium was in the samples the whole time. Nobody had thought to look.

When they finally did, the best holes came back well above the Block 1 resource average, and the strongest grades turned up right at the edge of the old drilling, where the resource runs out.

Some of the standout hits:

• 9m at 152.89ppm Sc₂O₃ from 9m

• 13m at 137.61ppm Sc₂O₃ from 6m

• 9m at 132.98ppm Sc₂O₃ from 9m

• 10m at 127.80ppm Sc₂O₃ from 9m

• 20m at 116.39ppm Sc₂O₃ from 15m

Grades are meant to fade as you walk away from a defined resource. You’ve drilled the good bit, the edges thin out, that’s how it usually goes.

At Grass Patch the opposite happened.

The numbers climbed the further out the holes sat, and the best of them landed right at the boundary of where anyone had bothered to drill.

That tells you the resource on the books could be the small end of what’s in the ground, and the company hasn’t found the edge of the system yet.

So for the cost of lab work, MRD has a fistful of near-surface scandium hits and a 13km corridor of untested ground pointing away from the resource. That corridor is where the drill goes next.

The Scandium Story

Scandium is one of those metals almost nobody talks about until they can’t get it.

The entire world produces around only 25 tonnes a year (demand’s already more than four times that). Barely any of it comes from outside China and Russia, and most of what does get made is a by-product of mining something else, so nobody can just turn up supply when it’s needed.

And since that clampdown, the buyers who lean on it, aerospace and the chip makers, can’t count on the supply that used to run through Beijing.

Scandium sits around US$3,350 a kilogram, a different universe to the metals most ASX juniors dig for.

Demand is tipped to grow about 14.5% a year out to 2031, off the back of those same end uses, and there’s next to nothing new being built to supply it.

Mount Ridley says it holds one of the largest scandium resources going, 25km from a deepwater port in WA. That’s a lot of a scarce metal, in a country the West actually wants to buy from, right when that’s the one thing everyone’s chasing.

The Cheapest, Smartest Path MRD Could Ask For

Mount Ridley skipped most of the bill.

For most explorers this size, the cash goes out the door faster than the results come back, and plenty of good ground never gets tested because the money runs dry first.

Here the drilling was already done years ago, and someone else paid for it, the nickel and copper explorers who worked this ground long before MRD arrived.

The holes are in, the samples are on the shelf, and the only real cost left is the lab invoice.

There are roughly 14,000 more pulps still waiting, on top of the 3,271 already run. Each one is a cheap shot at a bigger resource, off holes already drilled and paid for.

And the results come back in weeks, not the months a new drill program usually eats.

For a junior trying to make a dollar stretch, you couldn’t script it much better.

The first batch goes straight into the resource model, with a real shot at lifting parts of the existing resource from Inferred to Indicated.

Phase 2 is being scoped now, pointed squarely at that 13km corridor where the best grades turned up.

The Way Forward

MRD calls itself an explorer, but it’s trying to become a developer, and this nudges it further down that road.

The honest read is that there is still a fair way to go. These are aircore hits inside an Inferred resource, and they need real drilling before anyone banks them. The strike is open and the 13km corridor hasn’t seen a rig yet.

A resource growing off 14,000 pulps already in storage, with no rig and no raise, is about as efficient as a junior gets.

The market still prices MRD like a plain-vanilla explorer, a shallow scandium system 25km from a port, in the one country every Western buyer wants to source from as they back out of China.

The next assays aren’t far off. Keep pulling numbers like these out of storage, with the drill still to come, and a $35 million valuation likely won’t hold.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) just cracked the code.

It deposited the graphene below 300°C, and it did it run after run. No previous graphene process has worked below the industry's thermal limit, anywhere.

Copper is the wiring buried inside every advanced AI chip on the planet, and it’s hit its physical limits. TSMC, the biggest chipmaker on earth, has already named graphene as the way past it, and Adisyn is the first to deposit graphene at a temperature a chip can survive.

This is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry, and an ASX small-cap just delivered the result that makes Samsung, TSMC and Intel sit up and pay attention.

Adisyn is one of our portfolio holdings. We first wrote it up for readers in April at 6.8c, and it's up more than 150% since then, with the biggest catalysts still in front of it.

Today’s result clears the way for the big one, a commercial deal with one of the global chipmakers, and that’s what management is chasing inside the next 12 months.

AI1 made the breakthrough, then did the thing most small-caps avoid. It handed the raw data to someone independent and let them pull it apart.

That someone trained alongside the man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering graphene.

His name is Associate Professor Rakesh Joshi, who runs the Graphene Research Group at UNSW. He went through Adisyn’s data, across repeat runs and multiple points on the sample, and confirmed it stacks up.

The Man Who Checked the Work

In 2010, two scientists at the University of Manchester won the Nobel Prize in Physics for a material they had peeled off a block of graphite using ordinary sticky tape.

The material was graphene. A single sheet of carbon atoms, stronger than steel and a better conductor than copper, and their work turned it from theory into something you could hold.

One of those two scientists was Sir Andre Geim. Early in his career, Rakesh Joshi worked under Geim at Manchester and co-authored research with him.

These days Joshi is an associate professor at UNSW, where he leads the university’s Graphene Research Group and has published more than 130 papers in the field. Few people on earth are better placed to look at a set of graphene results and tell you whether they hold up.

So Adisyn handed him everything. The same deposition process run three times on three separate days, plus dozens of measurements taken at points right across each sample.

Each of those samples is a small square of copper, about a centimetre a side, with the graphene grown on it. By grown we mean carbon is laid down inside a chamber and the atoms settle into a single layer, one atom thick, across the copper.

One set of tests shows the result repeats, the other shows it’s even across the whole surface.

Joshi, who doesn’t work for Adisyn and has no stake in the outcome, went through the lot and confirmed the graphene is real, and that the process does what Adisyn says it does.

Plenty of companies say their science works. Not many are confident enough in the results to hand an outsider of that calibre the raw data and invite him to prove it doesn’t.

Why the Temperature is the Whole Game

Every advanced chip today runs on copper. Billions of transistors, all linked by copper wiring far too fine to see, moving electricity around the chip.

Copper has worked beautifully for decades. The problem is what's happening now the wires have shrunk this far.

The newest chips are shrinking below two nanometres, and at that scale copper starts to choke. Resistance climbs and the wiring runs hot, so power that should be doing useful work leaks away as heat. Across a data centre full of AI chips, that waste turns into a power bill big enough to run a small city.

The industry has known the fix for years. Graphene moves electricity more efficiently than copper, and it keeps doing it at sizes where copper overheats and fails.

Graphene was always going to work. The hard part was making it.

Growing it the usual way takes heat of around 1,000°C. A chip is a delicate stack of materials, and anything past about 450°C starts to wreck the structures already built into it. So the one material that could save the chip had to be grown at a temperature that would destroy it.

That’s the wall. Every chipmaker on earth has been staring at it for a decade.

Adisyn just grew graphene below 300°C. Comfortably under the ceiling.

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Anyone Can Get Lucky Once

The customers Adisyn is chasing are the giant chip factories, known in the industry as fabs.

TSMC, Samsung and Intel run them, and none of them will build a billion-dollar production line around a coating that worked one Tuesday and never again. So this result was about proving the first one would repeat.

Adisyn ran the same process three times, on three separate days. Same recipe, same setup, and each run produced the same graphene layer.

Then they checked the layer was good across the whole square, not just in one spot. When you grow a coating this thin, the danger is it comes out patchy, solid in one part and thin or missing in another.

A patchy layer is no use inside a chip. So they sampled the graphene at three different points across the surface, and it was the same at all of them.

Repeatable run to run, and the same right across the sample. A university lab can manage a one-off. A fab’s production line needs both, every single time.

The result proved a third thing (and this is the one chipmakers get excited about).

Adisyn's process works across a wide band of temperatures, which the industry calls a process window.

Say a process only forms its coating at one set temperature, 350°C and nothing else. Every other step on the production line then has to be built around that single number, which makes it a headache to fit in anywhere.

Adisyn's process runs from below 450°C all the way down under 300°C. The low end keeps it safe on the delicate structures a hotter process would wreck, and the width gives a fab the room to use it at several points along the line and set the temperature where the rest of the process needs it.

A window that wide also opens it up to jobs beyond the interconnect wiring. The more places a fab can slot it in, the more the industry wants it.

The machine Adisyn used, called an ALD system, is the standard tool already sitting in every leading-edge fab on earth. So if TSMC already owns the machine, what are they paying Adisyn for?

Think of the machine as just the oven. Adisyn’s invention is the recipe, the chemistry and the precise process that makes graphene actually form at low temperature inside that oven.

Owning a pizza oven doesn’t mean you can make the pizza. Adisyn owns the recipe to one of the most promising breakthroughs in microchips in a decade, and it’s patented.

That’s the part a fab can’t get anywhere else, and will pay a whole lot for.

Where AI1 Sits Today

A quick catch-up for anyone new to the story.

We got on the register in early April. Inside a week it ran to 20c, topped the ASX gainers board and added around $130 million in market value.

It hasn’t slowed down since.

The graphene process AI1 has cracked points at two very different markets.

The first is the one we’ve been walking through. Inside a chip, graphene grows as the wiring that carries the signal, the job copper can no longer do as chips keep shrinking.

The second is stealth. A radar finds an aircraft by firing out a signal and waiting for the echo to bounce back. Coat that aircraft in Adisyn’s graphene and the echo gets swallowed instead of returned, so a full-sized drone reads on the screen as something closer to a bird.

The same material that fixes the chip also helps a drone fly in unseen.

The news flow since April has been relentless. Adisyn locked in an exclusive worldwide licence on the stealth tech out of Tel Aviv University, then raised $14 million with Israel’s biggest investment house and Regal cornerstoning the book. Then the former commander of Israel’s Iron Dome came on to advise the drone arm, and the US granted the patent that sits over the whole thing.

This week, the chip side took the next big step forward.

What This Unlocks

Until now, Adisyn has been a lab story. A good one, but a lab story. With the result independently verified, the company can stop talking about what the process might do and start showing it to the people who’d buy it.

That means the Tier 1 chipmakers, the TSMCs and Samsungs of the world, and conversations about running the process inside their own fabs.

There’s a scaling job to do first. Everything so far has been grown on a square of copper a centimetre across. A real chip is built on a wafer, a silicon disc up to 300 millimetres wide, and Adisyn has to take the process up to that size before a fab can run it for real.

Think of it as proving the recipe works in the test kitchen, then proving it works in a restaurant turning out a thousand plates a night.

Then comes the part every small-cap is ultimately judged on. The science can be brilliant, but a company only gets rewarded once that science starts earning.

Adisyn’s path to that is licensing.

It owns the patented recipe, the fabs own the factories, and the cleanest model is to let them run the process and collect a royalty on every wafer that comes off the line.

A process this central is also an asset a major could simply decide to buy outright.

When the industry last switched interconnect material, from aluminium to copper, the chipmakers went out and bought the new chemistry from specialists.

Graphene is also one of the best heat conductors known. AI chips are built by stacking smaller chips tightly together, and packed in like that they run hot. Cooling those stacks could be where the graphene side brings in its first revenue.

The global semiconductor market is tracking towards US$1 trillion next year, and Adisyn’s process plugs straight into the interconnect segment, the wiring sitting inside every advanced chip. That segment is worth around US$31 billion today and headed for US$45 billion by 2035.

Now weigh it against the company carrying it. Adisyn’s whole market value wouldn’t cover the fit-out of one corner of a multi-billion dollar TSMC fab, and it owns the patented recipe the giants are going to need.

What We’re Watching From Here

The next domino is a million-dollar cheque.

Adisyn’s stated target is a binding deal with one of the global chipmakers, worth north of a million dollars to AI1, and the first of what could be many. For a company this size, that first name on a contract would land like a bomb.

Then watch who comes to the table. Adisyn is about to walk into TSMC, Samsung and the rest carrying results nobody can hand-wave away and a US patent in its back pocket, and the names that lean in, plus how fast they do it, will tell the story louder than any ASX release.

The giants will take their time. They test a new process half to death before they let it anywhere near a production line, so the conversations Adisyn is about to start will run on their clock. Worth remembering for anyone expecting sales by tomorrow.

While they get comfortable, we’re sitting on the one company that’s already cracked the thing every last one of them needs.

Our View

Step back from the nanometres and the interconnects for a second.

The most advanced industry on earth has been stuck on the same problem for a decade, and this week a small-cap on the ASX put a verified answer on the table.

Signed off, no less, by a man who learned graphene standing next to the bloke who won the Nobel for it.

Something this big usually sits locked inside a university lab, or buried in a research budget at TSMC. This one trades on the ASX.

The hard science is progressing quickly, and what’s coming is the selling, to buyers who are already telling the world that graphene is the future.

Every target the company has set itself, it’s gone and hit, and now it’s handed the proof to someone with no reason to flatter it.

A Nobel Prize was handed out for discovering graphene.

The fortune goes to whoever works out how to deploy it at commercial scale.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 900,000 performance rights at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by AI1 at the time of writing.

Confidentiality notice

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

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

This week Elon Musk and SpaceX put their hand out for one of the biggest cheques public investors have ever been asked to write, a raise that would value the company at roughly US$1.8 trillion.

ASX investors can get a slice too.

To put that in context, it's about what the entire ASX top 100 is worth combined

SpaceX started life as a rockets company, but that’s almost the boring part now. These days it’s pitching itself as a satellite internet giant and an AI infrastructure player that could end up one of the most important tech platforms of the next decade.

Whether it’s actually worth US$1.8 trillion is something the market will sort out in a couple of weeks when it lists.

Back in small-cap land, news was dropping everywhere. Silicon Valley money turned up in Malawi, AI1 went into a halt chasing a world first, EVG quietly added to its foundations, and DXN reminded everyone that AI stories work a lot better with a signed contract attached.

We also caught one of the strangest announcements of the year, a brutal biotech wipe-out, and a drone supplier having the week of its life off the back of the market's hottest theme.

Let’s get into it.

• Silicon Valley money arrives in Malawi as WndrCo backs Fortuna Metals

• Adisyn shareholders brace for a Milestone 2 verdict

• Evion adds Arthur Sinodinos and delivers positive EBITDA

• KTK keeps climbing as drone demand gathers momentum

• DXN proves AI still works when revenue is attached

• Opthea's 97.5% collapse and the cold reality of biotech

• SRJ's awkward SpaceX moment and the price query that followed

  ---

Silicon Valley’s Smart Money Lands in Malawi

One of the most connected technology investors in Silicon Valley has just written an $8.6 million cheque to Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN), taking a 19.9% stake and becoming its cornerstone shareholder.

The investor is WndrCo, the US fund founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, with more than US$3 billion under management and a track record of backing some of the biggest tech winners of the past decade.

Names in the portfolio include SpaceX, Anduril, Waymo, Databricks, Figma, Airtable and 1Password.

This is smart money. It spends its time working out where technology is heading before the rest of the market catches on.

WndrCo is arriving just as humanoid robotics moves from theory to production. Tesla wants to build millions of Optimus robots, defence contractors are deploying autonomous systems, and every one of those machines needs lightweight, high-strength materials.

Titanium sits near the top of that list, and rutile is one of its key feedstocks (the raw material you process to get the metal).

The money itself is meaningful, but the network may prove even more valuable.

With roughly $15 million in the bank after the raise and a cornerstone backer who understands where titanium demand is heading, Fortuna goes into the second half of the year with options. The stock finished the week at 12 cents. You can find our full write-up here.

Adisyn Waits for a Defining Moment

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) is one of ours. We backed it at 6.8 cents and it's now 17.5 cents, so we're watching this one as closely as anybody.

The company went into a trading halt this week pending independent validation of Milestone 2 in its graphene semiconductor program.

In plain terms, it needs to show it can lay down graphene reliably and repeatably below 300°C across multiple independent runs, with even coverage right across the test surface.

Management reckons that if it lands, nobody anywhere in the world has pulled it off before.

The whole case rests on graphene eventually replacing or improving the tiny connections that move data around a chip, the interconnects, which are one of the bottlenecks the industry keeps running into.

Holders have already had a taste of what a result does here. When Milestone 1 came through in January, the stock ran from around 6.8 cents to almost 30 before settling back under 20.

Milestone 2 carries even more weight.

There’s no guarantee the result lands the way shareholders are hoping. If it does, and the company keeps moving towards commercial engagement with semiconductor groups, Milestone 1 showed how the market tends to respond.

Bring on Tuesday.

EVG Keeps Adding Bricks to the Wall

The share price didn't show it this week, but Evion Group (ASX: EVG) kept putting runs on the board.

First came the appointment of former Australian Ambassador to the United States Arthur Sinodinos AO as a strategic adviser. For a $29 million company, landing someone whose network runs that deep through Canberra, Washington and critical minerals policy is a rare get.

Later in the week EVG’s Panthera Graphite Technologies operation delivered audited EBITDA of US$530,000 in its first full year of commercial production. The eye-catching part was that it did it while running at only 20-25% nameplate capacity (the maximum the plant is built to produce), while still paying down debt from operating cash flow.

Management is now mapping a path towards US$3.4 million EBITDA at Stage 1 capacity and US$5.8 million at Stage 2.

So EVG has a critical minerals business that actually earns money, a Nevada fluorspar project sitting in the middle of America's supply-chain scramble, and now an adviser plugged into the circles writing that policy.

The fluorspar backdrop shifted in Evion’s favour this week, and it came out of China.

China Kings Resources, the country's biggest fluorspar producer, has suspended several mines and launched a self-inspection on environmental and safety grounds.

China supplies most of the world's fluorspar, so when its largest producer pulls tonnes offline, everyone downstream feels the pinch.

Every shutdown like that makes a non-Chinese source worth a bit more, and a Nevada project feeding America's critical minerals push sits on the right side of it.

The market marked the stock down this week, but the underlying story keeps getting stronger.

KTK Keeps Finding Buyers

Plenty of stocks spike for a day and disappear. KTEK Group (ASX: KTK) is doing the opposite.

Another one of ours, backed from the 20-cent IPO, it climbed another 50% this week, from 32 cents to 48 on better than $5 million of turnover, as the market kept chewing over last week's news that deliveries had resumed after some supply-chain strife. On paper that's a fairly standard update. The buying says investors see something bigger.

What they're looking at is where KTK sits in a defence sector changing by the month.

The company makes composite airframes and the electromechanical guts of drones for Tier-1 manufacturers, which plants it inside one of the fastest-growing corners of defence going around.

The backdrop keeps helping, with reports only last week that the Trump administration is weighing funding to prop up domestic drone makers and shore up America's supply chain.

Management has talked about taking its ‘cordless factory’ model into the US, setting up small production sites right next to customers rather than building one giant plant. That idea makes a lot more sense if Washington starts tipping real money into home-grown drones.

For now the market's treating drones less like aerospace and more like ammunition, and that tailwind is still blowing hard.

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DXN Finally Gives the Market Something Real

The most talked-about small-cap of the week was DXN (ASX: DXN), and no wonder, it finished up 775%.

The stock ripped higher after signing a binding $8.8 million contract with a US-listed neo-cloud operator (a newer breed of cloud provider built specifically for AI workloads) to design and build an AI modular data centre.

This one moved because of a signed contract with revenue and a delivery attached.

It stood out in a week where a lot of the market’s biggest movers were still running on reinstatements, capital structure changes, speculative bets or simple repricing.

The contract is a pilot deployment, but management believes a clean delivery could open the door to follow-on work north of US$200 million.

It also lands square in the right theme, with AI infrastructure starting to bleed into the defence-grade and sovereign computing that governments want kept onshore.

The one blemish came late Friday, when two directors trimmed part of their holdings, worth roughly $78,000 and $130,000.

After a move that size, few would begrudge them taking a little off the table.

OPT Shows How Brutal Biotech Can Be

Few charts this year have looked uglier than Opthea's (ASX: OPT).

The company came back to trading this week after a long suspension and immediately lost around 97.5% of its value, dropping from roughly 60 cents to just 1.5 cents.

The collapse had been building for months. A late-stage drug trial failed (Phase 3, the final round before a treatment can be approved), in this case for a common eye disease that causes vision loss in older people. After that, the company had to rethink what it would become next.

The old Opthea is gone.

What's left is a much smaller company built around its remaining drug candidate and a new focus on a rare lung disease called LAM, with $31.2 million in the bank and an 18-month plan to develop it. That's a long way from the business that went into suspension.

Biotech is one of the highest risk/reward corners of the market. Years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars can vanish on a single failed trial.

Sometimes the science works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Opthea is what the second one looks like.

SRJ Gets Itself Into an Awkward Spot

Which brings us back to where we started, only at the other end of the size scale.

SRJ Technologies (ASX: SRJ) was probably the strangest story of the week.

The company emailed shareholders to reveal that SpaceX had adopted its BoltEx technology, a maintenance fix designed to keep critical infrastructure running while bolts are swapped out.

For a small-cap, that’s validation you dream about. SpaceX is one of the most demanding engineering shops on the planet and doesn’t hand out endorsements lightly.

Investors piled in. Shares jumped more than 50% at one stage before the ASX stepped in with a price query.

Then it got awkward. SRJ told the market operator the SpaceX adoption wasn’t material enough to warrant an announcement, and that the underlying order had already been referenced in an earlier update.

Flagging something straight to shareholders and then calling it immaterial when the regulator taps you on the shoulder is not a great look.

The stock still finished the week up 23%, but questions linger.

Having SpaceX deploy your tech is still real validation. The challenge for SRJ now is turning it into revenue and orders investors can actually measure.

The Week Ahead

Tuesday morning is the one to watch. Adisyn comes back from its halt to tell the market whether it can deposit graphene below 300°C, the core of Milestone 2.

We'll also be keeping half an eye on gold after Friday's drop to see whether it steadies, and on copper to see whether it holds its ground.

US markets fell on Friday night, so Monday opens with the question of whether we follow them down or shrug it off, though with Victoria on a public holiday we'd expect a fairly muted session either way.

As we roll into June, the bigger question is whether the market holds up over the coming weeks. Whichever way it breaks, we're expecting a solid run of news out of our portfolio companies.

Till next week.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 500,000 KTK shares, 900,000 AI1 performance rights, 4,500,000 EVG shares, 1,554,000 FUN shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, AI1, FUN, 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 License (AFSL) No 519872.

The company is one we’ve backed: Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN). The fund is WndrCo, an early backer of SpaceX and Figma, with more than US$3 billion under management. It now owns close to a fifth of FUN.

WndrCo was built by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran Walt Disney’s studio before he walked out and built DreamWorks into a Hollywood powerhouse. His partner, Sujay Jaswa, helped scale Dropbox from a few million in revenue to half a billion.

These are the people who get to the front of the queue on what’s coming next. Right now that’s Elon Musk winding down Tesla car lines to build Optimus instead, the humanoid robot he wants a million of a year.

Build robots in those numbers and you need titanium, light and strong under load. The cleanest source of it is rutile, the rock sitting under Fortuna’s ground in Malawi.

That rutile is why WndrCo wrote the cheque.

A cornerstone stake like this takes months in the data room before a cent changes hands. WndrCo came out the other side and put millions into a tiny explorer in a corner of Africa.

That leaves Fortuna with close to $15 million in the bank, enough to run for years without going back to shareholders.

The bigger prize is the network that comes with the money. WndrCo knows the major players who actually buy titanium, the buyers a junior in Malawi could chase for years and never get in front of.

We’ve held Fortuna since it was a 4c stock, and a backer like WndrCo turning up is the strongest sign yet we read it right. Companies this size rarely pull a partner of that calibre. FUN just did.

Who WndrCo Is, and What They’ve Backed

Sujay Jaswa has spent 20 years spotting which companies would win before the rest of the market caught on.

He did it at Dropbox, joining as one of its first hires and watching 15 million users turn into 300 million.

He did it cutting venture cheques at New Enterprise Associates, backing Workday and Cloudflare while they were still unproven names. He does it now at WndrCo, the firm he co-founded in 2016. He still finds time to lecture at Stanford between deals.

Katzenberg sits on the other side of the table, and the pair makes an odd one. One spent decades reading what the public would fall for next from the top of Hollywood. The other spent his career reading which technology would win from the inside of it.

Put a film mogul and a software financier together and you get a firm that backs both instinct and data.

That instinct runs right through WndrCo’s book. Most of the names mean little to an Australian investor, but in US tech they are the ones everyone knows.

They got into Figma early, the design software company that listed in New York last year and tripled on its opening day.

They hold a slice of Databricks, worth around US$134 billion while it is still private (one of a tiny club of companies to reach that kind of money without ever going public).

They own 1Password and Airtable, and they have built cybersecurity companies up from nothing.

Those rockets, drones and self-driving cars from the top of this piece have names. SpaceX. Anduril, the defence-tech outfit building autonomous weapons for the US military. Waymo, Google’s self-driving car arm.

Three of the most closely watched private companies on earth, and every one of them will be reaching for the same metals as it grows.

The way they back a company tells you as much as the names. WndrCo gets in early and goes deep. They lead the round and write the first institutional cheque.

They call themselves “the founders behind the founders”, and the model runs on seeing something before the market does, then helping drag it into the daylight.

So when a fund like that walks past the next AI darling and writes its cheque to a rutile explorer in Malawi, it’s worth asking what they saw. The rest of this is our best read on it.

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Why They're Backing Fortuna

What they saw is titanium, and a squeeze coming for it.

Rutile is the cleanest natural source of titanium there is. Start with rutile and you strip less out on the way to the finished metal, which is why buyers pay up for it. Fortuna’s ground in Malawi is shaping up as one of the best rutile stories on the ASX.

Forecasters have the titanium metal market growing from about US$30 billion this year to US$57 billion by 2035, and the pull is coming from every direction at once.

In aviation, every kilo of titanium that replaces something heavier in a jet engine or airframe saves fuel, so airlines never stop wanting more of it.

And since Russia rolled into Ukraine the West has been rearming in a hurry, with the US and Germany pushing defence budgets higher year on year, and a modern fighter jet is something like 40% titanium by weight.

Humanoids run on the very same metal. Tesla alone is talking about a million Optimus units a year to start, and Musk has floated far higher numbers after that, every one of them needing a frame that stays light under load.

While all that demand stacks up, supply is going the other way. The old rutile deposits are running down. China sits on roughly 70% of the world’s titanium sponge production, the first solid form the metal takes. And America imports 100% of the titanium metal feedstock it runs on, every gram of it from somewhere else.

Demand climbing while the supply tightens, with the biggest economy on earth caught short.

A Silicon Valley fund backing a friendly source early knows where this is heading.

The Doors They Open

The money is the smaller half of this deal. The bigger half is the doors it opens.

The way the deal is built shows WndrCo's hand. The $8.6 million buys the equity, but their real upside sits in a parcel of options that only pay out if they walk Fortuna in front of a US commercial partner by 2029, whether that is a metals trader, a defence or aerospace group, a processor that turns rutile into titanium sponge, or an end user like a humanoid robot maker.

The firm gets paid to open doors, so it keeps knocking long after the cash has cleared.

These are doors a Malawian junior could spend a decade knocking on and never get through.

WndrCo already sits behind the companies turning metal into rockets and autonomous machines, the same outfits that will be hunting for titanium feed as they scale.

They led the funding round for Alembic, an AI business whose product NVIDIA uses in its own marketing and whose work NVIDIA boss Jensen Huang has publicly put his name behind.

Jaswa chairs cybersecurity firms and has sat on American boards for years. Katzenberg has spent four decades building a contact book at the very top of US business.

When people like that ask for a meeting, they get one.

They sit in the rooms where the buyers sit, the companies that will need the titanium all that demand is chasing.

A junior explorer in Malawi can pull brilliant rutile out of the ground and still never get near the people who turn it into jet parts and robot frames.

WndrCo can make the introduction in an afternoon, and the way the options are written, it is squarely in its own interest to make it.

What This Means for Fortuna

A week ago Fortuna was a $37 million explorer with a good story, a great project and the usual junior's headache of how to pay for the next phases.

It now has a US cornerstone holder, close to $15 million in the bank, and a partner whose own payday rides on dragging Fortuna into a room full of American buyers.

Many juniors this size have to live raise to raise, diluting holders just to keep the drills turning. FUN can fund itself through to a decision on whether to build a mine without going back to the market, cap in hand.

The catalysts are already lining up.

Deeper aircore drilling is about to start. A maiden resource estimate for Mkanda is due late this month, the first hard number on how much rutile is in the ground.

And in Johannesburg, the metallurgical test work on a six-tonne bulk sample is wrapping up, with the concentrate it produces headed for the desks of potential buyers.

FUN now storms into the back half of the year with money, a resource, a product in hand and a backer working the phones on its behalf.

A fund that has backed some of the biggest names in technology ran its diligence and decided Fortuna was worth millions and a multi-year partnership.

It is now paid to make Fortuna bigger, and it has the contacts to do it.

Tailwinds like this one do not come along often for a company this size.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

He looks like he belongs there, because for three years he did.

From 2020 to 2023 he was Australia’s ambassador to Washington, the man Canberra sent to negotiate with the Americans. Before that he ran John Howard’s office and sat in Cabinet, and for years people had him pencilled in as a future Treasurer.

This week he signed on as strategic advisor to Evion Group (ASX: EVG), a critical minerals play trading at 4.9 cents with ground in Nevada.

Men with that record don’t usually surface around ASX small-caps. For a company Evion’s size, it’s a name with a reach most juniors never get near.

Sinodinos advises a private capital fund out of US which owns the very tungsten project Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump just backed. He moves through Washington’s critical minerals world at a level a junior explorer almost never reaches, and Evion has just brought him into its corner.

A good deposit still counts for everything in this game, but what’s changed is that critical minerals now sit in the middle of a geopolitical fight that keeps getting messier.

Washington, Canberra and their allies are tipping billions into supply chains tied to defence, semiconductors and energy security, all of it aimed at cutting their reliance on China.

The governments running those programs decide who gets the funding and the contracts.

Getting a small company in front of them is the hard part, and it’s the part Sinodinos has spent 30 years developing.

From Howard's Office to Trump's Washington

Before Washington, Sinodinos had already spent two decades close to power.

He ran John Howard’s office, then moved into the Senate and into Cabinet, picking up Assistant Treasurer, Cabinet Secretary, and Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science.

That last job put him in charge of the government’s industry and resources policy, the same brief now driving the critical minerals push.

Then came Washington.

His three years there lined up with the moment the West stopped taking its supply chains for granted. AUKUS was signed on his watch and defence ties tightened.

Around the same time, critical minerals went from a quiet corner of the mining world to a national security problem, largely because so much of the supply ran through China.

The relationships he built over those years reach into the US government and the investment houses now circling the minerals trade.A prvate US fund is one of them.

The Trump Sons' Tungsten Play

The appointment gets more interesting once you look at where else Sinodinos is spending his time.

He’s also a strategic advisor to a private US fund which backs critical minerals projects tied to American supply chain and resource security.

The fund has been busy across North America, building a book of investments aimed at domestic manufacturing and strategic supply.

Its highest-profile play is Kaz Resources, a Kazakhstan tungsten venture carrying the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource on the planet, with up to US$1.6 billion in US government financing lined up behind it.

Tungsten goes into drilling tools, armour-piercing rounds and kinetic missiles, and China controls about 80% of the world's supply. After Beijing tightened its export rules early last year, the price ran from roughly US$350 a tonne to around US$3,100. The West wants its own.

The project made headlines when Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump turned up as investors, through Nasdaq-listed company Skyline Builders, which merged with the fund’s tungsten unit.

The combined entity, Kaz Resources, is set to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker KAZR.

The US fund’s man on the government relations and partnerships behind deals like Kaz, across North America and Central Asia, is Sinodinos.

That’s the same skill set EVG now has.

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No Better Place Than Nevada

The appointment lands right after EVG’s acquisition of the CARP Fluorspar Project in Nevada, which drops the company into what plenty of people still rate as the best mining jurisdiction going.

Nevada has the infrastructure and the permitting to get mines built, and a long history of building them.

Getting a mine built is the catch in the whole critical minerals push. Governments want domestic supply, but supply has to start with projects that can get permitted and developed somewhere stable. Nevada fits.

CARP gives EVG exposure to fluorspar, which gets a fraction of the airtime lithium and copper get, while quietly doing a lot of heavy industrial lifting.

It goes into hydrofluoric acid, semiconductors, uranium processing, aerospace and defence supply chains, and the US and several allies list it as a critical mineral.

China sits at the centre of fluorspar supply, the same way it does with graphite, and the West is scrambling to build its own sources. That’s the gap a Nevada project is aimed squarely at.

Three Legs, Three Continents

Nevada grabbed the headlines, but fluorspar is the newcomer in EVG's story. The company started life chasing graphite, and that side is an important piece.

Its flagship there is the Maniry Graphite Project in Madagascar, which the European Union has tagged as a strategic project under its Critical Raw Materials Act.

In plain terms, Brussels has formally backed it as part of Europe's plan to build a battery supply chain that doesn't run through China.

Then there’s India, where EVG holds a 50% stake in Panthera Graphite Technologies, a processing plant already selling expandable graphite into the US and Europe.

So EVG has graphite coming out of the ground in Madagascar, a plant turning it into product in India, and fluorspar in Nevada, with no Chinese partners anywhere in the chain.

Last week the US, Japan, Australia and India launched the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative Framework, a plan to mobilise up to US$20 billion across mining, processing and recycling.

The point of it is getting critical minerals supply out of Chinese hands.

Line EVG up against that framework and it covers the US through fluorspar, India through graphite processing, and Australia through the listing itself.

What the Appointment Actually Delivers

For most small-caps it comes down to the rock in the ground and whether management can turn it into a mine. That hasn't changed for Evion.

Everything around it has. As governments wade deeper into critical minerals, getting in front of the right people in Washington has become its own kind of asset.

The officials writing the policy and running the funding programs are hard to reach, and Sinodinos has spent a long career working with them.

He gives Evion a way in. Three decades at the top of government and diplomacy, and a live network across the US groups chasing critical minerals supply right now.

Where to From Here

That reach is the part a junior usually can’t buy, and Evion now has it sitting across three of the four Quad nations.

The doors Sinodinos can open, US funding programs and the offtake talks that follow, are the ones Evion has to walk through to turn a handful of critical minerals assets into something bigger.

There’s hard yards between here and there. CARP is freshly acquired and the real graft is still ahead, and a company this size chasing American money will need more of its own to get there.

That's the bet with any early mover. Few get to make it with a man who's stood in the Oval Office beside the President.

Go back to that photograph. A former ambassador, shoulder to shoulder with the President, in the room where the decisions get made. He has now put his name beside fluorspar in Nevada, graphite in Madagascar and a plant in India.

Whether the rock and the relationships add up to something, nobody knows yet.

But Arthur Sinodinos has looked at a four-cent stock and decided it is worth his time, and men like him do not spend it cheaply.

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.

Then the gun went. One record fell all weekend, and a Greek swimmer set it clean. The juiced-up games limped out of the blocks.

The real action this week was a long way from Las Vegas. Across commodities, defence and tech, investors got a proper run of news. Europe drew a line in the sand on chips, and the lithium cheques came back out. The biggest mover of the lot was a coal stock that had been left for dead.

Closer to home, our portfolio kept ticking. Revenue landed, fresh samples came back, drills started turning and the big thematics gathered pace.

Let’s get to it.

• KTK turns its IPO into revenue, fast

• Humanoid robots start moving onto production lines

• EVG returns high-grade fluorspar samples in Nevada

• AZ9 keeps hitting massive sulphides at Red Hill

• 10X kicks off maiden drilling at Balerion

• Europe’s €120 billion bid for chip independence

• Coal pulls serious capital as a small-cap goes vertical

• Lithium money keeps flowing at both ends of the market

KTEK: A Week From Bell to First Invoice

KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) rang the ASX bell less than a fortnight ago, and this week it shipped product and booked revenue against it.

Plenty of freshly listed small-caps are still all promise at this stage. KTK is already getting paid.

The first delivery since listing booked $500,000 in revenue.

KTK makes the parts that go inside drones, and leaves the job of bolting together finished aircraft to someone else. Governments are spending a fortune on drones already, and every budget you look at says they're about to spend far more. Actually winning those contracts, though, is a knife fight.

KTK sits that fight out.

Whichever drone-maker takes the tender, KTK's components are in the aircraft, and KTK gets paid either way.

Management is aiming for 150 units a month inside five months. On their own numbers that works out to around $9 million a year from customers KTK already has, before a dollar of the IPO money goes to work.

More Tier-1 contractors are being courted, and the “Cordless Factory” model, which lets KTK grow without pouring money into a factory of its own, keeps expanding.

Most early defence manufacturers never make it past the certification grind. KTK spent years clearing the audits and approvals to supply the people who build the drones, and this week that work started showing up as revenue that’s real and repeatable. It’s a big tick for a small-cap.

The Robots Are Real Now, and They Need Rutile

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) is sitting at 13 cents and a market value of around $37 million, and one of the commodities it’s chasing through rutile could end up in the middle of one of the biggest manufacturing shifts of the next decade.

Humanoid robots have spent years feeling like tomorrow’s technology that never quite arrives. Every few months a video does the rounds of a robot pulling off a backflip, everyone gets excited, then it goes quiet again.

That’s now changing with BMW. The carmaker is putting humanoid robots onto its vehicle production lines, joining a run of global manufacturers already trialling human-shaped machines on the factory floor.

The thinking behind it is almost dull in its obviousness. Factories and warehouses were built for people, so rather than redesign every workplace around some purpose-built machine, you build a machine shaped like the worker the place was made for.

The military has landed in the same spot, trialling humanoids to haul supplies and drag wounded soldiers out of places you would not send a person.

Ukraine is already chasing tens of thousands of robotic systems this year as the tech moves from concept to the battlefield.

For investors, the question worth sitting with is what these machines are built from. Humanoids need lightweight, high-strength materials that can handle constant movement without chewing through power. Titanium sits near the top of that list.

Rutile is one of the key feedstocks for titanium.

The humanoid story is only getting bigger with some of the largest car makers, industrial names and defence groups in the world prioritising them.

Demand has to work its way back up the chain to the raw materials that make it all possible, and rutile is the very start of a humanoid.

10X Drills Ground the 90s Left Behind

The wait is over for Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X). Since it listed in December the company has been heads-down in soil sampling, IP and gravity surveys, building the case for where to put a rig.

This week one finally started turning at its Balerion Prospect in New South Wales.

Twelve holes, 3,425 metres of RC drilling, chasing copper, silver, lead, zinc and gold across ground that has already given up high-grade hits.

We've said before that discoveries are made long before the first hole goes down. The graft is in the data and the targeting. Now the theory meets the drill bit.

Two explorers drilled this ground in the 90s. One of them pulled 4.4 metres grading 342 grams of silver a tonne, lead and copper running with it.

Then they did the only sensible thing anyone could with metal prices where they were. They stopped drilling and left.

The grades stayed in the rock, and so did the fault underneath it, the same one that fed Captains Flat through 80 years as one of the biggest base metal mines NSW ever ran.

Cheap metal sent everyone home, and now expensive metal has brought the rig back.

The program is built to test it from several angles, soil chemistry, IP, gravity, magnetics and the old drilling all pointing at the same ground. It’s a campaign with several shots at a result.

At 18.5 cents, 10X is the smallest name in our portfolio. These are early days and a discovery is far from guaranteed, but for a company valued where 10X is, even one good hole brings a lot more eyes with it.

Drilling should run for the next four to six weeks, with assays coming back as they clear the lab.

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America Forgot About Fluorspar. It Remembers Now.

The US hasn’t pulled fluorspar out of its own ground since 1990. China makes around 59% of the world’s supply now.

For 35 years that suited everyone. The rock came cheap from somewhere else and nobody asked where.

In January the Pentagon wrote a US$168.9 million cheque to restart a single mine in Utah, rock grading 60 to 70%, just to get American supply moving again.

This week Evion Group's (ASX: EVG) Carp project in Nevada returned surface samples grading up to 88.15% calcium fluoride, independently verified, with several of the old mining areas clearing 80%. Higher-grade rock than the Utah mine the Pentagon just paid to reopen.

These are hand-picked surface samples, not what the whole deposit grades, and Carp still has to be drilled out. But for a project only recently added to our portfolio, it backs the geology management flagged when they picked it up.

Most investors never give fluorspar a second thought, yet it turns up in semiconductors, EV batteries, refrigerants and nuclear fuel processing.

The US imports all of what it uses despite getting through hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year, and that level of reliance is exactly what policymakers are now trying to unwind.

Carp was a producing mine once. The high-grade rock never left, and EVG now holds far more of the ground around it than when it first picked the project up.

With more than $7 million in the bank and a run of catalysts coming across Nevada, Madagascar and India, you’re starting to get a clearer read on where Evion wants to sit in the critical minerals supply chain.

AZ9: Two Holes, Two Hits, and a Richer Copper

Asian Battery Metals (ASX: AZ9) has flown under the radar for much of the past year. Two holes at Red Hill have changed that.

The first, drilled in May, came back with 18.8 metres of massive sulphide. The second, MU2603, went better. 21.9 metres, and known mineralisation now runs past 155 metres of strike.

Each hole is adding weight to the idea that Red Hill is part of a much bigger mineralised system.

The detail catching attention is chalcocite showing up in the sulphides. Chalcocite is a high-grade copper mineral, and finding it can be a sign the drilling is closing in on the hotter core of the system.

Assays are still to come, so the visuals are only part of the picture, but the geology is pointing the right way and management has already stepped out with more holes to test where it strengthens.

Copper itself is climbing. Codelco, the biggest producer on earth, just posted a 27-year production low, and the metal is trading near the highest it's held all year. AZ9 is drilling a system that gets bigger with every hole, and the company’s well funded with more than $5 million in cash.

The next batch of assays aren’t far away now and they’ll be telling us a lot about how real Red Hill is.

Europe Wants Its Chips Back

One of the week’s bigger stories slipped past most people.

The European Union is lining up a major overhaul of its chip strategy, more than €120 billion aimed at building semiconductors on home soil instead of importing them.

Europe makes around 8 to 10% of the world’s chips today and wants to double that by 2030. Brussels is starting to talk about chip supply the way it talks about energy supply, as something a continent can’t afford to leave in someone else’s hands.

Money like that gets spent in two directions. Building the factories, and backing whatever makes the next chip faster than the last one.

That second part is where Adisyn (ASX: AI1) lives.

Through its graphene semiconductor technology, the company is chasing a path beyond traditional copper interconnects, aiming at better speed, lower power draw and improved thermal performance.

A modern chip moves data through a dense web of copper wiring. Shrink it far enough and copper starts to choke, running hot and slow at scales it was never meant to work at. The whole industry can see the wall coming.

Graphene is one of the materials being looked at to get past that limit, and it’s what AI1 is working on. Europe’s billions will build the fabs. The harder question, how to make the silicon inside them genuinely faster, runs straight through the work AI1 is doing.

As governments commit hundreds of billions to semiconductor independence, anything that can deliver the next step up in chip performance gets more valuable by the day, and the macro backdrop for AI1 keeps building.

A Coal Stock Rocketed. So Much for the Funeral.

Everyone's been writing coal's obituary for years. White Energy (ASX: WEC) put on 195% this week, the biggest gain of any company under $100 million, which suggests the funeral was called early.

The jump took its market cap to around $86 million, on a non-binding term sheet to pick up a metallurgical coal project in Alabama and a large package in Queensland's Surat Basin.

The spark was a sparky. Nathan Tinkler, the Hunter Valley electrician who rode coal all the way to becoming Australia's youngest billionaire before losing the lot, is coming back as executive chair.

The man instrumental in building Whitehaven, the $5 billion miner that swallowed his Aston Resources, is having another go.

Non-binding is the word doing the heavy lifting there. Due diligence, financing, approvals and definitive agreements all still have to land before any of it is real. White Energy said as much itself, flagging there’s no guarantee the deals complete.

The Alabama asset comes with a coal handling plant already built, rail access, and a staged restart aiming at production inside 12 months of switching back on.

Infrastructure that already exists is infrastructure nobody has to fund from scratch.

So a market that supposedly hates coal just bid a coal stock up 195% on the strength of a deal that hasn’t closed yet. For all the noise around AI, defence and critical minerals, a credible path to revenue still gets coal a serious look.

The Big Money is Still Backing Lithium

The most telling signal in lithium this week came from the companies writing the cheques.

Western Australia approved the Mt Holland expansion, doubling spodumene concentrate capacity to 4.4Mtpa, while MinRes and Ganfeng signed off on a fresh $490 million investment into Mt Marion.

Spot lithium is still well off its all time highs, but it’s still very healthy and the biggest players in the game are committing serious money to future supply anyway.

Big investments like these rarely hinge on where the price sits today. They’re built on where management teams reckon demand lands a few years out.

Down at the junior end, Solis Minerals (ASX: SLM) put on 41.2% after locking in a A$6 million placement and pushing ahead with plans to drill in Brazil.

Funding often shows up before the discovery does. Capital’s still there for the stories investors believe can deliver.

Why a Quiet June Might Suit Us

There’s a thing that happens to markets in June, and most people read it backwards.

The volume disappears. Tax-loss selling drags it off, the screens go thin, and the easy assumption is that nothing’s happening and nothing’s about to.

The opposite is usually closer to the truth. A thin market is one with nothing standing in the way of a good result, which is exactly why a strong announcement hits harder in June than it would in a crowded tape.

Commodity prices are holding up, and the money is still walking past the companies that just talk to back the ones that deliver, drill results, resource growth, actual revenue where it exists.

The portfolio’s got drilling results, assays, development milestones and a few commercial calls all due over the coming weeks. Plenty of our holdings are kicking hard into the back half of the year.

The stocks that run in 2026 are the ones putting out real results, one announcement at a time. Finding those companies before the rest of the market does is the whole job, and it’s the one we get up for.

Till next week.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

The directors, authorised representatives, employees and associated persons of Equities Club may have an interest in the financial products discussed in this document and they may earn brokerage, commissions, fees and advantages, pecuniary or otherwise, in connection with the making of a recommendation or dealing by a client in such financial products. Equities Club owns 1,150,000 AZ9 shares, 500,000 KTK shares, 900,000 AI1 performance rights, 200,000 10X shares, 4,500,000 EVG shares, 1,554,000 FUN shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, AI1, FUN, 10X 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 License (AFSL) No 519872.

The first units since listing are already leaving the warehouse.

Inside the container: 1,100 advanced composite airframe components, packed into 100 finished drone sub-assemblies, heading to one of KTK’s existing Tier-1 customers.

The invoice on this one shipment runs to roughly AUD$500,000. And there’s plenty more to come. The company is targeting 150 units a month inside five months.

At roughly AUD$5,000 a unit, that works out to about AUD$9 million in annual revenue off existing customer contracts, before any of the IPO money goes to work pushing deliveries further across the back half of 2026.

Dekel Keisar, KTK’s founder and managing director, put it plainly:

At 31.5 cents, KTK is valued at roughly 5 times that $9 million revenue run-rate.

For context, Electro Optic Systems (ASX: EOS) trades closer to 14 times revenue and Elsight (ASX: ELS) sits north of 35 times.

KTK is the cheapest of the three.

Supply Lines Reopen

When we wrote up KTK last week, the conflict in the Middle East was still hot and the region’s supply chains were running on rations.

Components dribbled through when they could and production sat at a fraction of capacity.

The order book for KTK kept piling up while the parts to fulfil it sat on the wrong side of a border.

The picture has shifted in the past few days. The US is leaning hard on every party in the room to get a peace deal across the line, and the freight lanes have responded faster than the diplomats trying to negotiate peace.

Trucks are moving. Ports are clearing. The European facility has now cleared the first shipment out the door.

It’s still a fragile setup. A peace deal that’s being negotiated by the hour can come apart by the hour. But for the first time since KTK rang the bell, the parts are flowing where the orders are.

What the Shipment Feeds Into

The shipment announced today was half a million dollars. The cycle it feeds into runs to hundreds of billions.

The US has earmarked US$75 billion for drones and counter-drones in its FY27 defence budget. NATO is targeting 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. Europe has pooled US$870 billion for rearmament. Australia is in for AUD$22 billion over the decade.

It’s a procurement cycle so large it has its own acronyms (DAWG, DDP, JADC2, pick your alphabet), its own committees, and its own line in the budgets of dozens of governments.

The big drone-makers are the ones running the procurement gauntlet and winning the government contracts. KTK isn’t in that fight.

KTK supplies the parts that go inside the drones those contracts pay for, which means whichever drone-maker wins the tender, KTK’s parts are still in the aircraft and KTK still gets paid.

The drone-makers buying from KTK today include Elbit Systems and UVision, two of the most established names in the Israeli defence drone industry. The drones they sell, with KTK components inside, are flying in active conflict zones and sitting in the stockpiles of Western defence forces.

Two more Tier-1 names with combined revenues above US$10 billion have already cleared KTK as an approved supplier.

Getting to that stage takes between one and three years of facility audits, aerospace certifications, prototype runs and small initial orders.

The grind that buries most early-stage defence manufacturers before they ever ship at scale has already been ticked off by KTK.

One shipment is small in the scheme of what’s to come. The supply chain underneath it is built to ship years of them.

How KTK Ramps Without Needing a Factory

Most small defence companies, sitting where KTK is sitting today, would announce a factory.

A press release would go out. The capital raise would follow. Shareholders would get diluted to fund the concrete, the machines and the floor staff. By the time the doors opened, the order book would have moved on.

KTK has spent the past seven years building a way to not do that.

The model is called the Cordless Factory. KTK keeps the engineering work, the structural design and the quality assurance in-house, sitting with the team that has the certifications and the customer relationships.

The actual making of things, the cutting and laying and curing and assembling, sits with a network of aerospace partners across Israel, Europe, Thailand and the US.

When demand grows, KTK allocates more work into the network.

The proof is in the numbers from before the IPO. KTK quadrupled revenue between FY23 and FY25 without going back to shareholders for cash. Same share register, four times the revenue.

That’s the engine that gets KTK from the 100 units shipped this week to the 150 a month target.

The IPO money sitting on the balance sheet will push it even further than that.

What Lands Next

The shipment that left this week is the start of a list. Four things to watch for from KTK from here.

• The next Elbit and UVision invoices. This week was 100 units. The 150-a-month target covers contracted demand from those two customers, and every monthly shipment between now and then is a revenue line the market can see.

• The first purchase order from a new Tier-1. Two more Tier-1 names have already cleared KTK as an approved supplier. That's the hard yards done. The next step is converting that paperwork into an actual purchase order, then into a supply agreement that locks KTK in across a multi-year platform.

• The US partner. American drone procurement is the biggest single piece of the global cycle, and a lot of that money requires US-located manufacturing to qualify. KTK has flagged the US as the next geography to add to the Cordless Factory network. The sooner that partner is online and certified, the sooner KTK is eligible to ship into American programs.

• Growth outside defence. KTK also supplies agricultural and delivery drone operators, which sit completely outside the defence budget cycle. Any traction in that part of the book is upside on top of the defence story.

Our View

Less than two weeks ago, KTK rang the bell at 20 cents with a story about ramping into the biggest defence buildup since the Cold War and converting an existing order book into recognised revenue.

This week, the first container since listing is on its way to a customer, the invoice is sitting at half a million dollars, and the company is targeting 150 units a month inside five months.

The world has decided it needs more drones. The companies KTK supplies are the ones building them. KTK has spent seven years getting to the point where it can ship parts into that demand at scale.

This week was the start of it showing up.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

AZ9 picked up the project in southwestern Mongolia back in April, for less than a million US dollars.

The first hole, drilled in May, came back with 18.8 metres of massive sulphide.

The second hole, announced today, has gone better. 21.9 metres of sulphide, with a mineral called chalcocite turning up in the core for the first time.

The copper that had been coming up in the earlier core was bound up in chalcopyrite, the standard workhorse copper mineral. Chalcocite carries more than twice as much copper per chunk of rock.

When chalcocite starts showing up in a system like this, the drill is usually getting closer to where the system was hottest and richest when the rocks formed hundreds of millions of years ago.

So the picture from two holes: each one thicker than the last, and the copper in the rock getting richer as the drill goes. The mineralised strike across Red Hill now runs more than 155 metres.

All of this against a copper price up 27% over the past six months, and the worst run of supply disruptions the industry has seen in years.

AZ9 still trades at 2c on a market value of around $15 million, with $5.2 million in the bank. Assays from these drill hits land in the coming weeks. If they come in where the visuals are pointing, the stock likely won't stay this quiet for long.

Who's Running AZ9 and What They’ve Got

Gan-Ochir Zunduisuren spent years inside the boardroom of Oyu Tolgoi, the Rio Tinto-operated mine in southern Mongolia that ranks among the largest copper-gold deposits on the planet.

He sat there as the Mongolian government’s representative, the person whose job it was to understand how the rock came out of the ground and where the money went when it did.

He runs AZ9 now.

The company is built around its Yambat ground in southwestern Mongolia, where it made the Oval discovery in late 2024. Oval is a copper-nickel-PGE deposit with a five-million-tonne resource and first-pass metallurgy that came in above 90% recovery, which is what put AZ9 on the map.

Red Hill sits eight kilometres from Oval, on the same belt.

So when the rig hit massive sulphide on the first attempt at Red Hill, it was confirming what AZ9 already had reason to suspect from the rocks at Oval. The belt works.

The Hole the System Has Been Waiting For

Red Hill is what geologists call a volcanogenic massive sulphide system (VMS). In plain English: thick layers of sulphide minerals that were deposited by hot fluids venting onto the seafloor 100s of millions of years ago, then buried under younger rock and preserved.

The highest grades in a system like this sit closest to where the hot fluids came up through the seafloor. That spot is called the feeder zone.

Find the feeder, and you find the part of the system worth building a mine around. That is the prize AZ9 is hunting at Red Hill.

So far there’s been two holes drilled, for two hits.

The first hole, drilled in May, pulled 18.8 metres of sulphide.

MU2603, announced today, has topped it. 21.9 metres of massive sulphide.

Massive sulphide is rock that is essentially solid metal-bearing mineral, packed tight all the way through. Think of the difference between a thin layer of icing on a cake and a 21.9-metre slab of pure icing.

The thicker the slab, the bigger the deposit can grow once the drilling fans out from it.

The new hole was drilled 50 metres south of an older drill hole, MU2502, and intercepted the same sulphide lens about 75 metres up-dip.

In plainer English: the system is bigger than the old hole suggested, and sits closer to surface than previously thought. Shallower copper is cheaper copper to pull out of the ground.

Visible chalcopyrite and chalcocite are running through the core. Chalcocite is the high-grade copper mineral that we flagged earlier in the article, showing up in the drill core for the first time.

Globally in 2026, only 18 companies have reported a copper drill hit grading better than 2% over more than 20 metres of length.

Most of those companies are valued in the 100s of millions of dollars. If the assays from MU2603 land where the visuals are pointing, AZ9 joins that list at a very cheap $15 million market value.

AZ9 picked up Red Hill in April on a mining licence valid until 2045, so there is no tenure clock running on any of this.

The rigs keep turning, and assays will soon tell us what the rock actually grades.

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The System Keeps Growing

Two more holes pushed out from MU2603. One went west and one went east. Both came back with something to look at.

MU2604 was drilled to the west. The hole hit a 3.6-metre band of copper and zinc-rich sulphide inside a wider 15-metre mineralised zone. That intercept extended the known copper system at Red Hill out to more than 155 metres long.

Two months of drilling with 155 metres of system traced. The drill keeps finding rock that nobody had ever turned the ground over for.

The eastern hole, MU2602, drilled into a 44.5-metre thick zone of weathered, rusty rock with chalcopyrite veins running through it at depth.

Rusty rock above a sulphide system is what geologists call a gossan. It is what happens when sulphide minerals close to surface have been weathered by water and air over millions of years, leaving behind iron oxides that stain the rock red and brown.

Gossans are smoke trails. They sit on top of bigger sulphide systems underneath. Finding one means there is probably more to drill below it. Drilling east at Red Hill is now firmly on the to-do list.

So in two months, AZ9 has drilled four holes at Red Hill. The first two went into the main lens and hit massive sulphide on both attempts. The third extended the system west. The fourth turned up a gossan to the east, pointing the drill at the next target.

The system is bigger than the first hole suggested, and the drill hasn't found the edge of it yet in either direction.

The chalcocite in MU2603 also points the drill where it wants to go next. AZ9 has flagged that grades may zone higher toward the west-northwest, and MU2604 is already drilling in that direction.

The 2% Question

We’re speculating that MU2603 could come back at copper grades around 2%. The assays will settle that one way or the other, and they are four to five weeks away.

Historic hole MU2501, drilled during the due diligence phase before AZ9 bought the project, returned 14.5 metres at 2.23% copper and 0.73g/t gold from 132.5 metres. Red Hill has already produced a 2%+ copper hit, in the same mineralised lens that MU2603 has just drilled through.

Visuals are visuals, and grades are grades, and the only thing that closes the gap between the two is the assay lab.

The 2%+ grade in this system is a hole in the ground that AZ9 already has on the books.

If the assays come back anywhere near 2% over a 21.9-metre interval, AZ9 will be sitting on one of the rarer copper drill results of the year, at a market cap below most of its peer group.

The Copper Backdrop Is Doing Some Heavy Lifting

Behind the price move is a supply squeeze that has gone from chronic to acute. Codelco, the biggest copper producer on earth, just fired an executive after audits showed a 27-year production low. Anglo American and Glencore have hit fresh permit delays at Collahuasi, the world's sixth largest copper mine.

Cochilco, the Chilean copper commission, named Mongolia as one of the producing regions expected to help fill the supply gap, alongside the DRC, Zambia, Canada and the US.

Copper futures are trading around US$6.47 a pound on COMEX, the highest level the metal has held all year.

AZ9 is drilling in the exact bracket Cochilco is pointing at.

Where AZ9 is at

The assays for the first hole come back in around two weeks, and the bigger batch covering the headline 21.9-metre intercept and the two flanking holes follows four to five weeks behind that.

A gravity survey is already running across the ground, and the rig is moving onto the shallow gold target at MU2501, where a historic hole in the same lens once returned 2.23% copper over 14.5 metres.

The company is sitting on $5.2 million in cash, so the rigs keep turning whether the market is paying attention or not.

If the assays come back anywhere near what the visuals are pointing at, AZ9 is holding a result that very few junior explorers have produced this year, in a market that is already short of the metal.

If they come back softer, the system is still bigger and richer than it was a month ago, and there is plenty of ground left to drill.

Either way, the rig keeps turning, and the next month is the one to be watching.

General advice warning

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

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

Disclosure

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

Confidentiality notice

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

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

This week the rock came back signed off.

Surface samples from EVG’s Carp project in Nevada have come back grading up to 88.15% calcium fluoride. And three of the historic pits on the property cleared 80%.

The mineral they’re chasing is called fluorspar. It’s the unglamorous backbone of the lithium-ion battery, the semiconductor chip, the uranium fuel cycle and most modern refrigerants.

China produces 59% of the world’s supply. The United States produces none, and hasn’t since 1990 (which it recently realised is a big issue).

In January, the Pentagon wrote a US$169 million cheque to a single mine in Utah to restart American supply.

That’s the room EVG is now walking into with verified, ultra-high-grade rock on US soil.

Carp now puts EVG ahead of the only other ASX-listed company chasing US fluorspar - but more on that below.

At 5.5c, EVG trades on around $40 million with over $7 million in the bank. That’s enough cash to fund the next stage of work at Carp, push their Maniry graphite project in Madagascar toward a long-awaited mining permit, and keep the company’s Indian graphite joint venture filling out its order book.

Mal Randall also joined as chair last week, bringing 45 years in resources and 25 of those inside Rio Tinto, with current chair seats at Argosy Minerals (ASX: AGY) and Hastings Technology Metals (ASX: HAS). He doesn’t take chair roles at this point in his career on a whim.

Today’s verification is the first of several catalysts EVG has flagged for the months ahead.

What Fluorspar is and Why the US Wants it

Open the back of any modern phone and you’re looking at fluorine. Not in any obvious way, but in the lithium salt that lets the battery hold a charge, and in the way the chips were etched.

Open the air-con unit on the office wall. Fluorine.

Open the cooling system of a data centre. Fluorine.

The fuel rods inside a nuclear plant. We don’t recommend opening those. But fluorine again.

You get the idea.

All of it traces back to one rock. Crush fluorspar, refine the high-grade material, add water, and you have hydrofluoric acid, which is the upstream feedstock for almost every fluorine chemical the modern economy depends on.

The US consumes around 380,000 tonnes of fluorspar a year to feed that demand. None of it has come out of the ground in America since the early 90s.

For most of those 35 years, it didn’t matter. The supply came cheap from somewhere else, and the somewhere else was usually China.

Given the goings-on in geopolitics these past few years, it matters a lot now.

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The Cheque That Changed The Conversation

In January, the Pentagon awarded a US$168.9 million supply contract to Ares Strategic Mining for its Lost Sheep mine in Utah. The deal can scale to US$250 million over five years.

Ares is the only fully permitted fluorspar mine on US soil. The contract is Washington’s first serious move to rebuild domestic supply, and the cheque is sized appropriate to how much the Department of Defense wants fluorspar.

Lost Sheep historically produced fluorspar at grades around 60% to 70%. It’s the only US-based comparable the Pentagon has put real money behind, which makes what Carp returned this week worth measuring against it.

The Carp samples came back grading up to 88.15%, with three of the four historic pits clearing 80% on rock straight out of surface. That’s well above the grade Washington is currently paying to restart.

And EVG isn't the only ASX-listed company that's noticed the opportunity.

Carp vs The Peer Next Door

The Carp mine shut when cheap imports walked the economics of small US producers off a cliff in the early 70s. The rocks stayed in the ground. The price of fluorspar, and the politics around who supplies it, moved on.

OD6 Metals (ASX: OD6) is working the Quinn Project around 220km north of Las Vegas. EVG and OD6 trade at similar market caps and are chasing the same opportunity.

Two ASX juniors, same commodity, same country. The difference is in the detail.

OD6’s best surface work to date is a 12-metre channel sample at 68.9% from its Horseshoe prospect, with a peak grade of 79.7%. That’s commercial-grade fluorspar from real work on the ground, and it’s why the market’s paying attention.

The company also points to 1957 Union Carbide flotation testwork on a sample from its Mammoth prospect, which returned a 97.83% concentrate. OD6 has been upfront that the result is nearly 70 years old, never JORC verified, and yet to be repeated under modern conditions.

Carp’s headline 88.15% came out of the rock at surface this week, signed off by an independent geologist working to the JORC Code. The peak in OD6’s modern work is 79.7%.

Both stocks have plenty of work ahead. EVG starts with higher-grade rock on a fresher dataset, a producing-mine history on the property, a binding option over 100% of the ground at Carp, and more cash in the bank to put it to work.

What 88% Actually Means

Fluorspar gets sold in two grades:

• Metspar (above 60% CaF₂) goes to steel mills as a flux.

• Acidspar (above 97%) goes to chemical plants making hydrofluoric acid, which is the upstream feedstock for AI chip etching, EV batteries, nuclear fuel, refrigerants and a long list of industrial chemistry.

The higher the grade, the more the buyer pays.

Most fluorspar mines pull rock out of the ground at somewhere between 30% and 60%. They then put it through a processing plant to clean it up to the grade their customer wants. That processing step costs money, time and chemicals, and the higher the grade coming out of the ground, the less of it you have to do.

The peak grade at Carp came in at 88.15% from the West Pit, with an adjacent five-metre body at 78.29%. The North Pit and Central Pit also cleared 80%. South Pit topped out at 75.62%.

14 of 25 samples landed between 49.83% and 88.15%.

The high grades also came back from four different rock types: flat sheets of mineralisation, steep veins, replacement bodies, and rock running along old fault lines.

Four styles, spread across four pit areas. That points to a whole mineralised system across Carp.

The original mine ran on 69% rock between 1958 and 1971. The new sampling has come in well above that grade across multiple pits. The bits the old miners didn’t get to are sitting at higher grades than the bits they did.

The samples also threw up a touch of gold, and one separate rock type came back with strong grades of silver, copper, lead and zinc.

None of that is the main game at Carp. But it’s free upside sitting on top of the fluorspar.

Rock chips are selective hand-picked samples and don’t represent bulk grade. Carp still has to be drilled out, met-tested and worked up the development curve.

The Rest of EVG

There’s more to EVG than the fluorspar story.

The company started life as a graphite developer and only expanded into fluorspar earlier this year.

The Maniry graphite project in Madagascar is weeks away from its mining permit. The country’s Mines Ministry has directed the Mining Cadastre to process it.

The 2022 feasibility study put Maniry’s pre-tax net present value at US$263 million over a 21-year mine life, and a €3 million EU grant unlocks with the permit.

EVG also runs a 50/50 graphite joint venture in India that’s been shipping expandable graphite into international markets since March, including a A$1.5 million order to a US buyer in December.

Fluorspar in Nevada, graphite in Madagascar, processing in India, with no Chinese partners anywhere in the chain.

Half of Washington has spent the past two years trying to assemble what EVG already has.

What Happens Next at Carp

EVG has more than quadrupled the project footprint in the lead-up to this week’s results.

The original Carp ground covered 14 mining claims over 117 hectares. EVG has now staked another 45 claims alongside it, running in the same direction the high-grade rock runs underground.

The full holding now covers around 493 hectares.

The work program from here:

• Systematic surface sampling across the new ground to test whether the high grades extend along strike.

• Detailed geological mapping to refine drill targets.

• Permitting with the US Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that approves drilling on public land in Nevada.

• First drill holes once permits land.

Two targets sit ahead of the drill rig. The depth extensions of the steeply dipping veins already returning high grades at surface. And new manto-style targets across the expanded ground, the flat-lying sheets of mineralisation that built the historic Carp mine.

EVG has flagged a detailed update on the field program shortly.

We’re at surface samples now, but drill holes are what could turn Carp from a high-grade sampling story into a project Washington and its allies can actually buy from.

That’s the moment we’re waiting for.

Where to From Here for EVG

Carp has put rock at surface that most fluorspar juniors would kill for.

At 5.5c on around $40 million with over $7 million in the bank, the work from here is execution.

Three things can move this stock. A drill rig in Nevada. A piece of paper in Madagascar. And a growing list of American buyers placing orders with a graphite plant in India, for the simple reason that they would prefer not to buy from China.

Any one of them can reprice a $40 million stock.

For a country that spent 35 years not caring where its fluorspar came from, EVG is starting to look like a useful little ASX-listed reminder.

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.

AI1 is up around 270% since we added it. EVG is up more than 80% in a fortnight, after ripping 60% on its opening day. And this week KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) joined the portfolio, listed at 20c on Monday morning, and closed the week at 38c.

Ninety percent up in five sessions. The kind of start most listed companies don’t see in their first year of trading, let alone their first week.

The thread tying all three together is the same one running through the whole small-cap end of the market right now. Money is moving fast into defence and critical minerals, and the smaller end of the ASX is where that money keeps finding its biggest leverage.

The rest of the portfolio moved with it. Mount Ridley kicked off the metallurgical work that decides whether its heavy rare earths actually come out of the ground, and Evion brought in a 45-year mining veteran as chair.

Outside the portfolio, the man who built Northern Star from a $363 million WA junior into Australia’s largest gold producer stepped down. We’ll get to him further down.

Let’s get to it.

• KTK closes its first week on the ASX up 90%

• Defence and drones move into the hottest pocket of the small-cap market

• Mount Ridley shifts from rare earths discovery toward processing

• Evion brings in a 45-year mining veteran as chair

• Patrys lines up the clinical trial site for the delirium program

• The MD who built Northern Star from $363m into a $27 billion giant steps down

• Guzman y Gomez rallies after walking away from the US

  ---

KTK Closes Its First Week Up 90%

Somewhere on the Tel Aviv outskirts in 2019, an Israeli structural engineer named Dekel Keisar was working on a counter-theory.

Everyone else in the defence industry was building bigger, more expensive flying platforms. Dekel had spent his career inside that industry.

He thought it had the future backwards.

The drones that would matter, he’d decided, were the cheap ones. The ones you could build by the 1000s and lose without having to write a memo to a general.

Seven years later, the Pentagon agrees with him. KTEK Aerosystems, the company Dekel started with that hunch, listed on the ASX this Monday at 20 cents. It closed the week at 38, up 90%.

For new readers, KTK builds the components that go inside military drones. Wings, frames, landing gear, electromechanical assemblies. The names on the finished platforms, Elbit, UVision and the rest, buy those parts and bolt them in.

It’s the picks-and-shovels play of the drone boom.

We went long on the full breakdown on Monday. The IPO closed three times oversubscribed, with $30 million in bids for a $10 million raise that filled in under 24 hours.

Regal Funds Management, Thorney Investment Group and US-Israeli defence fund Scopus Ventures are on the register. Board and management hold 44%, while the top 20 holders sit at 70%.

Speaking with Dekel last week, one line stuck with us. He’d been attracted to small drones 20 years ago, when nobody in the industry took them seriously.

“Back then, most of the industry was focused on big, expensive flying platforms. I thought it makes sense to have small platforms, cheaper platforms, that you can manufacture in huge capacities … now that is what actually happens,” Dekel said.

The man bet his career on what the Pentagon now openly embraces. And the numbers behind that shift are extraordinary.

For KTK specifically, the move from here is operational. First purchase orders from the two newly approved Tier-1 contractors. A US manufacturing partner online. New customer wins beyond the existing book.

Each one is a chance for the market to re-rate.

Mount Ridley Moves From Discovery Into Processing

There’s a moment in the life of a junior critical minerals story where the question shifts.

It stops being “Have you found something” and starts being “Can you actually get it out of the ground?”. Most companies never make the shift. The graveyard of ASX rare earth juniors is full of names that had a resource, couldn’t crack the chemistry, and quietly disappeared.

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) started making the shift this week.

The company kicked off Phase 1 metallurgical testwork at Perth lab Nagrom, running the heavy rare earth, scandium and gallium mineralisation from its Grass Patch project through the chemistry that decides whether the rocks become a mine or a footnote.

You can find our full note on this week’s news here.

Running the program is Chris Larder, who joined MRD three weeks ago after spending 30 years building flowsheets in WA, including time at Alcoa’s Wagerup gallium plant and Lynas’ Mt Weld rare earth separation facility. The two WA operations MRD’s basket could realistically feed into.

The piece of this story we keep coming back to is the comparison with Victory Metals (ASX: VTM). Same clay-hosted, heavy-loaded deposit style. Same WA jurisdiction. VTM is well into pre-feasibility on its North Stanmore project with strategic partners on the books, and the market values that work at around $170 million. MRD sits at around $39 million.

That’s just under five times the gap on the same style of deposit, with one detail in MRD’s favour. VTM’s resource holds heavy rare earths and scandium. MRD’s holds all of that, plus gallium. The full set. And Grass Patch sits 25 kilometres from port in WA, which is a head start most of its peers don’t have.

Phase 1 doesn’t close that valuation gap on its own. The work in front of Larder’s team is the work VTM was doing two years ago. What it does is start the technical case the rest of the development pathway gets built on.

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The Defence Pivot on the ASX

Three years ago, a Russian tank cost millions of dollars and a Ukrainian drone cost a few thousand. The tank won that fight every time.

Now, the tables have turned.

The footage coming out of eastern Ukraine over the past 18 months has done more to shift Western defence procurement than any think tank report ever could.

There’s numerous clips around the internet of a backpack drone taking out a piece of armour that took a year to build and a decade to design.

The maths of war has been rewritten in front of a live audience.

The Pentagon, NATO and the Australian Defence Force have all seen the same footage and arrived at the same conclusion. The next war is going to be fought with things that cost less than a used car, built at mass scale.

Behind it sits Australia’s $15 billion commitment to autonomous systems, NATO targeting 5% of GDP by 2035, and Europe’s US$870 billion rearmament pool. The money has to find somewhere to go.

Some of it is finding the ASX.

Adisyn (ASX: AI1) has been on a run as the market has worked out what graphene stealth coating means for a drone the size of a quadcopter, and KTK turned a lot of heads in its first week on the ASX.

The trade has now spread well past what we own.

1414 Degrees (ASX: 14D) ripped another 60% this week on its aerospace and defence battery materials pivot.

AnteoTech (ASX: ADO) jumped 40% after validating drone applications for its Ultranode battery technology.

Both were industrial materials stories 12 months ago, and are now defence stories, because the money inside the sector has decided that’s what they are.

The thing to remember about defence trades is they don’t usually run on quarters. They run on procurement cycles, and the cycle that just opened is the biggest one since the Cold War.

The companies sitting inside it now are the ones that get to compound and the market is finally waking up to where the next generation of defence spending is heading.

Big Changes at Board Level as EVG Ramps UP

Evion Group (ASX: EVG) spent the week reshaping its leadership team, and the stock finished about 10% higher at 5.5c.

The headline appointment was Mal Randall stepping in as non-executive chair.

Randall brings more than 45 years across the resources sector. Senior Rio Tinto roles. Lithium, rare earths, graphite and broader critical minerals development. A career that’s run through every cycle the Australian resources sector has produced since the 1980s.

He doesn’t take chair roles on a whim at this point.

EVG has a few moving parts inside the business now, and they’re all maturing at the same time.

The newly acquired Carp fluorspar project in Nevada gives the company exposure to a mineral that quietly underpins lithium-ion battery electrolytes, semiconductor manufacturing, uranium enrichment and refrigerants.

China controls global supply. The US imports effectively all of it.

That’s the kind of imbalance Western governments have spent the past two years actively trying to fix.

Alongside fluorspar sits the Maniry graphite project in Madagascar, advancing toward Final Investment Decision under the EU Critical Raw Materials framework.

Graphite remains one of the core inputs for lithium-ion battery production, and Maniry is well advanced compared to most ASX peers in the space.

Underneath those two sits the Indian graphite JV, which already generates revenue and ships into international markets today.

The company also strengthened the technical bench this week with geologist Mark Fletcher, whose background spans nickel sulphides, gold and IOCG systems.

A year ago EVG was a graphite story.

Today it sits across fluorspar in Nevada, graphite permits in Madagascar, revenue in India, and a Rio Tinto-pedigree chair at the top.

This increasingly feels like a company trying to build a diversified critical minerals platform across multiple commodities, jurisdictions and revenue pathways rather than relying on one standalone project outcome.

PAB Lines Up Its First Human Trial

Patrys (ASX: PAB) climbed nearly 20% this week after the company lined up the two pieces it needed to put RLS-2202 into actual humans.

RLS-2202 is an injectable designed for acute care, where the target is delirium.

The Phase 1A trial site is now CMAX, one of Australia’s most established clinical research facilities. Alithia Life Sciences will run the day-to-day management of the study.

A biotech can talk about a drug for years before anyone actually receives it. Naming the trial site and the operator is the step that moves the conversation out of the lab.

Picture a nurse on a hospital ward at 3am, sitting with an 82-year-old who came in for a hip replacement and woke up confused, agitated, pulling at his IV lines.

That’s delirium. It strikes elderly patients hardest, particularly after surgery or in intensive care. It lengthens hospital stays, slows recovery, and raises mortality.

The patient pool is substantial. Ageing populations across the developed world keep elderly hospital admissions climbing every year, and delirium turns up in a meaningful share of them.

Acute care is a setting where speed matters more than almost anywhere else in medicine, and the treatment options on the ward for delirium haven’t meaningfully moved in decades. PAB’s pitch is that an injectable formulation can deliver faster and more reliably than what’s currently in use.

The company is targeting first participant dosing in Q3 2026, subject to approvals.

Biotech investing changes when a program crosses into humans.

Before that point, the market is pricing a thesis. After it, the market is pricing data. The two are different exercises with different multiples attached, which is why biotech share prices tend to move sharply around the moment of the crossing.

PAB isn’t there yet. But this week the company put the infrastructure in place to get there.

The 30-Bagger Walks Off the Job

In 2013, Northern Star Resources (ASX: NST) was an 85.5c stock with a $363 million market cap and a few WA gold mines on the books. The kind of name that scrolled past most retail investors without registering.

That year, a mining engineer named Stuart Tonkin joined as chief operating officer.

This week, NST announced Tonkin will step down during Q1 next year.

The stock sits at $18.83 and the company is worth almost $27 billion. It runs three major production hubs across Western Australia and Alaska, employs more than 10,000 staff and contractors, and is now Australia’s largest gold producer.

Every reader of this wrap is quietly hunting for a company that goes from speculative to serious while the rest of the market is still looking the other way. Northern Star is the closest the Australian gold sector has come to that template in the last decade.

Tonkin built it through the deals he did along the way.

The Saracen merger reunited ownership of Kalgoorlie’s Super Pit for the first time in generations. The acquisition of De Grey brought Hemi, one of the most significant undeveloped gold discoveries in the country, onto the balance sheet.

Those weren’t the only deals across the decade, but they were the ones that defined what Northern Star was going to be.

The past 18 months have been harder, with production downgrades and operational frustrations.

These are the kinds of pressures that catch up to companies once they get big enough, but the decade that came before is a story to be proud of.

Northern Star sat at the speculative end of the ASX in 2013. The same end where EC readers spend their mornings. The chance to compound a small company into a serious one is still on the table for someone today.

Tonkin’s decade is proof of what it takes to grab it.

Burrito or Bust: GYG Calls Time on America

Guzman y Gomez (ASX: GYG) walked into America in 2020 with its flagship store in suburban Chicago and a plan to take the country.

This week the company walked out with a writedown and an apology.

In response, the stock ripped.

The maths of failure in the US fast-casual market is brutal. Chipotle has been refining its operation for 30 years and runs more than 3,500 stores.

The American consumer has a thousand places to buy a burrito within a half-hour drive of any major city.

A handful of Australian-accented imports in Chicago weren’t going to change that, and the longer GYG kept trying, the more capital it was burning to find out.

Management drew the line this week. All eight Chicago restaurants shut and US expansion plans were abandoned. The company will wear a one-off financial hit exiting the market.

Investors rewarded the retreat, the opposite of what management teams usually get for waving the white flag on a growth story.

GYG upgraded guidance for Australian underlying pre-tax profit to roughly $85 million for FY26, representing growth of almost 30% year on year.

With the US write-off behind them, that growth now sits in front of the market with nothing in the way.

Expensive offshore growth stories that aren’t working have lost their patience this year on the ASX. Capital wants to see discipline before it sees ambition.

GYG had been carrying the US rollout as a question mark on the stock for years. The Australian business was doing the work, and the American one was the story management kept asking the market to believe in.

Even after falling from above $43 to below $20 over the past 18 months, GYG still carries a valuation around the $2 billion mark. That’s the price the market is now willing to pay for a focused Australian business with 30% pre-tax profit growth and no US story attached.

Sometimes the bravest decision a management team can make is the one that admits the last decision was wrong.

GYG made it this week.

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The Week Ahead

May closes out next week.

The small-cap end of the market still feels in better shape than the big end. Defence and critical minerals have been catching bids all month, and neither trade looks done.

Mineral Resources restarted Bald Hill this week. For two years the lithium majors have been writing down assets and pulling production. This was an early move in the other direction.

Sentiment across the smaller end of the lithium space picked up off the back of it, and there are a lot of names down there with operational leverage they haven’t been able to use in quite some time.

Gold is up roughly 50% on this time last year. Half the small-cap gold sector is still priced as though that move hasn’t happened, which means a meaningful chunk of the ASX is sitting on potential margin expansion.

Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) is the big one we’re sitting on. The maiden NSW drill program is underway and results could land any time. At a $7.5 million valuation, 10X is the smallest company in our portfolio, and positive assays could move the share price quickly.

From our side, the news flow into June is busy. Portfolio companies advancing, drill bits turning, and now a market rewarding the work.

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, 2,083,333 MRD performance rights, 900,000 AI1 performance rights, 200,000 10X shares, 4,500,000 EVG shares at the time of publishing this article. Equities Club has been engaged by KTK, AI1, MRD, 10X 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 License (AFSL) No 519872.

This morning the company kicked off Phase 1 metallurgical testwork at Perth lab Nagrom, on the heavy rare earth, scandium and gallium mineralisation at the Grass Patch project, 25 kilometres north of Esperance in WA.

It’s the first stage of the work that decides whether the rocks at Grass Patch become a mine or a footnote.

Chris Larder is running the program. He’s spent 30 years on WA flowsheets, including spells at Alcoa’s Wagerup gallium plant and Lynas’ Mt Weld rare earth separation facility.

Those are the two WA operations that MRD’s basket could realistically feed into.

We wrote about Larder joining MRD three weeks back. The program kicking off this morning is the one he's been designing since.

MRD trades at 2.7 cents, valuing the company at around $36 million.

Victory Metals (ASX: VTM), the closest comparable on the ASX, trades at around $180 million.

That’s roughly five times what MRD trades at, on the same style of deposit in the same state.

What’s In The Ground

Back in March, MRD’s maiden resource came in at 122.6 million tonnes grading 889ppm total rare earth oxide, and 41% of those rare earths sit in the heavy basket.

The heavies are the part of the periodic table driving the current critical mineral supply panic, and prices have been running hard while Western governments throw money at projects outside Chinese supply chains.

Inside the same deposit, MRD also holds 18,855 tonnes of contained scandium and 24,584 tonnes of contained gallium.

To put the scandium in context, the entire world produces around 25 tonnes a year, and China controls more than 95% of the world’s gallium.

Both metals are on every allied government’s shopping list, and MRD gets exposure to all three from a single project.

We covered the geology properly when MRD joined the portfolio, so we won’t redo it here. The short version is that the rocks are there in the right mix, in a jurisdiction the West actively wants to be buying from.

What the resource doesn’t tell you is whether the metals can actually be pulled out of the clay at a price that makes a project work.

That’s the question Phase 1 is built to answer.

Why The Heavies Are Running

There are 17 rare earth elements, and most of them are nowhere near as rare or valuable as the name suggests.

The ones the West is currently losing sleep over are dysprosium and terbium.

Both go into permanent magnets in tiny amounts, and they’re what keeps the magnet working when it gets hot.

That’s why you find them inside every EV motor, every wind turbine, every guided missile and every industrial robot that needs to keep running under load.

There’s no substitute for either element, and China controls almost all the global supply.

Last year, Beijing imposed export controls on both. By the time the controls bedded in, Western prices had started running well away from Chinese domestic prices, and they’ve been climbing ever since.

Dysprosium oxide for Western buyers is sitting at around US$930 per kilogram, and Terbium oxide is at around US$4,000 per kilogram

China's export licensing on the heavies has been tightening since it came in last year, which means the setup behind those price moves isn't going anywhere soon.

MRD’s resource holds 4,272 tonnes of contained dysprosium and 719 tonnes of contained terbium. Those are the two metals doing most of the work on the basket value, and they’re the two that Phase 1 is being designed around.

Grass Patch is one of a small group of ASX-listed names with a JORC heavy rare earth resource in a tier-one jurisdiction. Most other WA projects are light-dominant, where the metals trade at a fraction of dysprosium and terbium prices.

But all of that only matters if you can get the heavies out cleanly, and early testwork has already shown the heavies in MRD’s regolith leach more strongly than the lights.

That’s the recovery curve you want, because the highest-value elements come off the clay first.

Phase 1 is the program that puts proper numbers on how cleanly that split can scale.

What Phase 1 Decides

Grass Patch is what’s called a regolith-hosted deposit, which is a fancy way of saying the rare earths sit in soft weathered clay near the surface.

You can mine it with an excavator, which is a big head start on cost.

It’s also the same style of deposit China has built its heavy rare earth dominance on. The ionic clay operations in southern China produce the cheapest dysprosium and terbium on the planet, and the geology at Grass Patch is the western hemisphere’s version of that.

With this style of deposit, everything rides on the leach. The metals are loosely stuck to the clay, and a mild acid wash is supposed to pull them off cleanly.

When that works, the economics look beautiful.

When it doesn’t, recoveries collapse. The graveyard of junior rare earth stocks is full of companies that had a resource and couldn't crack the chemistry.

Larder's team has four jobs at the Winstons and Keiths prospects, both of which sit inside MRD's defined resource:

• Characterise the clay so the underlying chemistry is fully understood

• Test beneficiation, which is the step that strips out the waste and concentrates the good stuff before the main leach

• Develop and optimise the leach itself, which is the chemical step that pulls the rare earths off the clay

• Produce a clean batch of conditioned feed for the next stage of testwork

Get those right and MRD has a baseline the rest of the metallurgical pathway can build on, including the work flowing into the CRADA framework still being drafted with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US.

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What MRD's Got That VTM Doesn't

Victory Metals (ASX: VTM) is the closest comparable project on the ASX. Same clay-hosted, heavy-loaded deposit style, same WA jurisdiction.

VTM has been at North Stanmore since 2022 and they’re well into pre-feasibility work, with strategic partners on the books. That’s most of why they trade at around $180 million and MRD trades at $36 million.

MRD isn’t trying to leapfrog VTM. The work happening at Grass Patch right now is the same work VTM was doing a couple of years back, and the comparison only gets interesting if you ask what MRD has that VTM hasn’t.

Two things stand out.

The first is gallium. VTM’s resource carries heavy rare earths and scandium. MRD’s carries all of that plus gallium, the only critical mineral in the basket VTM doesn’t have on its books.

The second is the CRADA framework still being drafted with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re not aware of any other ASX rare earth junior with that kind of US lab partnership in flight.

Once it’s signed, it opens up US government funding pathways most juniors at this stage don’t have access to.

Phase 1 is the program that starts building MRD’s technical case toward the kind of dataset VTM has already put together.

The valuation gap is what it is. The question worth watching is how fast MRD closes it.

What Comes Next

Phase 1 results are the first deliverable from here. After that, the focus widens to the rest of the development pathway.

The re-assay of historical pulps at Grass Patch should flow into a resource upgrade, partnership agreements are still to be finalised, and a more advanced stage of met work will follow on from this Phase 1 baseline.

Met work is also where junior rare earth projects get validated or quietly fade. Lab recoveries don’t always translate to bulk material, and reagent costs can swing the economics.

We added MRD to the portfolio in March. Phase 1 is the next major test of the case we wrote up at the time.

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 drone cost a few thousand dollars. The tank cost millions.

That’s the war now.

In July last year, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo moving small drones from one accounting category to another. They used to be classified the same way as fighter jets. Now they’re classified as ammunition.

Ordered by the case, and expended by the thousand.

That single memo changed the maths. Annual US military drone purchases ran at around 50,000 last year. They’re forecast to hit 300,000 this year, and over a million within a few years.

The FY27 US Defence budget earmarks US$75 billion for drones and counter-drone systems. NATO is targeting 5% of GDP by 2035. Europe has pooled US$870 billion for defence rearmament. Australia is in for A$22 billion over the decade.

This is the largest defence procurement cycle since the Cold War.

In 2019, an Israeli engineer named Dekel Keisar started a company. He’d spent his career at Israel Aerospace Industries, running the structural engineering on military drones at Israel Aerospace Industries, the country's largest defence company.

Seven years on, that company is called KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK). It lists on the ASX today, and we’re adding it to the Equities Club portfolio.

KTEK Aerosystems builds the parts that go inside drones made by other companies. That's wings, frames, landing gear, electromechanical assemblies and structural sub-assemblies.

The names on the finished drones, Elbit, UVision and the rest, buy those parts from KTK and bolt them in.

Every drone they ship with KTK components inside is revenue back to KTK, without KTK needing to win a single government contract.

It’s the picks-and-shovels play of the drone boom.

Today’s IPO values KTK at $28 million. The drone programs KTK supplies parts into have won more than $2.5 billion in contracts since 2023.

KTK is already pulling in more than $5 million a year in revenue, more than quadrupled in two years. Dekel still owns 36% of the company going in.

The $10 million raise for the IPO filled in under 24 hours. It was three times oversubscribed, with over $30 million in bids. Regal Funds Management, Thorney Investment Group and US-Israeli defence fund Scopus Ventures are all on the register.

The top 20 shareholders hold 70% of the company between them, so there won’t be much paper left this morning.

KTK lists today at 20 cents. We think the rest of the story is bigger than the share price.

What KTEK Aerosystems Actually Does

KTK builds the bits that go inside military drones.

While that sounds simple, the engineering and supply chain behind it are not.

At the top of the chain sit the Tier-1 defence contractors. These are the companies that hold the government contracts, design the drone platforms, and ship the finished product to the military.

Think Elbit Systems, UVision, Textron and L3Harris.

While their names are on the contracts and logos are on the drones, they don’t build everything from scratch. No defence contractor does.

One layer down sit the Tier-2 suppliers. They build the components and sub-systems that go inside the drone. Things like airframes, wings, avionics mounts, electromechanical assemblies, power systems and landing gears.

The Tier-1 contractor takes those pieces, integrates them with software, sensors and weapons systems, and delivers the finished drone to the customer.

KTK is the Tier-2.

What KTK ships into a Tier-1 factory is what the company calls a “full-turnkey sub-assembly”. A ready-to-install drone section that arrives with all the mechanical, electrical and firmware components already integrated and tested. The Tier-1 bolts it in and moves on.

For the Tier-1, that saves months of engineering and production headache.

For KTK, it means they’re not competing with low-cost commodity suppliers on bolts and brackets. They’re delivering engineered systems that took years to design and qualify.

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The Cordless Factory

Most defence manufacturers scale by building bigger factories. That eats capital and locks the company to one country.

KTK runs a different model. The company calls it the “Cordless Factory”.

The engineering, the design work, the quality control and the systems integration all stay in-house.

The physical manufacturing gets contracted out to a global network of certified aerospace partners across Israel, Portugal, the Netherlands and Australia, with US partners next on the list.

The model lets KTK scale production without building new plants. It can move work between facilities depending on customer location, capacity and geopolitics, while avoiding the capital intensity that crushes most early-stage defence manufacturers.

It's how a company doing more than $5 million a year in revenue can already be supplying Tier-1 defence programs at scale.

The model works because Dekel and the team that built KTK came from the other side of the deal.

They spent years at Israel Aerospace Industries and consulting to the major drone manufacturers, working out from the inside what the Tier-1s actually want from a supplier.

The Cordless Factory lets them punch above their weight.

Why "Approved Supplier" Matters

There's a piece of the KTK story most retail investors will gloss over. It's the words "approved supplier".

Getting on a Tier-1 defence contractor's approved supplier list takes between one and three years. You go through facility audits, AS9100 aerospace certification, prototype runs and small initial orders, with performance monitoring throughout, before the Tier-1 trusts you with any real volume.

Once you’re in, you’re hard to displace. Swapping out an approved supplier means putting a competitor through the same multi-year qualification process while disrupting an active production line.

The Tier-1 won’t do it lightly.

That's why a $28 million company can credibly claim a place inside drone programs running $2.5 billion in contracts.

KTK is already inside the supply chains of the companies winning them, and getting another supplier in its place means rebuilding a multi-year process from scratch.

It’s the kind of edge that only gets built over years of work, and KTK has already done it.

Five Reasons We’re Backing KTK

1. The drone supercycle just changed shape

In July last year, the US Defence Secretary picked up a pen and changed how America buys drones.

Small drones used to be procured like fighter jets. Long contracts, big budgets, slow approvals, signed off by senior officers. Pete Hegseth’s memo moved them into the same accounting bucket as bullets. Cheap and expendable and bought by the case. Ordered by the unit commander rather than the Pentagon.

The numbers moved overnight from the memo.

The Defence Autonomous Working Group inside US Special Operations Command had a US$225.9 million annual budget last year. The FY27 budget request hands it US$54.6 billion.

That’s a 240-fold jump to a single line item, in 12 months.

The US Army wants a million small drones. The Pentagon’s separate Drone Dominance Program wants another 200,000 by 2027. Total US military drone purchases ran at 50,000 last year.

They’re forecast to hit 300,000 this year, then over a million within a few years.

While the companies whose names are on the finished drones get the headlines, the Tier-2 suppliers underneath them ship the volume.

Volume procurement rewards suppliers who are already qualified, already integrated into production lines, already shipping into platforms the US military has approved.

KTK is already inside.

2. The board has built one of these before

In 2017, an Australian-listed company called Elsight (ASX: ELS) came to market with a $18 million valuation. It built radio communications for drones.

The chairman who'd helped bring it there was a former semiconductor executive named Howard Digby.

Elsight today is worth about $1.5 billion.

That’s roughly 80 times the IPO valuation over eight years, in the same broad sector KTK is listing into today. Howard’s been on plenty of boards that didn’t 80x. He’s only chaired one drone-adjacent ASX small-cap.

KTK is the second.

Director Chris Baxter sits on the operational side of the table. He's advised Skyeton, a Ukrainian drone manufacturer shipping platforms straight into the war.

Ukraine is the most heavily combat-tested UAV environment on the planet right now, and the lessons coming out of it are reshaping how every Western military thinks about drones.

Non-executive director Winton Willesee sat on the board of DroneShield (ASX: DRO) through its early scaling years.

Three directors. Three ASX drone stories that became serious ones. That isn't common at the $28 million end of the market.

3. The customer base is bigger than the company

A $28 million company sits inside customer contracts worth more than $2.5 billion.

That single ratio is the most striking thing on the KTK page.

KTK's two existing public customer relationships are UVision and Elbit Systems, two of the most established names in the Israeli defence drone industry.

Both names mean a lot in the global drone space, but neither is a household name in Australia, so it’s worth a quick translation.

UVision is planning a Nasdaq IPO at a multi-billion dollar valuation. Its closest US-listed comparable, AeroVironment (NASDAQ: AVAV), is valued at around US$12 billion. Then there’s Shield AI, raising fresh capital at the same US$12 billion mark. Leonardo DRS (NASDAQ: DRS) sits at roughly US$10 billion.

Elbit Systems is one of Israel’s largest defence contractors, listed on both the Tel Aviv and NASDAQ exchanges with a market cap around US$25 billion.

That’s the calibre of company KTK is supplying parts to.

On top of the existing book, KTK has approved supplier status with two more Tier-1 defence and aerospace groups, with combined revenues over US$10 billion between them. Initial purchase orders are expected.

The $2.5 billion customer order book matters more than the headline number suggests.

KTK is already inside the supply chains of the contractors winning the contracts, and that’s the part you can’t replicate at IPO from outside the industry.

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4. Quadrupled revenue in two years, without diluting shareholders

KTK’s revenue went from US$769k in FY23, to US$1.95m in FY24, to US$3.3m in FY25. In Australian dollars, that's around A$5.5 million in FY25.

A 107% compound annual growth rate, and revenue has more than quadrupled in two years.

Most ASX companies celebrate 20% annual growth in a good year. KTK is growing five times faster than that, and onboarding Tier-1 defence contractors at the same time.

Usually that kind of growth at a small-cap manufacturer means going back to shareholders for cash, again and again, to fund the next stage of growth and the next customer ramp. Existing holders get diluted on every raise.

KTK has grown without doing that once.

The model is built to produce a margin profile closer to an engineering business than a manufacturer, and growth that doesn't depend on tapping shareholders every time a customer ramps an order.

5. The register going into listing is unusually tight

Regal Funds Management anchored the KTK seed round in late 2025. They came back for the IPO in 2026.

Regal is the alternatives arm of Regal Partners (ASX: RPL), with $20.9 billion in funds under management, and backing the same company twice at two different price points is about as clear a signal as a fund manager gives.

Alex Waislitz founded Thorney Investment Group in 1991, sits on the AFR Rich List with an estimated net worth around $1.5 billion, and has one of the longest small-cap track records in the country. Thorney is in.

Anton Tagliaferro founded Investors Mutual in 1998 and built it into one of the most respected value houses on the ASX.

His family office TGI Holdings is on the KTK register, and he gave the AFR his read on the listing directly: a “picks-and-shovels play to help facilitate the rapid acceleration in drone production driven by strong demand from defence departments globally.”

Scopus Ventures is a US-Israeli defence and technology fund. Specialist money that looks at defence supply chains for a living. Scopus putting capital into a Tier-2 UAV supplier listing on the ASX is a direct vote on KTK’s engineering and customer relationships.

VP Capital and Cyan Investment Management rounded out the institutional book. Both have spent years picking small-cap names that worked.

Add it all up. KTK has 140 million shares on issue at listing. Board and management hold roughly 44%, locked up. The top 20 shareholders hold around 70% of the register between them. Institutions own about half of what’s left.

That leaves a tiny free float with the potential to move aggressively if the market starts understanding what may be building here.

There isn’t much paper for retail this morning, and the names already holding it aren’t the kind that sell early.

What we’re watching

A few specific things from listing day forward.

• The first purchase order from a new Tier-1. Approved supplier is the hard yards. The next step is converting that into a purchase order, then a second one, then a supply agreement that locks KTK in across a multi-year platform. Each step is a chance for the market to re-rate the stock.

• The US partner network. American drone procurement is the single biggest piece of the global cycle, and a lot of that money will require domestic manufacturing or US-located supply chains. KTK has flagged the US as its next manufacturing geography. The faster they get a certified US partner online, the more programs they're eligible for

• New customers beyond UVision and Elbit. The existing book is concentrated in two names. Every new Tier-1 relationship that turns into revenue opens up more of the market.

• Revenue scaling without major capital raises. The Cordless Factory model is built to allow this. If it works, KTK compounds revenue without going back to shareholders for cash. If they need to raise to fund the next ramp, that's a different story.

Risks

KTK is an early-stage defence company on day one of life as a listed business. A few risks worth flagging:

• Customer concentration. UVision and Elbit dominate the current book. If either pulls back, or the geopolitics around their end-customers shift, KTK feels it.

• Geopolitical exposure. KTK was founded and operates substantially out of Israel. Engineering and a chunk of production stays where the talent is, and the region remains a high-risk operating environment.

• Tight float volatility. Limited paper amplifies upside when momentum is good. It can also amplify downside when sentiment turns.

Our view

Years ago, Dekel Keisar looked at the defence industry and bet against everything it stood for.

Every major player was building bigger, more expensive flying platforms. Multi-million dollar drones with multi-year delivery schedules. Dekel thought the future was the opposite. Drones you could build by the thousand.

In 2026, that’s the type of war being fought in Ukraine. That’s the procurement decision the Pentagon just made. That’s the volume problem every Western military is now staring at.

Dekel built KTK to supply the future he saw coming. The future has arrived.

KTK lists today at $28 million. Doing more than $5 million in revenue, growing at triple digits, customers running $2.5 billion in active drone contracts, and three directors who’ve each been inside an ASX drone story that became a serious one.

Most ASX listings ask the market to believe in something that might happen. KTK is asking the market to look at what’s already happening, and price it.

KTK rings the bell this morning at 20 cents. Wheels up.

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