Over a Dozen Brokers Told Us Their Top Picks
More than a dozen brokers, off the record, on what they're backing for the back half of 2026
Brokers don’t call you. They call each other. The small-caps worth owning get passed around a tight circle of people who trade for a living, and by the time one reaches the average investor, the move’s usually over.
We spent the past few weeks trying to get inside that circle. Coffees in Perth, working the phones to Sydney, and chasing a long tail of emails, texts and WhatsApp messages, all with one question:
“What are you backing for the second half of 2026, and why?”
The replies ranged from a single line to a full essay. A few never replied at all. Over a dozen came through in the end, with over 20 small-cap stocks worth watching.
Every one of them did it on the condition we kept their names out of it. That’s the deal that gets you the honest version, the pick they’d give a mate over a beer rather than the one they’d put in a client note.
Here’s what came back.
The Drone Reckoning is Coming
The broker who went deepest for us believes defence and drones are still early, and that most of what we’ve seen so far, the executive orders and budget lines, hasn’t turned into contracts and revenue yet.
The US and the Gulf states now have battlefield data from Ukraine and the US-Iran conflict, and they’re working out which drone platforms performed and which ones fell over.
Once that shakes out, the money and the political backing flow to the makers that proved themselves.
Trump's June 2025 executive order set out to build a domestic drone industry, and the Pentagon's 2027 budget request asks for more than US$70 billion for drones and counter-drone systems, its biggest ask on record.
One autonomous-warfare program alone jumps from US$226 million to a requested US$54.6 billion (not a typo).
His bigger point is that the commercial market ends up dwarfing the defence one, the same way jet and cabin technology built for World War II seeded the post-war aviation boom.
Drone deliveries exist in the US already. Wing and Amazon run them in a handful of suburbs, each operating on a special exemption from the rule that a drone must stay within sight of its pilot.
The FAA is close to scrapping that rule. Once operators can fly beyond the horizon without queueing for a waiver, then deliveries, crop surveys, mine mapping and pipeline checks via drone all get to scale properly.
The names mentioned:
KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) (one of ours): Makes sub-assemblies for military and commercial drone platforms. It supplies the builders, so it grows as the whole sector scales and no single drone's battlefield result makes or breaks it.
Boresight (ASX: BST): Runs counter-drone testing for militaries and manufacturers, riding the western spend on knocking drones out of the sky.
Hydrix (ASX: HYD): Counter-drone. Just won a binding $1.2m contract with munitions group NIOA to build the payloads that bring down small drones. The broker did a site visit and came away impressed.
Copper’s Tight and Everyone Can Feel it
Five separate brokers came back with copper, which is about as close to consensus as this crowd gets.
Miners dig up ore and pay smelters a fee to turn it into metal. Right now there’s so little ore going around that smelters have cut the fee to zero, and some have gone further and are paying miners for the ore.
They wear the loss because a cold furnace costs more to restart than a loss-making one costs to run, and the gold and sulphuric acid that come out alongside the copper cover some of the bills.
Two of the world’s biggest copper mines went down within months of each other recently. Grasberg in Indonesia declared force majeure after a mud rush tore through its underground operations, and Kamoa-Kakula in the Congo spent months recovering from flooding.
All while demand from power grids and AI data centres kept climbing.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs says grid and power build-out alone drives more than 60% of copper demand growth between now and 2030.
One of them added that there hasn’t been a major copper discovery in a decade, while data centres and the EV build-out keep pushing demand the other way.
Copper hit fresh records above US$14,000 a tonne in May before easing back.
Five brokers, five different copper plays:
White Cliff Minerals (ASX: WCN). Copper, Canada: A hole in the Northwest Territories came back grading almost 7% copper over 20 metres, with a slice inside it near a fifth pure copper, a number you rarely see in a drill result.
Tarrina Resources (ASX: TR8). Copper-gold, SA: Chasing an iron-oxide-copper-gold target beside Havilah’s Kalkaroo, the deposit style that builds giant mines, and the ground Sandfire paid $240 million to earn into.
Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9). Copper, Mongolia: Two copper discoveries side by side, one on a granted mining licence, gold, nickel and PGE alongside. Lab work has de-risked it, and the broker reckons the discovery hole still isn't priced in.
Great Bear (ASX: GBL). Copper-gold-silver-uranium, Canada: An IOCG project in the Northwest Territories with permitted, walk-up drill targets near historic mines. The draw is the board, chaired by Ray Shorrocks, former chair of Bellevue Gold.
C29 Metals (ASX: C29). Copper, Namibia: Picked up a brownfield copper project near Midas Minerals (ASX:MM1), with gold permits granted this week and copper permits due any day. Drilling starts within weeks, and the broker rates it cheap against peers on enterprise value.
The Metals the West Can’t Get
One broker called critical metals the biggest theme of his lifetime.
The West has woken up to how much of what runs modern life (chips, magnets, guided weapons, EV motors etc.) comes out of China, and it’s now scrambling to lock in supply from anywhere else.
Gallium is the sharpest example. It makes modern chips and radar work, and there's no swapping it for something cheaper.
Close to none of it currently reaches the US, which is a problem when SpaceX, Tesla, Raytheon and Nvidia are all scaling up products that need it.
China produces about 94% of the world’s gallium, the US leans on China for roughly 95% of what it uses, and Beijing banned exports to America in late 2024. That ban is paused until late November this year, though the licensing and the military-use block stay in place.
Gallium is never mined on its own, it comes out as a by-product of zinc and aluminium, so you can’t just switch on new supply when the price runs.
The same shortage runs through rare earths, the elements inside the magnets that drive EV motors, wind turbines and missiles. Neodymium and praseodymium carry most of the money, plus a smaller group of heavy rare earths that are scarcer again.
China refines most of the world’s supply, so the West is paying up for projects in friendly countries with the grade to back them. A bit of scandium or gallium in the same dirt helps too, since by-product credits can carry a marginal project into the money.
One gallium play, three rare earths plays, all aimed at the same shortage:
G50 Corp (ASX: G50). Gallium, USA: The most advanced US gallium play on the ASX. The broker reckons cheap processing matters more than grade, and the deciding metallurgy is due around Christmas.
Eclipse Metals (ASX: EPM). Rare earths, Greenland: 208Mt at 0.7% oxides with gallium and scandium credits and a deep-water port. Cheap next to Nasdaq neighbour Critical Metals, but mostly low-confidence tonnes and pre-feasibility.
Oceana Metals (ASX: OCN). Rare earths: Brazil. Early-stage, but the grade stacks up and first holes are due around August. A driller with the story still to prove.
Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD). Heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium, WA: A big clay-hosted deposit, but the metal needs beneficiation and separation work to unlock, and that isn’t solved yet.
Gold Keeps Doing Gold Things
The broker on gold built his case around who’s buying.
Central banks took in a net 244 tonnes over the first quarter, and a recent World Gold Council survey found 45% of them plan to add more before the year is out. China alone has now bought gold for 18 straight months.
Gold pays no interest, so it competes with things that do. When rate cuts finally arrive and bond yields fall, that competition weakens and gold gets easier to own.
He puts the pullback from January's highs above US$5,400 an ounce down to oil-driven inflation pushing rate cuts back, more a speed bump than a turn. Goldman still has gold at US$5,400 by year-end.
His name, plus two more from a second broker who came back with gold:
Brightstar Resources (ASX: BTR). Gold, WA: An emerging producer-developer with about 4Moz across Laverton, Menzies and Sandstone, already pouring gold and building a bigger plant at Laverton.
High-Tech Metals (ASX: HTM). Gold, WA: Bonanza grades at its Wagtail deposit, including 1m at 171 g/t inside a broader 6m at around 29 g/t, and the metallurgy shows the gold is easy to extract. A toll-treatment MOU with Wiluna, a mining contractor lined up, and about $11m cash against a $24m market cap.
Nordic Resources (ASX: NNL). Gold-copper, Finland: Kopsa holds just over 1Moz and counting, with a new high-grade zone driving the growth. Remaining assays land by end of July, with an updated resource due in the second half.
The Frontier Trade
Two brokers pointed at the tech end, from different angles.
One is watching the far edge. Quantum encryption and orbital data centres were among the ideas he rattled off, and his bet is that money rotates from commodities into tech and rewards whoever gets there first. It’s early and speculative, and he knows it.
Global data centres chewed through around 460 terawatt-hours of power this year, more electricity than Australia uses, and one forecast has that near 1,280 by 2030.
The five biggest tech companies spent north of US$400 billion last year on the data centres and chips behind AI, and are tipped to lift that by three-quarters again.
The grid can’t keep up, so more of them are bolting their own gas power on site.
Only one of the two gave us a name:
Top End Energy (ASX: TEE). Lining up "powered land" in the US, development-ready sites with the gas and connections a data centre needs. Working toward a re-listing, so it's a position play: on the ground in the right market early.
Biotech Catches a Bid
Biotech got a run from a few brokers, and the case starts in the US.
Big pharma is staring down a patent cliff, with more than US$300 billion of branded drug revenue losing protection by the end of the decade. The standard fix for this is to go shopping for someone else’s pipeline.
The big players are sitting on an estimated US$1.3 trillion in firepower, and they’re spending it. Deals hit US$106 billion in the first half of 2026, the busiest run since before COVID, with the likes of Lilly, Merck and Gilead paying up for late-stage assets, often at 30 to 50% premiums.
The flow-on reaches small biotech across the board, because every buyout re-rates the ones still standing. The US biotech index has bounced hard off its 2025 lows and the IPO window has cracked open again.
The broker’s read is that the Aussie names lag the US by about six months, so the move here is still in front of us.
A second broker added a different angle on the same sector: medtech has been oversold. Plenty of ASX medtechs kept hitting commercialisation milestones while their share prices went the other way, and they said the gap closes this year.
Six names came up between them:
Nyrada (ASX: NYR). Biotech: Mid-stage trial on a drug to protect the heart while surgeons clear a blocked artery, the mechanism already validated in a big pharma kidney trial.
HeraMED (ASX: HMD). Health tech: Remote pregnancy-monitoring software into US hospitals, with a tie-up with device giant Philips.
Island Pharmaceuticals (ASX: ILA). Biotech: Lead drug Galidesivir is a broad-spectrum antiviral aimed at Ebola and Marburg, moving through an FDA pathway with the US Army. Fully funded after a $9m placement at 35c, with Marburg trial data due in the second half.
Ceretas (ASX: CTS). Biotech: A fresh float, listing this month. Ultrasound technology licensed from the University of Queensland targets Alzheimer's by briefly opening the blood-brain barrier to clear the proteins behind the disease and let drugs through. Run by Tony Keating, who sold ResApp Health to Pfizer in 2022, with Phase 2 slated for this year.
Entropy Neurodynamics (ASX: ENP). Biotech: Psychedelic therapeutics. Its lead drug is IV-infused psilocin, in what the company calls a world-first binge eating disorder trial with Swinburne University. The IV route lets clinicians control how deep the experience goes and how long it runs, which oral psilocybin can't do.
Memphasys Ltd (ASX: MEM). Medtech: Landed global regulatory approvals and multiple major contracts in the past nine months, beating its $2m FY26 contract target. The broker expects revenue to triple next financial year.
The Late Mail
One broker replied after the deadline, apologising for the delay. He needn’t have. His pick was the most left-field of the lot, and we love left-field.
This broker’s view is vanadium re-rates later this year. It hardens steel and also fills flow batteries, which are the shipping-container-sized units that store power for the grid.
For years the price has sat in the gutter around US$5 a pound. Then the US government signed a US$125 million defence contract with Brazilian producer Largo at close to US$20 a pound (four times the market price), because it wanted the supply locked up.
Years of cheap vanadium have flattened the companies that mine it as their main business, since most of the world’s supply arrives as a leftover from Chinese and Russian steelmaking. Bushveld Minerals collapsed into business rescue (South Africa’s version of administration), and Glencore’s South African operations and Largo in Brazil are hanging on.
So supply is shrinking while the Pentagon pays more to jump the queue.
His own caution was that a sharp price move needs Chinese steel demand to stabilise, and depends on how fast flow-battery demand scales.
His pick:
Vanadium Resources (ASX: VR8). Vanadium, South Africa: Sits in the Bushveld complex, home to most of the world's vanadium, with a mining licence, a completed DFS and what he calls the highest grade in the world. A binding version of its US Vanadium offtake is the catalyst.
The Names, in Short
KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK). Defence and drones. Sub-assemblies for military and commercial drone platforms. One of ours.
Boresight (ASX: BST). Defence, counter-drone. Testing for counter-drone systems and militaries.
Hydrix (ASX: HYD). Counter-drone. A $1.2m payload contract with munitions group NIOA. Cheap on revenue, per the broker.
White Cliff Minerals (ASX: WCN). Copper, Canada. High-grade Danvers drilling in the Northwest Territories, three rigs turning, about $10m cash.
Tarrina Resources (ASX: TR8). Copper-gold, SA. An iron-oxide-copper-gold target beside Havilah’s Kalkaroo.
Azzuro Resources (ASX: AZ9). Copper, Mongolia. Adjacent discoveries with de-risked recoveries, plus gold, nickel and PGE. One of ours.
Great Bear (ASX: GBL). Copper-gold-silver-uranium, Canada. An IOCG project in the Northwest Territories, board chaired by Ray Shorrocks.
C29 Metals (ASX: C29). Copper, Namibia. Brownfield project near Midas Minerals, permits landing, drilling within weeks.
G50 Corp (ASX: G50). Gallium, USA. The most advanced US gallium play on the ASX, deciding metallurgy due around Christmas.
Eclipse Metals (ASX: EPM). Rare earths, Greenland. 208Mt at 0.7% oxides with gallium and scandium credits and a deep-water port.
Oceana Metals (ASX: OCN). Rare earths, Brazil. A high-grade find, first holes due around August.
Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD). Heavy rare earths, scandium and gallium, WA. Clay-hosted, with the processing still to solve. One of ours.
Brightstar Resources (ASX: BTR). Gold, WA. Around 4Moz across Laverton, Menzies and Sandstone, already producing and building a bigger Laverton plant.
High-Tech Metals (ASX: HTM). Gold, WA. Bonanza Wagtail grades, $11m cash, $24m market cap.
Nordic Resources (ASX: NNL). Gold-copper, Finland. 1Moz and growing at Kopsa, assays due end of July.
Top End Energy (ASX: TEE). US powered land for AI data centres, site qualification under way in Texas. Working toward a re-listing. One of ours.
Vanadium Resources (ASX: VR8). Vanadium, South Africa. Mining licence, completed DFS, US supply chain strategy.
Nyrada (ASX: NYR). Biotech. A mid-stage heart-protection trial.
HeraMED (ASX: HMD). Health tech. Pregnancy-monitoring software into US hospitals, with a Philips tie-up.
Island Pharmaceuticals (ASX: ILA). Biotech. Antivirals for Ebola and Marburg, fully funded, trial data due 2H.
Ceretas (ASX: CTS). Biotech. Ultrasound tech for Alzheimer’s, listing this month, ex-ResApp CEO at the helm.
Entropy Neurodynamics (ASX: ENP). Biotech. IV psilocin in a binge eating disorder trial with Swinburne.
Memphasys (ASX: MEM). Medtech. Approvals and contracts landed, revenue tipped to triple next FY.
The Part Where We Remind You Nothing’s Guaranteed
Brokers get things wrong. So do we, and so do small-caps, regularly and sometimes spectacularly. Some of the people who shared these names hold the stock, which you’d want to know before acting on anything here.
A name passed over a quiet coffee carries the same odds as one printed in a client note.
A drill comes up empty, or the shortage everyone’s counting on takes an extra year to bite. Any name on this list can halve while the story stays intact.
Treat this as a look at what the people moving real money are thinking heading into the back half, then do your own homework on anything that catches your eye.