Weekend Wrap: Iron Dome Tech, Fresh Drilling Hits And A Massive Gold Merger
Gold pushed back toward record territory this week as markets sold off, while ASX small caps delivered fresh drilling, defence and critical mineral catalysts.
$50 billion got wiped off the ASX 200 on Friday, the worst day in seven weeks.
While the big end of town got sold off, our small-cap portfolio kept punching above its weight.
Colonel Tamir Zimber spent his career deciding when Iron Dome interceptors left the launcher. This week he joined Adisyn’s advisory board.
We also had visible sulphides on a first hole back in Mongolia, drills close to spinning up at Balerion, fresh gravity targets across Grass Patch, and another mineral sands veteran joining Fortuna’s team.
It was a bit of a tale of two markets, really.
Gold pushed back toward US$4,730 an ounce, Gillon McLachlan and his fellow Tabcorp punters watched $500 million walk out the door, and a $10.7 billion merger created a new ASX gold heavyweight.
Plenty going on in our portfolio and beyond. Let’s get to it.
What caught our eye this week:
Fund managers think a peace deal could send the ASX back toward record highs
AI1 lands a top-shelf advisory board appointment and locks in US patent protection
Exultant Mining set to drill Balerion with high-grade historical hits back in focus
Mount Ridley adds new targets as it looks to expand Grass Patch
Fortuna adds more expertise with a titanium specialist
AZ9 is back drilling in Mongolia and immediately hits visible sulphides at Red Hill
Tabcorp punters cop it as more than $500 million is wiped overnight
A new ASX gold heavyweight emerges as consolidation sweeps through the sector
The Peace Trade is Building
A growing number of fund managers reckon the ASX snaps back to record highs the moment the US and Iran lock in a real ceasefire.
It’s a sentiment we share.
Before the conflict escalated, global markets were already grinding higher on the back of AI spending and a wall of liquidity flowing into equities.
Oil spikes and inflation fears since then have dragged sentiment lower, particularly across cyclicals.
The AFR spoke to several managers who reckon the ASX has trailed overseas markets all year and could quickly return toward record levels on a lasting ceasefire.
Their theory is that lower oil eases inflation, easing inflation lets central banks back off, and once rates stop being the market's biggest fear, money rotates back into growth and risk assets fast.
Resources stand to do well in that scenario, particularly copper and gold producers.
For what it’s worth, we’re with the fundies on this one. The ASX has been holding its breath all year. The moment it can exhale, things tend to move fast.
AI1 Lands Iron Dome Pedigree and Locks In Its US Patent
Adisyn (ASX: AI1) couldn’t stop making news this week.
On Tuesday, the company appointed retired Israeli Air Defense Colonel Tamir Zimber to the advisory board of its stealth drone subsidiary.
Zimber spent more than two decades inside Israel’s air defence unit, the one that operates Iron Dome, Arrow, David’s Sling and Patriot.
Zimber ran the unit that operated the lot.
Defence procurement runs on relationships built over years, and Zimber has spent twenty of them inside the rooms where those calls get made.
His day job today is at Israel Aerospace Industries, where he runs air defence sales into India. India is IAI’s biggest single foreign customer, and one of the fastest-growing defence import markets on earth.
The advisory board is there to do one thing. Turn lab results into orders.
Two days later, the US patent office formally allowed AI1’s foundational graphene coating patent.
The patent covers the manufacturing method, the resulting graphene-coated product, and the devices built around it.
AI1 is the only company we can find that’s figured out how to grow continuous graphene at temperatures that don’t melt the chip.
The same patent extends to the stealth drone work happening inside the 2D Radar Absorbers subsidiary. It’s one piece of IP, with two enormous markets.
AI1 is now up over 340% since we first added them to our portfolio three weeks ago.
It’s the jewel in the portfolio right now, and the company keeps giving us reasons to say so.
Exultant Nears Drill Start at Balerion
Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) is just about ready to spin the drill bit at the newly renamed Balerion Prospect. Approvals are through and the 12-hole RC campaign is good to go.
With drills days from turning, this one is shaping as one of the biggest near-term catalysts in our portfolio, and we don’t think the market has quite clocked it yet.
The campaign is targeting multiple untested geophysical anomalies pulled from the company’s recent IP, gravity and resistivity surveys across a 900m-long copper-lead-zinc-silver-gold corridor.
Several holes are also targeting down-dip extensions of historical high-grade hits, including 4.4m at 342.7g/t silver, 4% lead and 1.1% copper, alongside another intercept returning 22% zinc and 11.6% lead.
At a market cap of around $6 million with the rig about to turn, this is exactly the setup we like. A funded drill program on ground that’s already produced mineable grades, with no need to raise. A few good holes and the conversation around 10X changes very quickly.
Mount Ridley Keeps Adding to Grass Patch
Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) keeps building scale around its Grass Patch rare earths, scandium and gallium system near Esperance, with new 3D gravity modelling pointing toward more potential beyond the current resource footprint.
The modelling tied mineralisation tightly to gravity highs, with fresh target zones now opening up across two large corridors that remain open along strike and at depth.
Translation: there's more here than what's already been counted, and the system isn't running out of room.
The shallow depth to fresh rock, estimated around 70-80 metres, matters if the resource base continues growing. Shallower mineralisation can materially improve future mining economics through lower strip ratios and simpler development pathways.
MRD continues strengthening its position in the heavy rare earths space, with the company working alongside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on metallurgical processing while still trading at roughly one-fifth the valuation of nearby peer Victory Metals (ASX: VTM), leaving plenty of room for the market to reassess the story if resource growth and downstream discussions continue progressing.
The location of the project keeps working in MRD’s favour too. It sits just 25km north of the deep-water Port of Esperance, giving it infrastructure advantages most critical mineral projects can only dream about.
Management hasn’t taken its foot off the pedal either. From exploration success to target refinement to early processing chats, all inside a short window.
The latest modelling says the system is bigger than what’s been counted, and nobody at Grass Patch is slowing down to admire it.
Fortuna Builds Out Its Commercial Team
Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) continued building out its technical and commercial team this week with the appointment of mineral sands marketing specialist Ian Hind, a figure with more than two decades of experience across Iluka, Kimberley Mineral Sands and Strandline Resources.
You don’t bring in a guy like that if you’re still trying to find the rocks. Fortuna is clearly thinking past exploration and toward what happens when the rutile actually needs to move.
Hind brings direct experience in titanium mineral sales, logistics, shipping and offtake, all areas that matter more as projects move closer toward feasibility.
It’s the latest high-profile appointment for FUN as the company continues building a credible team around the Mkanda rutile project in Malawi.
Drilling is also underway on tighter-spaced infill work ahead of a larger aircore program planned for June, targeting mineralisation down to around 20 metres.
Coherent rutile anomalies now stretch across roughly 53km², with higher-grade cores covering around 28km². Mkanda keeps getting bigger every time fresh data comes in, and Hind’s hire suggests Fortuna already knows where this is going.
AZ9 Starts Strong at Red Hill
Asian Battery Metals (ASX: AZ9) waited out the Mongolian winter to put a rig back on its newly renamed Red Hill copper-gold project, and the first hole back hit visible sulphides.
It has been a little while since the market last had a drilling update from AZ9, but the company has wasted very little time getting back into mineralisation.
The first completed hole intersected chalcopyrite and chalcopyrite-bornite across two massive sulphide intervals totalling 18.8 metres.
Management noted the changing copper mineralogy and increasing copper intensity may point toward a higher-grade copper zone developing toward the west-northwest of the system.
The hole also hit the targeted electromagnetic conductor pulled from earlier work, giving the team another early tick in the box for its geophysical targeting.
Assays are still pending, but visually the campaign has started strongly. With follow-up drilling continuing and the broader VMS system still largely underexplored, AZ9 looks to have regained momentum heading deeper into the 2026 field season.
Tabcorp Gets Hit By AUSTRAC
Gillon McLachlan was supposed to be at the Warrnambool Cup this week, deep in the box with the heavy hitters. Instead, he was on the phone in a boardroom, watching half a billion dollars walk out the door.
The company revealed AUSTRAC, Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulator, had launched an enforcement investigation into Tabcorp’s AML and compliance controls.
The reaction was brutal, with more than $500 million wiped from Tabcorp’s value within hours and the market cap dropping from around $2.63 billion overnight.
The issue is cash. Tabcorp still has exposure to cash betting through pubs, clubs and tracks, which creates obvious monitoring headaches compared to purely digital wagering rivals.
Punters have long speculated on the ease of sending a photo of a winning TAB ticket for a mate to cash.
The AFR also noted Tabcorp had already been fined $45 million by AUSTRAC back in 2017.
There aren’t many CEOs as adept or well-connected as McLachlan. AUSTRAC sits at arm’s length from government, but the broader political mood around gambling has hardened, and his playbook is about to get a proper test.
The company says the investigation is early stage and all outcomes remain open, including no further action. But punters know how to read form. When the regulator’s circling, you back the bad news in early and check the result later.
Regis And Vault Build A Gold Giant
The gold space got another major merger this week, with Regis Resources (ASX: RRL) and Vault Minerals (ASX: VAU) agreeing to combine in a $10.7 billion deal that will create the third-largest gold producer on the ASX.
The combined business is expected to produce more than 700,000 ounces a year and control roughly 20.5 million ounces of gold resources alongside 6 million ounces of reserves spread across Australia and Canada.
This feels like another sign the Aussie gold sector is entering a new phase. With gold sitting at historically strong levels and producers throwing off huge cash flow, the majors are starting to realise scale matters more than ever.
A few years ago the game was all about finding ounces. Now it feels more like a land grab for processing infrastructure and regional dominance.
WA’s Goldfields in particular is starting to look like one giant consolidation battle. Any small-cap that makes a substantial discovery becomes a takeover target very quickly.
The Wrap
Plenty still to land in the next few weeks. Drills spinning up across the portfolio, assays still pending out of Mongolia, and infill work running ahead of Fortuna’s larger aircore program in June.
We’ll also be watching the federal budget closely this coming week, particularly anything that lands on critical minerals, defence spending, or resources tax settings. The detail tends to matter more than the headlines for small-caps.
Gold’s still firm, copper’s still tight, and the juniors are getting busy. Hard to ask for much more than that heading into a budget week.
Till next week.