Weekly Wrap: Albo's Three Minutes, Trump's Few More Weeks, and No Rest for Small Caps
Albo told us to catch the bus, Trump said the war's won but not quite, and the ASX gave back its gains, while the small end kept moving
Albo addressed the nation on Wednesday night. Eight hours of build-up for three minutes of “enjoy your Easter” and a reminder to catch the bus. The hard questions about what happens if fuel supply gets worse got punted.
The overriding sentiment seemed to be we’ll worry about it after the long weekend. Which is a pretty Aussie way to deal with a crisis.
Trump followed up Thursday claiming the US had “completely won” in Iran, then said they’d need a few more weeks to wrap things up. Gold and silver gave back ground on the contradiction, and the ASX followed.
It was a shortened week, with plenty of noise up top, but the small end kept moving.
Firstly, a Happy Easter from all of us at Equities Club. Now here’s what caught our eye this week:
10X builds momentum at Big Badja with its best silver hit yet
MRD's chairman puts his money where his mouth is
Gold and silver soften as the US stays put in Iran
Uranium juniors surge as sector sentiment returns
NeuroScientific rockets on Crohn's disease progress
We caught up with Cosmo Metals, a $5 million gold explorer with near-term drills
A humanoid robotics IPO and what it means for the supply chain
10X Keeps Delivering at Big Badja
Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) dropped more sampling results this week from Big Badja, part of the broader Peak View Project in NSW. And the grades keep climbing.
We had 10X's exploration manager in studio this week to walk through the results. Video below.
The standout was a new rock chip sample returning 339 g/t silver, 1.8% lead and 0.4 g/t gold. That's the highest-grade modern assay the company has recorded from the historic workings.
Rock chips are hand-picked samples so they're not representative of bulk grade, but they tell you the system carries serious metal. And the consistency across multiple samples backs that up - 256 g/t silver, 108 g/t silver, and 93.4 g/t silver with 3.32% lead from earlier rounds.
A trial IP line run across the historic mine confirmed a chargeability anomaly sitting directly beneath the old workings, open at depth. Nobody has ever drilled this target with modern techniques and it’s a first pass at something that could extend the system well beyond what's visible at surface.
Big Badja sits on a 15 km granite-sediment contact with a 3 km Pb-Zn soil anomaly nearby. There’s a lot of ground still to test across the wider Peak View tenure.
We backed 10X in early February and the team hasn't slowed down since. At 19c with a $7 million valuation and roughly $4 million in cash, the company is spending money on the ground while the silver price sits in a holding pattern because of Iran. When that resolves, 10X will be well placed to have the targets ready to go.
Mount Ridley Mines on The Front Foot
Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) hosted an investor webinar this week, and the most telling moment had nothing to do with slides.
Chairman David Wall recently bought roughly $180k worth of shares on market. For a junior explorer with a $40 million market cap, that's a decent cheque. On the webinar, he said he wouldn't be buying if a near-term capital raise was coming.
That takes one of the main risks off the table heading into a busy stretch.
If you didn’t get the chance to listen in, we have the link here.
We added MRD to the portfolio on March 24 and you can read the full breakdown here. The short version: three critical minerals from one deposit in WA, a maiden JORC resource, a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and a market cap that looks light next to its nearest peer.
The webinar filled in more colour on the Grass Patch project. The heavy rare earth resource is 41% heavy rare earth elements, with significant dysprosium and terbium endowment - two elements China has slapped export controls on and the same ones the Pentagon is stockpiling.
The peer comparison that keeps coming up is Victory Metals (ASX:VTM), which hosts a similar rare earth system in WA and trades at roughly $207 million.
MRD sits at around $40 million with additional scandium and gallium resources that VTM doesn’t have.
The gap between $40 million and $207 million is where the opportunity sits, and the path from here runs through metallurgy and resource growth.
On the scandium side, MRD already holds the second-largest JORC scandium resource in the western world behind Sunrise Energy Metals (ASX: SRL), which carries a $1.3 billion valuation.
The company has around 20,000 historical drill pulps sitting in storage to be assayed. If those come back with decent grades, the resource grows without a single new hole in the ground.
The 2026 catalyst list is busy:
Assaying historical pulps for scandium growth potential
Metallurgical work underway with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Seven walk up drill targets ready across Grass Patch
Early flow sheet development
Downstream partnership and government funding discussions
With $2.5 million in cash and no near-term raise on the horizon, MRD is funded to tick most of that list off through 2026. We'll be watching closely as they work through it
Gold and Silver Give Back Ground
Gold had been charging toward US$4,800/oz and silver was up over 10% for the week, nearly touching US$80/oz. The market had priced in the US leaving the Middle East, and precious metals were running on it.
Trump’s Thursday speech killed that momentum. The US looks to be staying put for the next few weeks (at least), and both metals pulled back as traders recalculated.
Right now, gold and silver are trading almost entirely on what happens in Iran. Until there’s a clearer picture on the conflict, we’d expect both to stay choppy.
For small-cap explorers, the soft patch is actually useful. Drill programs take months to plan, permit and execute, and results don't come back overnight.
Companies doing the work now could have news landing right around the time the conflict picture clears up and sentiment improves. The ones sitting on their hands waiting for a better market will be scrambling to catch up.
We continue to hold our full positions across the precious metals side of the portfolio:
Black Horse Mining (ASX: BHL) - Drilling for gold in Victoria
Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) - On the ground in NSW building towards a near-term gold drilling campaign
Asian Battery Metals (ASX: AZ9) - Working towards a copper-gold drilling campaign in Mongolia
Uranium Juniors Catch a Bid
A few small-cap uranium names had a strong week on the ASX, and we didn’t see it coming.
American Uranium (ASX: AMU) was the standout, up nearly 40% after releasing an updated resource for its Lo Herma Project in Wyoming.
The interim resource now sits at 945 Mlbs eU₃O₈. For a company trading under $20 million, that's a resource approaching the billion-pound mark.
To put that in context, several producing or near-production ISR operations in Wyoming and Texas are running on resource bases in the tens to low hundreds of millions of pounds.
The deposit also looks suitable for in-situ recovery mining, which is the cheaper end of uranium extraction.
Instead of building an open pit or going underground, ISR circulates solution through the ore body to recover uranium in place. If the project advances, that keeps development costs and complexity well below what a conventional mine would need.
The jump in share price reflects renewed investor appetite for uranium exposure as energy security continues to dominate the macro backdrop.
Cauldron Energy (ASX: CXU) surged almost 80% during the week without any price-sensitive news, which earned it a formal ASX price query. CXU put the move down to broader uranium sector strength and growing attention on nuclear power globally.
Both moves are a reminder of how fast sentiment can swing back into uranium when the macro lines up. These stocks can sit dormant for months and then move 40-80% in a week.
NSB Jumps 40% on Crohn’s Progress
NeuroScientific Biopharmaceuticals (ASX: NSB) was up roughly 40% this week after hitting a manufacturing milestone for its StemSmart™ platform ahead of Phase 2 clinical trials.
StemSmart™ is being developed to treat fistulising Crohn’s disease, one of the most severe forms of Crohn’s where ongoing inflammation creates small tunnels between the bowel and surrounding tissue.
These are extremely difficult to treat and often do not respond to existing therapies, leaving patients with limited options. StemSmart™ is designed to reduce the inflammation driving the disease and support the body’s ability to repair damaged tissue itself.
The company confirmed the first manufacturing transfer run has begun with Q-Gen Cell Therapeutics in Brisbane, which is the step that gets them to actual clinical trial material ahead of a planned Phase 2 study in the second half of 2026.
The global Crohn's treatment market is expected to exceed US$13 billion, so the commercial prize is huge if the science holds up.
That's often a big ‘if’ with any biotech, and the share price from here will live and die on trial timing and results, but it’s one for the watch list.
A $5 Million Gold Explorer Worth a Look
We caught up with Cosmo Metals (ASX: CMO) this week. It's a micro-cap gold and antimony explorer sitting under $5 million with about $1.5 million in cash.
Safe to say it’s firmly in "one good drill hole changes everything" territory.
Managing Director Ian Prentice walked us through what’s coming, and the drill calendar for the next few months is fuller than you’d expect for a company this size.
In WA, CMO is about to drill the Kanowna Gold Project, right next door to Northern Star’s Kanowna Belle operations near Kalgoorlie. An EIS grant is helping fund the program.
The project sits along the same structural corridor that hosts several multi-million ounce deposits, and historical drilling has already returned 18m at 5.3g/t and 10m at 4.7g/t gold. And they're about to find out if there's more where that came from.
Over in NSW, CMO controls a big ground position across the historic Bingara goldfields, where recent drilling returned 6m at 9.99g/t gold from just 11m depth.
So it’s shallow, high-grade, and barely scratched.
Two active projects in proven gold regions gives them more than one shot at it, which is as much as you can ask for from a $5 million explorer. It’s worth keeping a close eye on.
Humanoid Robots Are Getting Real. The Supply Chain Should Too.
One of the more interesting IPO stories this week came out of China. Unitree Robotics is preparing to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, looking to raise around US$610 million.
Unitree is already profitable. In 2025 the business did roughly US$250 million in revenue and delivered around US$90 million in net profit. Humanoid platforms now make up more than half of core revenue.
That’s worth pausing on. This is a humanoid robotics company that’s actually making money, not burning through cash pitching a prototype.
They're targeting production capacity of 75,000 humanoid robots annually in the near term. Tesla is aiming to start commercial sales of Optimus by 2027 with ambitions above a million units in the short term.
If even a fraction of those production targets land, the metals demand that follows is enormous. And it could be worth having one or more humanoid associated narrative plays in your shortlist.
We’ve backed Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) on this theme. FUN is exploring for rutile in Malawi, right next door to the world’s largest rutile deposit held by Sovereign Metals with Rio Tinto backing.
Every humanoid frame needs titanium, and the cleanest path to titanium is rutile.
At 8.3c with a market cap of roughly $25 million, FUN has a big upside. If the humanoid supply chain story plays out the way the production numbers suggest it could, rutile demand is only heading one direction.
The Week Ahead
Markets will keep swinging on whatever comes out of Iran, or Trump’s press conferences, each day.
Until there’s a clearer picture on the conflict, that’s just how it is. And the fuel supply conversation in Canberra could move from “catch the bus” to something more serious pretty quickly.
Our portfolio is heading into a busy stretch. We'd rather be holding companies doing work during the quiet periods than chasing them after sentiment turns.
Enjoy the long weekend. Eat some chocolate. Try not to look at the price of petrol on the drive home.
Till next week.
