Another week of smoke and mirrors has left markets generally sitting pretty to end the week.
The ASX slid a little on Friday, largely on retreating copper and aluminium prices as the world’s biggest miner BHP shed nearly 4 per cent.
However, US markets were pushing new all-time highs on “nothing to see here” US inflation data, taking some heat out of the interest-rate hawks.
The biggest winner of the week was Japan, with its Nikkei enjoying a strong run as investors digested the prospect of further US support for the beleaguered yen. Behind those green numbers sits a rather fascinating piece of financial theatre. While the Yen has been collapsing towards 40-year lows and threatening to make Japan's already enormous pile of US Treasuries increasingly uncomfortable, it was the US to the rescue after a photograph of US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's notepad at a Cabinet meeting revealed a rather extraordinary item on his to-do list: “Buy Japanese Yen $5 to $10 billion.”
The US subsequently coordinated with Japan to support the currency, with Trump cheerfully explaining that Japan “wanted a little bit of help” and the money printing American machine was there to provide it - how charitable.
The US had two very good reasons to help.
A permanently collapsing yen makes Japanese exports cheaper and US goods more expensive, widening America's trade deficit and more importantly, Japan is one of the world's biggest holders of US government debt.
If Tokyo needed to sell a mountain of Treasuries to defend the yen, it could send US bond prices lower, yields higher and American interest rates through the roof.
In other words, Washington wasn't necessarily rescuing Japan. It was protecting its self-interests.
The yen bailout also gave gold a fresh kick. Normally gold and oil don't party together, but both have been rising as investors question the strength of the US dollar and the stability of the global financial system. Renewed Chinese buying has added more fuel to gold, while America's decision to help prop up the yen has only highlighted how fragile the world's currency and debt architecture has become.
Back home in Australia and our inflation maestros - the Labor government – have again been recklessly spending your hard-earned cash.
Albanese put his cape on to announce a $2.5 billion taxpayer-funded rescue package for Rio Tinto's Tomago aluminium smelter which is struggling under surging electricity prices. The fake herioics were looking decidedly smoke screenish as the Japanese "melongate" saga threatened to swallow him whole.
Bailouts aside it was a promising week for the Bulls N’ Bears Runners cavalcade, as the small caps index continued to surge and junior resources were the biggest beneficiaries. It was four-from-four for resources on the list this week, with some curious trading funny buggers rather than substance creating a clear winner.
ACCENT RESOURCES NL (ASX: ACS)
Up 5233% (1.2c – 64c)
The Bulls N' Bears Runner of the Week and now a serious contender for Runner of the Year is the extraordinary case of Accent Resources.
While the company did release an update on independent beneficiation test work at its wholly-owned Magnetite Range project in Western Australia, the subsequent surge in its share price had little to do with the announcement and everything to do with how much speculative heat could be pumped into a stock with a ridiculously tight share register.
Yes, the company is progressing a pre-feasibility study to assess the quality of its iron ore. And yes, its latest coarse dry magnetic separation work managed to reject nearly half of the unwanted material while maintaining magnetic iron recoveries above 97 per cent. However, the 97 per cent figure, while appearing important, was quickly overshadowed by another number that captured the market’s imagination: 98.5.
That figure, 98.5 per cent, is the portion of the company held by the top 20 shareholders. This kind of tightly held stock is the stuff of day-traders dreams and what ensued in the days following its announcement can only be classified as pure madness.
On Monday's announcement, the company saw a grand total of just $140 worth of its shares traded. By Tuesday, the funny buggers of the day-trading world has weighed in, pushing the share price up 50 per cent to 1.8c then onto an astronomical intraday run, soaring 614 per cent with only $14,000 in shares changing hands.
The market overlords at the ASX were quick to blow their whistles, slapping Accent with a speeding violation and placing it in a trading halt pending a response to a price query. On Tuesday night, Accent responded that it was unaware of any unannounced information but did note the news from Monday.
That was just the warm-up however, Wednesday morning saw the stock continue on its ballistic trajectory and by 11am on Thursday, Accent’s share price had peaked at 64c, representing a colossal 5233 per cent gain for the week. It was promptly placed into another trading halt pending a response to the question on everyone’s lips: “What the hell is going on?”.
Surely by now the hard-working men and women at the ASX would recall their headaches with last year's Runner of the Year, Kaili Resources, which in a similar fashion surged 39,650 per cent in just two days of trading on its own tight register.
Yet once again, there was no stopping the Accent bandwagon. The company's market capitalisation of just $5.8 million last week was looking more than just a little pale against its final market cap of s$313 million by the time it hit 64c on Thursday. What’s even crazier is that only about $540,000 worth of stock had been traded since Monday morning to create the monumental uplift in value.
It was certainly great news for its 64 per cent shareholder, the aptly named Rich Mark Development Group, who at one point was sitting on a paper gain of nearly $200 million. It’s another wild lesson proving that a tight structure, a bit of hot air and a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of traders can create market events that make Wall Street’s meme stocks look tame.
LIBERTY METALS LTD (ASX: LIB)
Up 100% (0.2c – 0.4c)
Snagging silver for the week is junior gold explorer Liberty Metals, after it unveiled a binding four-year option to acquire 90 per cent of its Oko North and Oko South gold projects in Guyana, South America.
At face value this analyst might have guessed that being in Guyana would land you somewhere in West Africa rather than South America, but in terms of gold geology, that’s not such a far-fetched equation. The company says its Guyana gold tenure within the Guiana Shield of Brazil-Guyana-Venezuela was once adjoined to West Africa's prolific Birimian Shield, which extends through Ghana and hosts most of West Africa's world-class gold deposits.
Guyana's Cuyuni Mining District sits inside the Guiana Shield, the same geological belt that hosts Newmont's Merian mine in Suriname and Zijin's Aurora mine just down the road. It is a jurisdiction that has quietly become one of the more interesting unknown gold addresses on the planet.
The Oko region in particular has drawn serious attention over the past few years, with the $14.5 billion Canadian-listed G Mining Ventures advancing the Oko West project toward first gold.
More importantly, Liberty's Oko North project directly abuts ground held by G Mining, which is in comfortably close to G Mining's New Oko Discovery. That discovery has returned thick gold hits including a whopping 60m running a handy 5.9 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and even 100m at 2.2 g/t gold.
G Mining’s feasibility study defined resources of well over 10 million ounces, supporting an average production profile of a monstrous 350,000 ounces per annum over a 12.3-year mine life, representing a monster project. Notably, Liberty's ground sits right in the same neighbourhood, which is why its 180-square-kilometre footprint carries real weight even before a single drill hole is contemplated.
Looking for gold where monster deposits have been found before is always a good start, with Liberty now set to complete a maiden systematic geochemical sampling program to define drill targets, which is planned to commence in the third quarter of 2026.
As a result of the acquisition, the company also completed a placement to raise $5 million to a cornerstone group of institutional investors at a quarter of a cent, adding plenty of paper to the company that already has 8.2b shares on issue.
KING RIVER RESOURCES LTD (ASX: KRR)
Up 75% (6c – 10.5c)
Taking out the final podium spot this week is a WA gold explorer that has been on an absolute tear of late. Buoyed by its substantial shareholding in Tivan Limited, valued at more than $26 million, the company has surged over 300 per cent in recent months on the back of exploration at its Mindoolah gold project in the Murchison, where early-stage resource definition is heating up.
Its share price was once again set alight this week after a high-resolution magnetic drone survey lit up a grab bag of new high-priority gold targets at Mindoolah, unveiling a series of previously unrecognised structural corridors and alteration zones. The company says the survey results point to a much larger, structurally controlled gold system than previously thought, extending well beyond the project's historical mine workings in the highly prospective Murchison province.
The Tony Barton backed Perth-based explorer has now defined four priority targets for follow-up work based on interpreted hydrothermal alteration, complex fold-shear interactions and structural repetitions. Those interpretations were largely led by King River's relatively new Managing Director Graham Gadsby who appears to be shooting the lights out at King River. The company's share has been on a glory run from 1.6c on October 14th last year when he was appointed, to closer to 10c now with plenty of action in the last week.
King River only acquired the Mindoolah project, located about 70km north-west of Cue, in February this year and has wasted no time in applying modern exploration techniques.
The project is littered with underground workings dating back to the early 1900s. In the decades that followed, shallow open pits delivered high-grade results with production averaging up to 19g/t.
Much of the old mining was constrained by the water table, with shallow mining depths down to just 20 metres and the higher economic cut-off grades of the day have potentially left plenty on the table for a modern explorer.
The company now expects its maiden Mindoolah assays in mid-September, while modern geophysics is lighting up fresh targets across its Murchison ground. Those old Mindoolah workings could be nothing more than the tip of a much bigger gold iceberg for this now $125 million market capped gold story.
AUSTRALIAN MINES LTD (ASX: AUZ)
Up 71% (2.45c – 4.2c)
Rounding out the Bulls N’ Bears Runners this week is burgeoning scandium junior Australian Mines, which surged as US interest in Australian scandium, specifically in New South Wales, put the sector well and truly back on the market's radar.
The catalyst was the Pentagon’s US$400 million (A$566 million) loan to Sunrise Energy Metals to help develop its nearby Syerston scandium project in NSW. The US bypassed any Australian funding hopes in what is a serious vote of confidence in the strategic importance of the metal and the Australian supply chain.
The US intervention inevitably shined a brighter light on Australian Mines’ Flemington project, which sits right next door to Syerston and hosts a 6.3 million tonne resource grading 446 parts per million (ppm) scandium, with about 98 per cent already sitting in the high-confidence measured and indicated categories.
With around 90 per cent of the resource also sitting within 50 metres of surface, Flemington has the potential for relatively shallow, free-dig mining in an area which has been seared onto the global scandium map.
Scandium is a critical metal used to make aerospace and defence alloys lighter and stronger, while also finding applications in advanced electronics and semiconductors. With Washington increasingly desperate to secure critical mineral supply chains outside China, Australian projects are evidently the next port of call.
Australian Mines is now progressing a pre-feasibility study looking at scaling up Flemington, giving investors plenty to chew on as the US throws serious money at the scandium industry next door. When the Pentagon starts putting hundreds of millions into your neighbour's backyard, it tends to make make the market meerkats sit upright and with a hefty 71 per cent run for the week they clearly have their eye trained on Australian Mines.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Andrew Todd
