After more than a month of nothing but red, it looked as though the ASX had finally shaken things off and last Friday's rally was quickly morphing into a mini bull market.
Oil woes were supposedly subsiding, rate rises were fully priced in and after a few shaky months, it looked like business as usual for the market bulls.
Traders had barely finished congratulating themselves before the market delivered yet another uppercut.
Any lingering optimism about peace in the Middle East was wiped out by Thursday morning as a sea of red greeted traders after the terrible news of surprisingly strong US economic data – even good news remains bad news in 2026.
US data showed manufacturing was humming, services were firing and employers were hiring at the fastest pace in more than four years. On the surface, it looked like exactly the sort of report investors should have been celebrating. Instead, Wall Street took one look and groaned.
The catch is that costs are climbing almost as quickly as activity. Businesses reported rising fuel, freight and labour expenses as supply chains crack under the pressure. The current cost of a giant oil tanker freight has pushed to over US$1 million a day, an unprecedented 8 times its cost back in January.
Closer to home, and the bearish energy analysts were back, warning $4 a litre diesel was not far away if supply disruptions continued and shipping routes remained under threat.
The market's mini revival and favourite narrative - that interest rates were peaking – was definitely a little premature.
The yield on the US 10-year Treasury Notes also punched back through 5.2 per cent to end the week, levels not seen since before the GFC. Oil meanwhile stormed back to US$107 a barrel as traders tried to decipher a daily barrage of contradictory headlines surrounding Iran, the Strait of Hormuz and fresh Houthi attacks on Saudi targets.
There was only one thing running other than oil in global markets – Mark Zuckerberg’s latest triumph – MUSE.
Meta's new AI agent platform, MUSE, consumed Wall Street's attention all week. Investors were not just clamouring for the latest time-saving wizard; they bought absolutely anything that might sell MUSE a chip. Euphoria quickly turned to panic as the market worked out who MUSE might put out of business and promptly decimated the broader market instead.
The logic is simple. A personal AI agent that re-shops your car insurance every renewal, audits your subscriptions, compares energy providers and haggles with your phone company is bad news for any business whose margins rely on customers being too busy, distracted or lazy to do it themselves.
The casualty list read like a household's monthly direct-debit statement. Planet Fitness shed more than 10 per cent of its value in a day, as investors contemplated a future where your AI assistant finally acts on the fact you haven’t visited a gym since before COVID.
And judging by Muse being the no.1 downloaded app in the world this week, it seems nobody’s too worried about handing old Zuckerberg even more of their data. After he already let Cambridge Analytica rifle through half our Facebook profiles, what's a little more personal data between friends?
Our Runners list was thin again this week, with little love for the small caps, as an unexpected biotech company topped the week after a serious share price slide in 2026 was stopped short when its chairman stepped up and bought a swathe of shares on the market.
MICRO-X LIMITED (ASX: MX1)
Up 200% (1.8c – 5.4c)
Bulls N' Bears Runner of the Week was portable medical device specialist Micro-X, which rocketed higher on what initially looked like no news at all on its portable scanning technology.
After dealing with a pesky reply to the market overlords down at the ASX following a ‘speeding ticket’ about an impressive 200 per cent share surge in one day, Micro-X tried to wave off the gains as 10 days of "generally elevated trading at historically low prices".
The company added that a "substantial volume” of shares was traded last Thursday, while the ASX query pertained to Wednesday's trading surge.
Micro-X also posited the abnormal activity might have been spurred by selling from Perennial Value Management, which on September 3 said it was no longer a substantial holder. Unfortunately for long-term holders, the share price had slid under the persistent selling by the fund, which held 6.79 per cent of the company earlier this year. And, despite this week's share surge, the stock's price still sits at only half of where it was to start the year.
However, it's a pretty good sign when one of your largest shareholders gets shoved aside by a buy from the company's current chairman, Patrick O’Brien. The chairman seemingly said enough is enough and bought just over 1.36 million shares between 2.2 cents and 2.9 cents apiece this week on the market, seeing and clearly believing in the value proposition Micro-X's developed technology presents.
The stock then followed suit, rising from 1.8 cents last Friday to an intraday peak of 5.4 cents on Wednesday, up 200 per cent.
So what does Micro-X do? The company is developing lightweight brain-scanning units based on its proprietary cold cathode, carbon nanotube emitter technology. The company targets stroke detection for its portable units, a field where speed is everything. The core advantage of portable stroke detection is dramatically faster diagnosis and treatment in the critical “golden hour”, summarised by the simple principle that “time is brain.”
Micro-X is a broader imaging-technology company commercialising lighter X-ray and CT systems and has developed its portable X-ray technology over time. It is also impressively contracted to the US Department of Homeland Security to design a next-generation airport security checkpoint, focused on miniaturised CT baggage scanners and passenger self-screening.
The company says this contract alone could be worth up to $31.7 million in milestone payments, an impressive figure given that at the start of the week the company's valuation was less than half that amount.
ARROW MINERALS LTD (ASX: AMD)
Up 82% (2.2c – 4c)
Making an impressive back-to-back appearance on the Bulls N' Bears Runners list is Pilbara iron ore hopeful Arrow Minerals. There was no fresh news this week, however Arrow's share price got on its bike again on hype around its highly prospective iron ore tenement application that sits right on the doorstep of Rio Tinto's world-class Robe River joint venture in the Pilbara.
The company says the tenement adjoins Arrow's existing Yarraloola ground and comes within just 2km of the large-scale open-pit operations forming part of the Robe Valley Mesa A mining hub for Rio. The Robe River JV has been operating in the region since the early 1970s and today produces around 20-23 million tonnes of iron ore per annum, squaring the minuscule Arrow right in the thick of a major Pilbara mining address.
The new application also expands Arrow’s prospective Pilbara landholding by around 30 per cent to 415 square kilometres, giving the company an even bigger footprint in the world's greatest iron ore province. And, there's serious pedigree behind the push.
Arrow is headed by David Flanagan, the founder and former managing director of Atlas Iron. That means something to plenty of junior mining pundits because between 2004 and 2016 Flanagan took Atlas Iron from a $9 million company to as much as $4.5 billion by growing a 15-million-tonne-per-annum Pilbara iron ore production base.
Atlas was ultimately acquired by Hancock Prospecting in 2018 after a bidding battle that also involved Mineral Resources and Fortescue. Flanagan isn't simply another junior explorer talking up the Pilbara; he has already built and exported iron ore from the region, giving Arrow's renewed focus on direct shipping ore (DSO) a little more bite.
The move comes hot on the heels of Arrow agreeing in August to acquire a 70 per cent interest in a direct shipping-grade iron ore project from Voyage Minerals. That project sits across the same broader Yarraloola district, less than 15km from the Robe River JV's 65-million-tonne-per-annum operations, where previous explorers have identified direct shipping grade mineralisation at surface.
The really appealing bit is the geology. Previous work identified a more than 2km-long and 250m-wide Channel Iron Deposit target, dubbed the “BBQ Valley CID target”, with the mineralised unit remaining concealed by cover in both directions. For Arrow, it is the chance to stitch together a sizeable iron ore position immediately alongside one of the Pilbara's proven production engines.
MAMBA EXPLORATION LTD (ASX: M24)
Up 71% (2.1c – 3.6c)
Rounding out the Runners podium is copper-gold pioneer Mamba Exploration, after the company unearthed a treasure trove of historical high-grade copper drill hits at its Meeka East project in Western Australia's Murchison region.
The news sent its share price soaring, with the deep dive into historical data returning a massive 165 copper intersections from just 47 drill holes across its Copper Hills and Lady Alma prospects.
The company says its mineralisation extends for a long 3km corridor and, importantly, sits just 30km along strike from the $500 million market-capped Solstice Minerals' Nanadie project, which has been hailed as one of the most notable greenfields copper discoveries in WA in recent years.
At Copper Hills, highlights included a thick 26-metre intercept grading one per cent copper and 0.33 grams per tonne gold from just 24m. Another hole returned 23.1m at 1.1 per cent copper from 39.9m and a shallow 10m intercept at 1.3 per cent copper from only 2m downhole.
About 1.9km to the north-west, the Lady Alma prospect delivered a top result of 13.4m at 1.3 per cent copper from 151.7m and a 16.4-metre hit grading 1 per cent copper from 93.5m.
With a new geological model in hand and a swag of impressive historical results, Mamba is now planning to fast-track exploration. The company intends to conduct detailed mapping, rock-chip sampling, a soil survey and a reinterpretation of existing geophysical datasets.
Crucially, it is planning for a new round of RC and diamond drilling to test the grade and extent of the mineralisation, including the first-ever drill testing of the ground between Copper Hills and Lady Alma.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Andrew Todd
