DJs Folds, Dems Sweep, Fortuna Deeper

David Jones gift cards are out of the family Secret Santa this year.

Australia’s oldest retailer opened in 1838 and listed on the ASX 157 years later, where it lasted 19 years. Another 12 years passed before the administrators walked in on a normal Thursday and took over.

Then the blame game began.

Some blamed cost of living and Albo and/or Jim, and others blamed the Reserve Bank, which raised rates for the fifth time this year on Tuesday.

Plenty of shoppers blamed declining service in the store and packages that turned up a week late.

We think it’s a bit of all of it. A department store built for a Saturday outing was always going to be up against it in the age of apps with next-day delivery, and 38 stores on 20 and 25 year leases is a lot of rent to carry with customers drifting off.

It’s a shame, but it’s been coming for a while. And it still possibly survives as a smaller, more agile David Jones. Though its not-too-distant days of handing out champagne alongside the resident grand pianist (look it up) are now long gone.

On the same Thursday the ASX had its best day since April last year, with 255 stocks up and just 39 down and the Small Ords up 4.7%.

In our portfolio, rutile explorer Fortuna Metals drilled through the bottom of its resource at a second prospect, and Mount Ridley’s Selectro leach worked on a third ore.

What caught our eye this week:

• Fortuna’s holes end in rutile at 24 metres, three times deeper than its resource
• Mount Ridley’s leach pulls 96% of the vanadium from a third ore
• The Democrats take both houses and Wall Street gives it all back a day later
• Oil drops 20% in a week after Trump calls off Iran
• BPM doubles on its first hole at Bonnie & Clyde
• NextDC gets raided at $9.50 a fortnight after its $3 billion day
• Evion options 63 Nevada holes never tested for fluorspar

Let’s get to it.

Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) Drills Through the Floor at Kahuna

On Monday rutile explorer Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) put out its second batch of aircore results from Mkanda, its project in Malawi, and the best hole ran 24 metres at 1.27% rutile from surface and was still in rutile when the rig stopped.

Mkanda holds 300 million tonnes of rutile, the sixth largest resource in the world, and all of it sits in the top eight metres because it was drilled with hand augers. This year Fortuna put an aircore rig on to see what’s underneath.

The first prospect through the rig came back a month ago with 24 metres at 1.5%. We said then that if the other prospects carried their grade down, the resource could get a lot bigger.

This week’s batch is from Kahuna, the second prospect. All 12 holes hit rutile from surface and nine were still in it at the bottom. The average hole ran 22 metres.

Kahuna’s high-grade core runs a kilometre and is open at both ends, with more assays to come across the 2km prospect.

Sovereign Metals owns the world’s biggest rutile deposit 20km up the road, and its resource nearly tripled once aircore rigs drilled it to 20 metres.

The third prospect’s samples are at the lab now, part of 2,700 from this year’s drilling, with four to six months of results still on the way.

CEO Tom Langley said a 22 metre average hole against an eight metre resource shows how much room there is to grow it.

FUN closed the week at 6.6c, which values the company at about $28 million with $11.4 million in the bank, and the pre-feasibility work starts in December. We backed it at 4c last September.

We think the next resource estimate will be a good deal bigger than 300 million tonnes, and we’re happy to wait for it.

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) Selectro Makes it Three from Three

MRD managing director Allister Caird spent this week in Ankara, Turkey, putting Selectro in front of a conference of miners from around the world, walking in with a fresh result in his pocket.

Selectro is the leach the critical minerals explorer in our portfolio Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) built for the scandium clay at Grass Patch, its project near Esperance in WA.

A leach is a chemical bath. The ore goes in and the metal dissolves into the water, where you collect it. Caird explained it to us last month with a tea bag.

The bath was built for MRD’s own clay and pulled 92% of the scandium out of it in August. Then MRD started feeding it other people’s ore.

In October it borrowed some bauxite from the ground next to Alcoa’s leases, and the bath took 95% of the gallium and left a pile of sand where a refinery leaves a dam of red mud.

On Tuesday it was an iron ore called titanomagnetite, which is where most of the world’s vanadium comes from. Selectro pulled 96% of the vanadium out and brought half the titanium and three quarters of the iron with it.

You can find our full write-up here.

The producers who dig this ore today roast it at 1,200°C to get the vanadium and throw the titanium and the iron away. MRD did it in a bath under 100°C and kept them.

Vanadium is the metal inside the big batteries power companies have started bolting onto the grid, and China makes about three quarters of the world’s supply.

MRD’s plan is to license the bath to the companies that own the ore, the way a software company licenses its code, and let them do the digging. Every ore it cracks is a new set of customers to call on.

Next is a demonstration plant in Perth, pencilled in for the first half of next year. It’s a small working version of the real thing that runs the bath on tonnes of ore at a time, and a customer can bring their own ore and watch.

MRD closed the week at 4.3c, worth about $60 million. We bought it at 2.4c in March for the scandium in the clay, and Grass Patch is still the biggest scandium resource in the world.

We now think the bath is the bigger asset, and at $60 million the market is paying for the clay and getting the bath thrown in.

We’ll catch up with Caird when he’s back.

Democrats Sweep the US Midterms and Wall Street Yo-Yos

Trump’s a lame duck and the Democrats might’ve found their 2028 president.

That was the gleeful commentary from the blue side of America this week after the Democrats took both houses of Congress, halfway through Trump’s second term.

It’s a stark turnaround from 2024, when Trump wiped the floor with them and the pundits talked about a lost decade or two for the Democrats.

The media reaction surprised us a bit, though Trump is always good for clicks. The bookies had the Democrats at short odds for both houses for months, and cost-of-living issues off the back of the Iran war have been tearing their way through Trump’s base for a while now.

It’s reminiscent of Obama after the 2014 midterms, who had a headache getting anything done in his last two years, and it’ll be interesting what tactics Trump uses to push through his agenda in the final years of his presidency.

After the results, gold and silver went vertical. Gold jumped 3.4% to US$4,061 on Wednesday and silver 5.1% to US$52, and by Thursday gold was back above US$4,100 for the first time in a fortnight.

Then the hangover kicked in on AI and tech stocks. The Nasdaq fell 5.5% on Thursday night, Nvidia lost 9% and AMD 15%, off the back of hawkish Democrats who have found a new boogeyman in AI and data centres.

Aussie Jon Ossoff (his mum’s from Sydney, so we’ll claim it) is now favourite to be the president in 2028 after a run from the clouds that saw the senator win Georgia by the equivalent of 10 lengths at Flemington. One publication breathlessly anointed him “the next Barack Obama”.

He’s one member of what’s now seen as a deep bench on the Dems side that includes new Texas senator James Talarico, the first Democrat to win a Senate seat there since ’94, alongside usual media contenders AOC, Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg.

We’ll do a breakdown of what each contender would mean for markets, and how that affects the ASX, closer to the primaries.

Oil Price Gives Back a Fifth in Three Days After Trump Calls Off Iran

Brent crude was US$118 a barrel last Friday. By Wednesday night it was US$94, the lowest since early September, and most of the fall came in one session.

Trump told the Financial Times on Tuesday he had no immediate plans to strike Iran, then went on Fox after the midterm rout and said the reason his side lost was the price of petrol. JD Vance put it more plainly on X: the reason we lost is the war.

Traders took it as a president who now wants a deal with Tehran, and sold.

Goldman Sachs picked the same week to lift its December forecast to US$105 a barrel, and Brent fell 8% on the day the note went out.

Energy was the only sector on the ASX that went backwards on Thursday, down 4.8% while everything else ran.

Unleaded averaged about $2.40 a litre across Australia last month, and the ACCC’s Friday report had prices easing a few cents in most cities this week.

We’ve stayed out of oil stocks for the whole of this war because of weeks like this one.

A small-cap oil and gas stock lives and dies on the oil price, and when a fifth of its potential revenue can disappear between Monday and Wednesday on the strength of two interviews, we’d rather protect our investments.

BPM Minerals (ASX: BPM) Doubles on the First Hole at Bonnie & Clyde

The biggest small-cap mover on the ASX this week was a gold explorer up more than 100% after it put its first two holes into a target it has been talking up for a year.

BPM Minerals (ASX: BPM) owns the Forelands gold project about 150km east of Kalgoorlie, and Bonnie & Clyde is a 6km line of gold in the soil on it, in the same rocks that host AngloGold’s eight million ounce Tropicana mine. It had never been drilled before.

On Wednesday the first hole came back with 4 metres at 20.57 grams a tonne from 39 metres and 8 metres at 9.23 grams further down. The other hole got nothing.

BPM closed last Friday at 18c and this Friday at 36.5c.

CEO Oliver Judd says the soils are working and there’s another five or six kilometres of them to drill. Thirty-six more holes are at the lab with results due through to early next year, and a diamond rig and a geophysics survey follow this quarter.

BPM has $5.3 million in the bank and another $3 million from options to pay for it.

BPM has had a big run, and with 27 holes of the program still to drill it may just be getting started.

NextDC (ASX: NXT) Raided at $9.50 After Its $3 Billion Day

A fortnight ago we wrote about NextDC (ASX: NXT) losing $3 billion in a day because the locals in Melbourne’s west didn’t want taller power poles outside their houses, and the shares finished that week at $5.61.

On Wednesday night Goodman Group and the American data centre giant Digital Realty bought up to 9.9% of the company at $9.50 a share, a 45% premium to the day’s close and about $730 million of stock.

Hedge funds who had shorted NextDC on the way down filled most of the book.

The board called it opportunistic and said it has had no takeover offer. It then hired Barrenjoey and UBS, which is what a board does when it expects a takeover. Goodman and Digital Realty say they have no plan to bid, for now.

The shares closed Thursday at $9.85 and Friday at $10.40, both above the raid price. The rest of ASX tech fell on Friday after the Nasdaq rout.

Evion Group (ASX: EVG) has 63 Nevada Holes Not Tested for Fluorspar

The graphite and fluorspar company in our portfolio, Evion Group (ASX: EVG), signed an option on Monday over the hill next to Carp, the old fluorspar mine it picked up in Nevada in May.

The hill is called Blue Nose, and a cement company drilled 63 holes into it in 2009 and 2010 looking for limestone. The crew bagged a sample every metre and a half and the bags, all 5,626 of them, have sat in a Reno storage unit for 16 years. They were never tested for fluorine.

They did test for barium, which turns up next to fluorspar in the Carp pits.

The deal costs US$250,000 and a million shares at closing.

On Tuesday EVG said the magnetic survey it flew over Carp last month is done. The drone covered the whole claim in 655 line kilometres, and the geologists now have the data to pick where the first holes go.

A magnetometer picks up the faults the fluorspar runs along, and managing director David Round calls the data a step change in resolution over anything the company had at Carp before.

At 1.3c EVG is worth about $11 million with $5.7 million in the bank, and the fluorine numbers from the bags, the Carp rock chips and the drill targets all land before Christmas.

The Week Ahead on the ASX

The receivers at David Jones have said the first thing they’ll do is shrink the store count, so the closure list probably lands before Christmas trading starts.

Oil traders spent the week betting on a deal between Trump and Tehran, and this week we find out if they were right.

We’re sitting down with Black Horse Mining this week. The rig has been turning under the old Mt Egerton goldfield in Victoria for a month, and we’ll have an update for you on where the first holes are up to.

Thursday was the best day on the ASX in 18 months and Friday gave a third of it back. A Christmas rally doesn’t look like it’s coming from here, but we’ve been wrong about December before and we’d happily be wrong again.

Till next week.