Gold War Begins as Uranium Rips

We finally hit publish on the broker piece this week, and there may have been a quiet beer poured when it went out. Chasing picks out of more than a dozen brokers, then researching and writing up 20-odd stocks, took longer than we’d like to admit.

Worth it though. We think it’s one of the better pieces we’ve put out this year. If you haven’t read it yet, start there:

Over a Dozen Brokers Told Us Their Top Picks

The rest of the week didn’t slow down for us either. KTK managed two announcements in four days, and Fortuna’s rigs started chasing the Mkanda rutile deeper than any hole on the project has gone before.

Up at the big end of town, Genesis lobbed $5.6 billion at a gold miner that had already promised itself to someone else. Nothing says bull market quite like a bidding war.

What caught our eye this week:

• The broker piece: over a dozen brokers, 20-plus small-cap picks for the second half
• KTK signs a satellite partner and files for its US export route, all in one week
• Fortuna kicks off aircore drilling at Mkanda
• Genesis gatecrashes the Vault-Regis merger with a $5.6 billion bid
• The banks keep lifting their gold forecasts
• Australia opens uranium exports to India, and the sector rips
• A biotech doubles as it trades a drug for a clean balance sheet

Broker Picks: 20-Plus ASX Small-Caps for 2026

Yes, we mentioned it 30 seconds ago. We’re mentioning it again, because it took weeks of chasing busy people who’d rather be trading, and we want it read.

Copper came up more than anything else, with four separate brokers backing it. Smelters are so short of ore that some are now paying miners for it, and there hasn’t been a major discovery in a decade.

Gold and critical metals weren’t far behind, and defence and drones had their backers too.

The deepest answer we got was on drones. That broker’s view is the executive orders and budget lines haven’t turned into contracts yet, and once the battlefield data from Ukraine sorts the platforms that worked from the ones that fell over, the money will flow to the proven makers.

A few brokers wandered into biotech, where big pharma’s patent cliff has the giants out shopping for pipelines. And the most left-field pick of the lot arrived after deadline, from a broker apologising for being late. We’ll let you judge whether it was worth the wait.

Over 20 small-caps all up, with the reasoning behind every one: Over a Dozen Brokers Told Us Their Top Picks

KTK Adds a SATCOM Partner and Files for US Exports

There were two announcements out of KTEK Aerosystems (ASX: KTK) this week, and for a company that’s been listed all of eight weeks, they’re running at a fair clip.

Monday’s was the satellite deal. Over-Sat is an Israeli company that builds SATCOM terminals, which is the kit that keeps a vessel or a drone connected to a satellite while it’s moving. Its gear is already out at sea on an unmanned Elbit vessel used by multiple navies.

Over-Sat and KTK have signed a Letter of Intent that puts KTK first in line to manufacture parts for those terminals. It’s the same work KTK already does for drone makers like Elbit and UVision, applied to satellite terminals, and it gives the company a fifth product line to sell.

Because it’s an LOI, the work gets agreed order by order, and revenue shows up as those orders are executed.

Thursday’s news was the export licence. KTK has applied to the Dutch regulator for permission to ship parts from its Netherlands facility to the Los Angeles site it secured last month. With both in place, KTK can build parts in Europe, then assemble and deliver them to American customers from an American address, which is how American defence buyers prefer to be supplied.

KTEK’s prospectus set aside two years and around $3 million to get the US expansion moving. The LA facility arrived in month one and the licence application in month three.

The Dutch regulator’s standard processing window is eight weeks, so we could know the answer on the licence before the first quarterly is even due.

We love a management team that treats its prospectus like a to-do list, and this one is running well ahead of its own schedule.

We added KTK to the portfolio at 20 cents and it’s now sitting just over 30, up 50% since listing.

Fortuna Metals Starts Aircore Drilling at Mkanda

Our portfolio company Fortuna Metals (ASX: FUN) has started a 5,000 metre aircore drilling program at its Mkanda rutile project in Malawi.

Every hole at Mkanda so far has been drilled by hand auger, which is what it sounds like, a crew physically twisting a drill into soft ground. It’s the right tool when you’re covering a lot of ground on a small budget, and it’s what found the high-grade rutile sitting near surface across the project.

The rutile sits in saprolite, soft weathered rock that keeps going well past the reach of a hand auger, and an aircore rig can chase it down to around 20 metres. FUN is about to find out whether the grades near surface hold once the holes get deeper.

Sovereign Metals answered that same question at Kasiya, 20 kilometres away on the same geology. Its resource sat at roughly 644 million tonnes until aircore drilling tested deeper, and it came out the other side at 1,800 million tonnes.

FUN’s maiden inferred resource is due within weeks, built entirely off the hand auger data already in hand. The aircore results won’t make it into that first number, but they’ll feed the updates that follow, and that’s where the depth gets added if it’s there.

Rutile is also one of the purest natural sources of titanium, which is the metal robotics and humanoid makers reach for when they want strength without weight. A bigger Mkanda gives FUN a mining story and a tech story to tell off the same deposit.

Genesis Bids $5.6 Billion for Vault Minerals

On Monday, Genesis Minerals (ASX: GMD) walked in uninvited with a $5.6 billion offer for Vault Minerals, cash and shares combined.

Vault had already agreed to an all-share merger with Regis Resources back in May. Genesis looked at that deal and simply outbid it.

Vault’s the gold producer formed in 2024 when Red 5 and Silver Lake Resources merged. Its crown jewel is King of the Hills, a long-life operation in WA’s Leonora region currently going through a mill expansion.

Genesis’s Tower Hill project sits just 35 kilometres up the road from that mill.

If Genesis owns both, it can bin the processing plant it was planning to build for Tower Hill and truck the ore to Vault’s instead, keeping roughly $500 million of capex in its pocket.

Genesis is offering 0.7629 of its shares plus 47.5 cents cash for every Vault share, which works out to $5.274 a share.

That’s 15.7% above where Vault was trading before any takeover talk hit the price, and 14.5% better than the Regis deal, which was all scrip with no cash sweetener.

Vault’s board wasted no time calling it a superior proposal, triggering Regis’ matching right under the scheme deed it signed in May. That window runs until Monday.

Regis can now match the terms, walk away, or come back with something better.

Genesis is paying a premium, and paying a chunk of it in cash, for gold production with the metal already sitting at US$4,100.

A board doesn’t spend $5.6 billion buying ounces at record prices unless it believes those prices are staying.

Bank of America sees $5,000 once the Fed’s done tightening. JPMorgan’s at $4,545. Goldman’s calling $4,900 by December. ANZ pushed its $6,000 call out to mid-2027 but hasn’t dropped it.

We’ve been bullish gold for a while now, and it’s nice to have a $5.6 billion second opinion.

Australia Opens Uranium Exports to India

Indian PM Narendra Modi rolled into Melbourne this week, hightailing it to Marvel Stadium and pulling a Thursday night crowd that would make some AFL teams jealous.

It came alongside Australia and India signing an arrangement that opens up long-term Australian uranium exports to India.

The two countries have technically had a nuclear cooperation agreement since 2015, but barely any uranium ever moved under it, mostly over fears the material could find its way into weapons (India still hasn’t signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Thursday’s signing clears that logjam, with exports locked to exclusively peaceful purposes.

India is the world’s most populous country and it wants to lift its nuclear capacity from around 8 gigawatts today to 100 by 2047, with 11 new reactors already under construction. That’s a twelve-fold build-out, and it needs fuel India doesn’t dig up at home.

Modi framed the deal as fresh momentum for India’s clean energy objectives.

Once the world’s most populous nation calls nuclear clean energy, it gets much easier for the next country to say the same, and every country that does is another buyer lining up for uranium.

We expect uranium demand to keep rising from here, and Australia holds the world’s largest known deposits of it.

(For now, Australia will happily sell you uranium, sail it around in submarines under AUKUS, and still won’t let anyone use it to power a home in Australia. Make of that what you will.)

Friday was a sea of green for ASX uranium names, with Deep Yellow (ASX: DYL), Bannerman (ASX: BMN), Boss Energy (ASX: BOE) and Paladin (ASX: PDN) adding around $500 million in value between them.

No volumes, pricing or timing have been disclosed yet, so the commercial deals still have to be written. But the door India has been pushing on for a decade is now open, and money that hasn’t thought about uranium in years is thinking about it again.

We’ll have a lot more on uranium in the coming weeks.

Argent BioPharma Doubles on CannEpil Licensing Deal

Argent BioPharma (ASX: RGT) had the run of the week, up 106% from a 3.5c open on Monday to a 7.2c close on Friday.

The trigger was a licensing deal for CannEpil, its lead drug for drug-resistant epilepsy. Roughly a third of epilepsy patients don’t respond to existing medication, so there’s a big patient group out there waiting for something that works.

Argent has licensed the global rights to US-listed Splash Beverage Group (yes, an American beverage company mid-pivot into cannabinoid medicine, we checked twice). And the US$5.5 million upfront payment never touches a bank account. It gets paid by wiping out US$5.5 million of Argent’s secured convertible debt to Mercer.

So Argent comes out the other side with its main liability gone, and it still owns the drug and the IP, still does the manufacturing for Splash, and clips a 15% royalty on future sales.

Anyone who’s held a micro-cap with convertible debt hanging over it knows how heavy that overhang gets. Argent just removed its one without issuing a single new share, and the register spent the week repricing accordingly.

The deal still needs board and shareholder approvals and the Mercer debt exchange to complete, after which Splash takes CannEpil into the US clinical and FDA process.

The Week Ahead

The small-cap scene has been quiet lately, between June tax-loss selling and half the market taking the first week of July off. We reckon that’s about to change.

Conference season is only weeks away. Noosa Mining kicks things off, then Diggers and Dealers, and small-caps love timing their news for the big events, when the whole industry is in one room and paying attention. Expect the announcements to start flowing.

Biotech is picking up pace too, with deals starting to land. The US has been running a biotech bull for a while now, and we expect it to wash up on the ASX through the second half of 2026.

Closer to home, we’ve got a big month lined up, with new additions to the portfolio on the way. As always, subscribe to be the first to know.

Till next week.