A welcome sea of green has flooded its way back to the meandering ASX this week, just in time for the corporate types of the resources sector to descend upon the annual Diggers and Dealers forum in Kalgoorlie.
Gold was well and truly back on the menu at Diggers following US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's claim Washington was just days away from striking a deal with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.....yes, again! The result was a rally for markets as the mere suggestion was enough to send gold soaring 5 per cent and oil tumbling nearly 10 per cent to below US$80 a barrel on the prospect of middle east oil flowing freely again.
Even North Korea's own little rocket man couldn't derail the rally. Apparently feeling left out, Kim Jong Un lobbed a couple of his own rockets into the Sea of Japan, seemingly reminding Japan he wasn't thrilled about their renewed defence ambitions. bottle
The ASX joined the party too, surging an impressive 3 per cent to fresh record highs after spending the better part of the past year grinding sideways, as the AI-fuelled globally rally largely bypassed the local market.
The AI trade has finally shown cracks this last month and it was always going to happen. After years of chipmakers and hyperscalers doing the heavy lifting, investors are starting to bank profits and rediscover Australia's beaten-up resource stocks.
The street talk around Kalgoorlie was palpable. And a raft of Aussie gold’s mid-tier got on their bike in a serious way.
One of the better quotes in conference history came from Benz’s chief executive officer Mark Lynch-Staunton, after he said: “Last year I stood on this stage and said that Glenburgh deposit could be the next Hemi ($5 billion gold takeover). I was wrong, because a Hemi discovery is most likely just the beginning for us. It's only a starting point. We believe Glenburgh has the potential to become one of Australia's legendary gold discoveries. A vast new gold district.”
Despite the goldies dominating the headlines this week, the Bulls N Bears Runners list is surprisingly devoid of the shiny yellow metal. Instead, it's a healthy mix of healthcare, telecommunications and copper juniors in what was a ripping week for the ASX - if not quite as much for the smaller end of town, which continues to struggle a little for attention.
WELLNEX LIFE LTD (ASX: WNX)
Up 168% (5.6c – 15c)
The Bulls N' Bears Runner of the Week is Melbourne-based consumer healthcare and wellness producer Wellnex Life, after it agreed to sell its Pain Away medicinal cream brand for up to $21.3 million in cash, a transformative deal that sent its share price soaring.
The company says the deal will see it become debt-free and undertake a reset, with Wellnex to receive $19.8 million upfront from Mentholatum Australasia, a subsidiary of Tokyo-listed Rohto Pharmaceutical and an additional $1.5 million through an earn-out linked to post-completion earnings targets.
Wellnex plans to use the proceeds to fully repay approximately $10.2 million of secured and unsecured borrowings, wiping its slate clean, as the deal lifts a sizeable financial weight from its shoulders and leaves it with something many small caps can only dream about — a healthy cash balance and a clean slate.
Wellnex says the proceeds will fund working capital, expand its retained soft-gel analgesics and capital-light contract manufacturing business, while also giving it the firepower to chase acquisitions of established consumer brands or even return some capital to long-suffering shareholders, a most unusual occurrence.
By cashing out Pain Away — a business that generated $13.38 million in revenue and $4.36 million in EBITDA last year — Wellnex has brought forward its cashflow.
Management will no doubt be relieved the cheques are in the mail, with shareholders now waiting to see whether the war chest funds the next growth story... or finds its way directly into their pockets.
PENTANET LIMITED (ASX: 5GG)
Up 100% (1.5c – 3c)
Stealing second on the podium this week was digital infrastructure company Pentanet, after the long-embattled telecommunications player announced its financial highlights for FY26, having impressively turned around its profits and gained serious momentum in its high-value gaming division.
The company delivered a material improvement in its operating and financials, with group revenues climbing 8 per cent on the previous corresponding period to $24.4 million.
Group EBITDA jumped by a remarkable 74 per cent to $2.4 million. The results extend a trajectory that has seen Perth based Pentanet swing from an EBITDA loss of $1.3 million just two years ago in FY24, to two profitable successive years.
The engine room for the growth is its CloudGG premium cloud-gaming service, which is based on NVIDIA GPUs. Pentanet owns one of Australia's largest clusters of high-powered NVIDIA gaming GPUs, allowing customers to access premium gaming performance through a subscription, without needing to purchase and continually upgrade expensive gaming hardware.
As the cost of gaming hardware has climbed over the past year, the value proposition for cloud-gaming has only improved.
The platform reached 840,000 registered users in FY26 and added 31,773 gross new paying subscribers during the year.
Critically, the gaming division’s annual revenue per user (ARPU) jumped a whopping 36 per cent to $24 per month. This was driven by a pronounced shift in the subscriber mix towards the higher-margin tier, showing customers are willing to pay up for premium quality.
GWARDAR RESOURCES LTD (ASX: GRS)
Up 68% (41c – 69c)
Taking out our final podium spot this week is ASX debutant Gwardar Resources, a fresh face that hit the boards following a $6 million raising at 20 cents per share through Ora Capital, with its share price doubling on debut before continuing on a serious run come Monday.
The share price was up as much as 245 per cent from its issue price to hit 69 cents per share on Tuesday.
Gwardar holds two core assets in the Kurnalpi project and the Doolgunna project, both located in Western Australia.
The Kurnalpi project is located within the Eastern Goldfields of the Yilgarn Craton, with many major gold and nickel mines within 50km and other deposits located just 10km to 25km from the tenements.
Meanwhile, the Doolgunna copper-gold project lies in the Murchison region of WA, just a stone’s throw from the state’s most prolific copper-gold discovery at DeGrussa.
The project boasts 372 square kilometres of prime Bryah Basin tenure, with Gwardar no doubt hopeful that one of its Halloween West, Wizard and Malachite Patch prospects can turn into Australia’s next ultra-grade, Degrussa-style discovery.
The company listed with a tiny enterprise valuation of just $600,000 with $6 million in the bank and it was no wonder the share price skyrocketed with one of the more tightly held share registers in recent IPO history.
Adding a little spice to the story, the company has since released several director interest notices, showing consistent on-market buying from its directors Nadar El Sayed, Alex Rovira and Shaun Hardcastle over the first couple of days.
CODRUS MINERALS LTD (ASX: CDR)
Up 63% (2.7c – 4.4c)
Rounding out the Bulls N Bears Runners this week is copper-moly hopeful Codrus Minerals, after it unveiled its acquisition of two high-potential copper and molybdenum exploration assets in the tier-1 addresses of Australia and Peru.
The company ran on the back of its latest land grab through private company EdgeMet, which featured its Copperhole Creek project in Queensland and the right to earn up to 99.8 per cent of the Tiquihua project in Peru's Apurimac region.
Copperhole Creek is located about 300km from Townsville and Cairns and is considered highly prospective for copper, silver and tin, with some serious historical drilling results previously tabled from the project. They include a stellar 12-metre hit running 3.27 per cent copper, 0.66 per cent zinc, 51 grams per tonne (g/t) silver and 0.26 per cent tin from just 36m.
Codrus says the project contains multiple prospects with historical exploration results that are crying out for follow-up and modern exploration techniques, including its Avalon prospect which previously returned a hefty 10.9 per cent copper from historic dump sampling.
Meanwhile, the 100-hectare Tiquihua project in Peru is prospective for high-quality molybdenum and copper porphyry prospectivity in a country that has quickly emerged as the next major force in South America's dominant copper production profile.
The real kicker in the deal might be a licence that EdgeMet holds from Rice University for early-stage joule heating technology through its subsidiary Syntenix. This is the same rapid, high-temperature processing technology that electrically heats materials and sent fellow ASX-lister Metallium limited to a market cap of nearly a billion dollars late last year.
The acquisition came with a $2.5 million capital raise at 2.5 cents, as the market lapped up the prospects of the in-favour red metal and a potentially disruptive processing technology.
Falling just short of Runners glory this week but still getting lots of love from Diggers and Dealers delegates was a flurry of mid-tier goldies. The 4.5-million-ounce WA developer Brightstar Resources – also headed by Alex Rovira - surged nearly 40 per cent this week, as the diggers and dealers woke up to its impending 75,000 ounce per year production target. The Tim Goyder-chaired Minerals 260 scooped up the conference’s Emerging Company Award, up a further 37 per cent this week after soaring more than 400 per cent on its definition of more than 6Moz of gold at its Bullabulling project near Coolgardie.
Other notable mentions go to St Barbara and Benz Mining, up 31 per cent and 25 per cent respectively, with the latter up over 80 per cent in under a month after revealing an almighty 12Moz exploration target for its Glenburgh deposit in WA’s Mid-West - nice work if you can get it.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Andrew Todd
