Nothing sours a voter quite like soaring living costs and a war nobody asked for. Donald Trump found that out the hard way this week as Democrats swept the midterms, taking both the House and the Senate. Even his own Vice President, JD Vance, pinned the loss on the war in Iran, which has dragged on since February and sent petrol and power bills through the roof.
Oil got the memo first, with Brent sliding almost 9 per cent in a day to just under US$95 a barrel as traders bet a Democrat-run Congress will push for peace in the Middle East. Wall Street, meanwhile, partied for about 24 hours before Thursday came and the penny dropped.
The extremely AI-heavy Wall Street has been running on the AI trade almost single-handedly for the last four months.
AI needs data centres, data centres need electricity and voters furious about their electricity bills have just handed power to a party swearing to slow the whole build-out.
The Nasdaq fell a massive 5.5 per cent Thursday, with the S&P 500 shedding 4.4 per cent, its worst day since Trump’s tariff tantrum back in April.
That left the Nasdaq in correction territory and US$2 trillion lighter. Copper, the metal that wires all those data centres together, copped it too.
Then came the so-called Magnificent Seven, which could no longer hold the NASDAQ on its shoulders, shedding more than US$1 trillion in market value in a single session. Nvidia, the poster child of the AI boom, sank more than 9 per cent, with Tesla diving almost 11 per cent.
Back home, the cost of living wasn’t getting any government reprieve at all. Same government, same rate outcome. The RBA turned up on Melbourne Cup Day and said its tired old ‘please stop spending’ line, but this time, not to the consumer.
With the rate rise Aussies feared arriving, cash rates were lifted to 4.85 per cent, hitting an 18-year high.
Governor Michele Bullock was blunt that oil isn’t the reason. The problem is domestic demand outrunning supply – cough government spending. Awkward, then, for Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers and Albo, who spent the week pointing the finger at oil.
Fresh off 18 holes at the newly $6 million revamped Marrickville Golf Club, where, after previously denying he ever played golf, Albo defended his grant - worth 76 times all Australian golf grants combined this year - as a sewage fix, before admitting he “was not correct”. Hard to see how crude prices did that. Now the PM has suddenly discovered the need for “hard decisions” on government spending. Apparently, it only took a trillion dollars in debt for the penny to drop. After a budget that landed a body blow to industry and small business, Dr Jim’s much-promised cost-of-living relief is looking increasingly like another round of higher mortgage repayments.
And just when you thought tech couldn’t look more toppy, Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, lost a record US$6.3 billion to the North Koreans last Friday, following a fake job interview and a tampered AI tool to one of its employees.
It seems Rocket Man’s boys have been having a very good week.
Unconfirmed hackers have also been cooking the fridges and freezers of European supermarkets, with one Swedish store hitting 50 degrees Celsius on overdrive. UK cyber officials say the French units were plugged straight into the internet with default passwords. Which raises the question: why is a fridge connected to hackable infrastructure at all? Apparently so head office can check the temperature from afar, which is handy right up until someone else wants to turn the dial.
Amid all the week’s red, there was one shiny yellow lining. Gold jumped more than three per cent on the midterms, its biggest one-day gain since August, to reclaim US$4,000 an ounce and sit roughly six per cent higher on the week.
Our Runner of the Week is back on old faithful too, with a geologist’s favourite words, “greenfields discovery”, coming out of WA’s Eastern Goldfields. There’s something reassuring about a hole in the ground: nobody has found a way to hack one yet. “First-ever drilling on massive target, hitting high-grade gold”. Nothing gets the imagination firing quite like that headline.
BPM MINERALS LTD (ASX: BPM)
Up 117% (18c – 39c)
Bulls N’ Bears Runner of the Week is BPM Minerals, which delivered the sort of maiden drilling result that gets rock lickers’ hearts racing. The junior goldie made a cracking high-grade greenfields gold discovery in the first two holes ever drilled at its Bonnie & Clyde Prospect, part of the Forelands gold project in WA’s Eastern Goldfields.
The hits came from a sprawling six-kilometre-long gold-in-soil anomaly. After punching through 15 to 30 metres of paleochannel sands, the company says the bit intersected the richly mineralised metamorphic basement, with one hole returning two standout intervals of 4m at a whopping 20.57 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 39m, including a bonanza one metre at 73.33g/t, followed by 8m at 9.23g/t from 71m.
The second hole failed to return anything significant, but one maiden hole like that is plenty for the market to stew about.
The company says its gold sits in an oxidised, quartz-veined shear zone along the Yellow Dam shear, where a major structural flexure appears to have created a prime trap for mineralisation.
Management says the host rocks are the same broad geological setting as AngloGold Ashanti’s multi-million-ounce Tropicana deposit, giving the discovery some serious regional credentials. Better still, the shallow mineralisation remains open along strike and down-dip, two of the sweetest words in the exploration business.
For a company built around the broader Forelands project, the timing was perfect, with gold surging back above US$4000 an ounce.
BPM says it has completed 38 reverse circulation (RC) holes for 5272m at Bonnie & Clyde, with samples from dozens of them due through the December quarter and into early 2027.
A further 27 holes for 4700m remain in the 65-hole program, with diamond drilling now lined up to define the system’s direction beneath the cover. Drilling continues across four priority gold-in-soil anomalies, with BPM holding a handy $5.3 million in the bank to keep the rods turning.
For a greenfields discovery made in just its first two holes, Bonnie & Clyde has certainly lived up to its name, with potentially plenty more mischief lurking beneath the sands.
NEXTDC LIMITED (ASX: NXT)
Up 77% ($5.87 – $10.38)
Snagging silver on the week was NEXTDC, proving one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Barely two weeks after the data centre giant lost roughly $3 billion in valuation in a day as delays forced it to put new developments on ice, the Americans came shopping.
Australia’s largest data centre operator now has potential suitors following an aftermarket share raid by the Ackland Investments No.1 Trust, a vehicle owned in equal shares by ASX-listed Goodman Group and US-listed Digital Realty Trust.
The pair went after up to 9.9 per cent of the register at A$9.50 a share, a 45 per cent premium to the previous close, with NEXTDC’s board calling it an “opportunistic” attack.
While the buyers say they have no current plans for a full takeover bid, they have reserved the right to make one. A strategic block like that tends to put a company in play and with the annual general meeting around the corner, the timing makes interesting reading.
It’s a prize worth chasing. NEXTDC is recognised for the design, construction and operation of Australia’s only network of top-tier data centre facilities and is one of the first data centre operators in the Southern Hemisphere. Morgan Stanley reckons the A$9.50 price is below what it would cost to replace the capacity - very opportunistic indeed.
With much of America’s data centre build-out potentially going on pause after the midterms, perhaps a data centre hopeful abroad is the play. There’s no takeover yet, but shareholders, now looking at a stock north of $10, will be waiting eagerly. The question is whether the Yanks will pay up.
SCIDEV LTD (ASX: SDV)
Up 48% (14.5c – 21.5c)
Rounding out the podium on another quiet and red week for the market was environmental solutions dynamo SciDev, after it was awarded a deal to supply bulk completion chemistry to one of North America’s leading oil and gas producers in the Delaware Basin, a sub-basin of the Permian.
Revenue is estimated at up to A$20 million over 12 months, with A$14 million of that landing in FY27, based on the customer’s current expected volumes. The catch is that there’s no minimum purchase commitment, so actual revenue and timing depend on customer orders. It’s a ceiling, not a guarantee, but a handy ceiling nonetheless.
The deal extends SciDev’s long-standing relationship with a key energy services customer, providing a platform to expand its products and services over time. The company’s field chemistry team will work alongside the customer’s crew, with dedicated on-site technical support in the mighty Texas basin.
For a company known for water-treatment chemistry, it’s a push further into the oil patch. It builds on three separate contracts secured last month with a total committed value of almost A$8 million. From supplying water-treatment chemistries used in mineral processing, tailings management and industrial wastewater treatment, the order book has morphed to customers across mining, utilities and infrastructure. Those contracts carry extension options worth up to A$4 million, with around A$5 million of revenue expected in FY27. And if the oil and gas game delivers, as it so often can, the rewards could be substantially more.
With oil still hovering near US$98 a barrel, the Permian isn’t short of reasons to keep pumping and SciDev is hopeful it can sell the chemistry that helps it do so.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
