Welcome to the end of another week. Let’s start with what HotCopper users have been watching.
Webjet’s recently-spun-out B2B travel arm, WEB Travel Group, rattled feathers this week when it came out of the blue and started blaming Deloitte for a delay to its 1H25 reporting.
But that explanation only came with a voluntary suspension days after it originally issued a trading halt from which mentions of Deloitte were absent.
The trading halt, in turn, said that its financial projections needed to be fiddled with, but that it wouldn’t change 2025 outlook. And yet, the company issued a halt, followed by a voluntary suspension.
Next week should be enlightening.
Elsewhere, Sayona Mining dominated views this week as over 60,000 people came to look at the company’s news it’s merging with North Carolina’s Piedmont Lithium.
That deal caused much hubbub, but in lithium land, it’s just another M&A story in a world of depressed battery metal prices. It speaks to investor interest in lithium stocks, but also, the ongoing game of vulture-and-prey hitting lithium miners the world over.
Third in line was Pancontinental Energy, a hotly watched smallcap energy stock of foremost interest due to it standing in line for a potential transformational deal with Woodside.
Pancontinental has an offshore oil and gas licence in the waters of Namibia overlying the Orange Basin, and in March of 2023, Woodside acquired an option to take a 56% stake in the licence.
Should it be willing to do so, that would obviously be a good windfall for Pancontinental – thus investor interest. But after issuing a trading halt early week regarding an update to do with the licence, which caused obvious excitement, on Friday we learned the update was a non-event – Woodside still have until March next year to make a decision.
Here’s something I haven’t talked about in a while – Brent Crude futures.
This week we’ve seen the international oil benchmark rise above US$74/bbl on the back of a scary letter signed by Putin earlier this week.
What letter? Well, it’s more of a declaration. Or, it’s just a letter.
Basically, Biden has given Ukraine permission to use US (and UK-made) long range missiles against Russia. Putin has long said this would be enough to start a nuclear war if he felt like it.
Well, Ukraine has started bombing Russia with US and UK missiles, and, Putin hasn’t dropped the bomb.
What he did drop was a signature on a revised document floating around inside the Kremlin that basically lines out what Russia will and won’t consider enough of a provocation to press the big red button once and for all.
Once again: it’s kind of just a scary-sounding letter, perhaps like an envelope from a debt collector that goes straight into the trash. (Hopefully not, but, you get what I mean.)
What struck me as interesting was that when news of Putin’s letter hit world headlines, Brent ticked up a little bit – but not much, suggesting the market at large doesn’t really see a nuclear war happening.
Russia’s firing of a blank long-range ballistic missile into Ukrainian territory was enough to push prices to US$74/bbl, however – but we’re still a long way off US$80/bbl.
Of course, no modern weekly finance wrap could go without mentioning Trump – but it was an appointment he made to his impending Administration that rattled the Australian market in an interesting way.
Shares in blood plasma giant CSL Limited fell this week after Trump appointed Robert F Kennedy to be his health czar – better known as RFK, the Kennedy-lineage-Democrat-cum-conspiracy-theorist turned Republican.
RFK’s appointment also tanked global pharmaceutical shares this week; particularly those that make vaccines.
RFK is probably one of the stranger characters to come from an already absurd America. The man is well known for having had a worm in his brain – definitely unrelated to his propensity for raw food fads – and also once apparently dumped a dead bear in a NYC park. For, you know, a laugh.
Sure, why not.
The man doesn’t believe in vaccines; pesticides; or fluoride in the water. Presumably, if he gets his way, tinned fruit companies could become a lucrative investment down the line, seeing as all of America will be on softs in five years time without fluoride.
CSL, which has a heavy presence in America, suffered in turn.
A lot else happened this week, but this wrap’s long enough.
Take a look at what else I spotted this week below, and, see you next Friday.
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