Sunday Edition: 5th July

Disclosure: S3 Consortium Pty Ltd and its associated entities may hold direct or indirect interests in securities referred to in this publication and may receive fees or other forms of consideration from entities mentioned. These interests and arrangements may create a potential conflict of interest in the preparation of this material.

The information contained in this communication is provided for general information purposes only and may relate to speculative investments. It does not constitute financial product advice, and has been prepared without taking into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. You should consider obtaining independent financial advice before making any investment decision.

Any forward-looking statements are uncertain and not a guaranteed outcome.

Below you can find short overviews of all the content we wrote last week, plus links to each full note.

Further down, there’s also some links to other interesting stuff we came across on our travels around the internet.

Yesterday’s Saturday note: Down at half time, small caps come out firing in July

Quick Takes: PFE, VKA (x2), WCE, IIQ, OD6, WAU, CND, RML, EIQ (x2), SGQ, BKB, AW1, ILA

Deep Dives: ION, PKP, AVM, PUR

Other content: IVR, SGQ, MTH, AW1, BKB, ION, PNN, LSR, PR1

ION is holding a webinar on Tuesday July 7th at 10:30am AEST / 8:30am AWST with CEO Lewis Utting and recently appointed VP North America, Kevin Hobbie, here is the presentation released during the week.

You can register for the ION webinar here

PFE sampled 19.2% antimony and 63.8g/t silver in rockchips from its US project.

PFE's project contains over 18 historic antimony and silver mines that produced in the late 1800s and into the 1900s.

Despite that history, the project has had no modern exploration - no geophysics and no drilling.

Now PFE has sampled the old workings, and recovered high grade rockchip samples.

PFE is aiming to start drilling over the coming weeks (July/August).

(source)

VKA sold its WA gold project for up to $5M to First Au Ltd (ASX:FAU) and is now fully focused on its US tungsten project.

The $5M transaction is for $1.2M cash upfront with the rest in FAU shares - $1.0M on completion and up to $2.8M on FAU achieving certain milestones.

VKA has cleaned up its balance sheet with this move, including a nice little cash hit just before it kicks off a drilling campaign on its tungsten project in the US.

(source)

Watch VKA Managing Director Julian Woodcock talk through the deal in this video.

Also, VKA announced sampling results from its US tungsten project’s tailings dam and confirmed that drilling would start in “mid-July”. Not long to go now then.

WCE kicked off geophysical surveys across its WA silver project.

In April, WCE defined a maiden JORC resource estimate for its project - 2.8M ounce silver resource with an average grade of 617g/t silver.

Now WCE is aiming to find repeats of that resource along the geological structures in the region - the first regional exploration program on this project in decades.

Below is a summary image with the current drilling near/at the mine, the fault extending north and south, plus some of the targets that WCE is eyeing off:

(source)

The new surveys will be run ~2km north and south of the old mine - hopefully we see a few big interesting targets defined with this program.

IIQ improved its ovarian cancer diagnostic test results - but owing to significant variability in external sample quality, the study cohort was deemed unsuitable for performance evaluation.

It was a rough week for IIQ share holders with the share price halving since the company’s trading halt was lifted and this news was released.

Here are our two key takeaways from the announcement.

The positive: IIQ IMPROVED the results for its diagnostic test (based on the original 500 sample dataset) to:

• 92.3% sensitivity for stage I/II ovarian cancer - stage I/II is usually the hardest stage to diagnose - when patients usually have no symptoms. IIQ’s test picks up 92.3% of cancers.
  
• 92.5% sensitivity across all stages (1 to 4).
  
• 98% specificity - meaning only about 2% of women would get a false alarm (a "false positive") using IIQ’s test based on these early data results.

Very strong data on face value - but unfortunately IIQ’s study cohort has been “deemed unsuitable for performance evaluation” due to “significant variability in external sample quality”.

The market hates uncertainty and setbacks... So IIQ’s share price was probably always going to be punished in the market on this news.

For us, it's a very unfortunate setback/delay and the share price collapse does sting - BUT it’s definitely not game over for IIQ and its ovarian cancer test.

IIQ is committed to the commercialisation of its test, with international patent filings delivered last Monday.

(source)

OD6 defined new high-priority drill targets at its Nevada fluorspar project.

Before today, we already knew about three high-grade fluorspar systems on OD6’s project - none of which have ever been drilled in modern times.

The new targets were identified from ~320 soil samples outside the known historic workings.

We have previously written about the “iceberg” theory for OD6 - the possibility a bunch of small outcropping workings are actually connected at depth by one larger ‘iceberg-esque’ structure.

Now OD6 has two targets ~1.5km apart that COULD possibly be part of the same mineralised system.

(source)

WAU started drilling next to $1.6BN MI6's 4.5Moz gold resource - one of Australia's largest near-term gold developments.

WAU is the only company of significance around $1.6BN capped Minerals 260’s deposit, and it sits on the same structures that host the 4.5M ounce deposit.

WAU’s current ~3,680m aircore drill program will look for northern extension to MI6’s defined resources AND follow up previous high grade hits (2m @ 18.1g/t gold).

Any indication WAU’s ground could also host something of material significance will surely bring with it corporate interest... (yep, speculation on our part...)

WAU also had an update on its other 518koz WA gold project confirming assays for that project could be due any day now.

(source)

CND appointed former $1BN Karoon Energy CEO - Dr Julian Fowles as Non-Executive Director.

Dr Fowles served as CEO and MD of Karoon Energy (ASX: KAR) from 2020 until 2025, where he led the company’s transformation into a diversified international oil and gas producer with operations in Brazil and the USA.

CND’s block has an existing 1 Tcf (contingent resource) natural gas discovery and over 3.3 billion barrels of prospective oil resources.

Right now, CND is waiting for the outcome of its application for a formal exploration license.

Dr Fowles has significant experience in South America, and has joined CND at a crucial stage of its development...

(source)

RML has completed 16 holes at its US gold-tungsten project, with assays pending.

RML has drilled 16 holes (4,470m) into a planned 13,700m campaign on the project.

Current drilling is following up last year's campaign which hit gold in all 14 holes and defined a mineralised structure over ~2km of strike.

This included a 253m at 1.5g/t gold discovery hole.

The main thing we want to see with this current round of drilling is whether or not the mineralisation extends at depth.

The image below shows what we are looking for - we want to see if the blue sections contain gold mineralisation (extending the orange sections where RML announced a discovery).

(source)

EIQ raised $110M at $1.45/share.

The raise was closed just 6 days after signing a proposed $20M funding deal with $22BN medical imaging giant, Pro Medicus.

EIQ will now have the cash AND partnerships in place to go hard on its sales/distribution strategy for its Heart Failure tech (IF the FDA clears the tech).

FDA clearance for its Heart Failure tech could come any day now.

(source)

Also, EIQ secured exclusive access to ~500k-1M heart scans to develop its AI tech.

Before that announcement, EIQ was developing its tech under an exclusive relationship with the National Echo Database Australia (NEDA), one of the world's largest longitudinal cardiovascular outcomes datasets covering ~1.2M patients. (source)(source)

Given EIQ’s entire business is built around AI tech that reads echocardiograms (ultrasound heart scans) working alongside a cardiologist, having access to data to train the AI models is a big part of the moat for EIQ’s tech.

The AI is only as good as the data it is trained on and the more data that runs through EIQ’s model - the smarter it should get.

After this week’s deal EIQ’s data moat just got bigger.

(source)

SGQ hit its largest ever intercept from its development stage rare earths-niobium project in Brazil.

SGQ hit a massive 199.5m intercept with grades of 2.86% total rare earths oxide (TREO) and 0.44% niobium, starting from the surface.

That is SGQ’s largest intercept to date and,the hole ended in mineralisation with the last 1m hitting 4.8% TREO.

(so SGQ’s largest ever intercept could have actually been a lot bigger too)

These results will feed directly into another resource upgrade for SGQ (the second in 12 months) targeted for later this year. If we see a few more hits like the one from this week, the resource upgrade could be a big one.

See SGQ Executive Chairman John Prineas’ take on the intercept here.

(source)

BKB hit extensions to US silver resource with grades up to 1,333g/t silver.

BKB’s project already has a 17.6M ounce foreign resource estimate, so we expect to see strong results from drilling (to convert the foreign resource to JORC compliance).

The interesting takeaway for us is that BKB’s new assay results are coming back higher than similarly positioned holes drilled in the past.

AND BKB is hitting silver outside of the current resource footprint.

(hopefully that means when the resource is converted into JORC compliance it not only grows BUT also maintains its high grade)

(source)

AW1 extended the USA's biggest indium project with intercepts across ~1.6km.

AW1 had two key points in its announcement this week:

1. Assays from hole #2 of the current drill program - A 350m extension south-east of the existing deposit, with peak values of up to 8.6% zinc, 1.1% lead, 19.7g/t gallium and 1.3g/t gold
   
   
2. Visuals from hole #3 of the current drill program - A combined 66m of visual zinc-lead sulphides and a combined 89m of visual molybdenite within the porphyry system.

Together, the two holes have now extended mineralisation across ~1.6km (inside a >4km long magnetic anomaly).

So as AW1 continues drilling out to the east, it keeps hitting mineralisation which we hope grows what is already the biggest undeveloped indium resource in the USA.

(source)

ILA was granted a Singapore patent for its dengue treatment drug - exclusivity running through to 2034.

The newly granted Singapore patent extends ILA's exclusivity for using ISLA-101 as a standalone antiviral treatment for mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and chikungunya.

Then late on Friday, ILA went into a Trading Halt for an announcement in relation to the use of its Galidesiver drug in a clinical trial in Ebola in Africa.

Read our take on the halt at the bottom of yesterday’s note.

All eyes on ILA for whatever is announced by Tuesday.

(read the trading halt announcement here)

Iondrive (ASX:ION)

Two weeks ago the G7 group of nations (basically all the western big dogs) met and made explicit commitments to “boost recycling of critical minerals”.

Specifically calling out urgency around China dominated rare earths supply - rare earths being critical inputs in advanced technologies like AI, robotics and advanced weaponry.

One stated G7 aim was to make recycling capacity account for a “significant share” of annual consumption by 2030.

(source)

Recycling already exists commercially for minerals like copper and aluminium.

(remember dropping off your old stepped on Coke and Sprite cans for the aluminium to be recycled? And getting that sweet 5c per can)

The G7 (and us) think that for the West to fix its China dependency for critical minerals, it will need to lean heavily into recycling tech.

Discovering and building new mines from scratch can take decades.

Recycling can be rolled out a lot quicker.

(as long as there is feedstock, and the tech works...).

Whoever can crack the recycling of critical minerals (especially heavy rare earths) at scale could be very valuable.

Which is why we are Invested in ION.

ION is developing recycling tech that recovers critical minerals from e-waste.

(electronic equipment like mobile phones, TVs, circuit boards, industrial equipment etc, old equipment that was built using critical minerals BEFORE China started turning off the supply tap)

ION has been busy over the last year preparing its “rare earths recycling” ship and is now opening their sails into the winds created by the G7 summit “rare earths recycling urgency” statement.

Back in September last year ION signed a binding deal with the biggest e-waste recycling company in the USA (Colt Recycling).

Two weeks ago, ION recovered rare earths from Colt’s feedstock including 93.5% of dysprosium and other heavy rare earths like holmium and gadolinium. (source)

And this week, ION received a letter of support for up to ~US$15M in funding to build a rare earths recycling facility in Oklahoma, USA.

Read more: ION: announces US$15M in support to build heavy rare earth recycling module in Oklahoma, USA. G7 summit says rare earths urgent.

Investor Presentation: Securing a Circular Domestic Rare Earth Supply Chain in the United States.

Peak Processing (ASX:PKP)

Know who this guy is?

West coast gangsta rap royalty...

NWA - Straight Outta Compton.

12 solo studio albums - many of which arguably defined 90s and 00s hip hop.

Known by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

How about the biopic "Straight Outta Compton”...

Or the 1997 classic horror/adventure film Anaconda?

He has 30M+ followers on Instagram.

Okay fine...

It's rapper, turned writer, turned actor and more recently, turned cannabis entrepreneur...

Ice Cube.

Back in 1995, he co-wrote and starred in arguably the most famous "weed movie" ever - Friday.

(remember watching that with your mates in high school, ahem... unsupervised while your parents were out of town? “You got knocked the F out, man!”, “Bye, Felicia”, “I like pigs feeeet”)

In 2021, Ice Cube turned that Friday movie franchise into his own cannabis brand - Fryday Kush. (source)

(source: just Google “who owns Fryday Kush”)

The Fryday Kush brand name is highly recognisable in the cannabis world - it currently operates as an infused flower, moon rock, and vape brand.

In a Forbes interview last year Ice Cube said:

“I used to drink, but once I found good weed, I started pushing the (alcoholic) drinks away. I don’t really like to drink (alcohol) no more.” (source)

And now Ice Cube’s business empire is moving into THC (cannabis) drinks.

In the USA.

But which company is going to manufacture these THC drinks for Ice Cube’s FryDay brand in the USA?

Our microcap Investment Peak Processing (ASX:PKP) is.

PKP owns and sells the technology to "infuse any drink with THC” and then manufacture the drinks at scale.

PKP’s THC-infusion can be applied to ANY drink, so any big alcohol company OR drink maker can use PKP to make a non-alcoholic, THC-infused version of their popular brands.

This week: PKP announced that they will be manufacturing Ice Cube's Fryday Kush THC drinks in the US, across 13 states.

Read more: PKP: World Famous Rapper/Actor Ice Cube’s Cannabis Brand FryDay signs deal with our microcap Investment PKP - for USA weed drink manufacturing.

Advance Metals (ASX:AVM)

Our Investment Advance Metals (ASX:AVM) is drilling its highest grade, least drilled silver project in Mexico right now.

This week AVM announced results of a hole drilled away from their 22.4 million ounce silver deposit (designed to test if the deposit is actually bigger) - and hit high grade silver:

8.4 metres at 245 g/t silver from 90m.

What we were NOT expecting was a giant 54m plus copper (and gold) intercept in the SAME drill hole...

54.6 metres at 0.6% copper, 22g/t silver & 0.3g/t gold from 180m.

A hit that looks good enough for most explorers to call it a new copper-silver-gold “discovery”.

(and it looks to be INSIDE AVM’s existing silver deposit? discovery-ception?)

Meaning that AVM’s silver could be part of a bigger copper-silver-gold system.

A solid first sniff with more drill results to test around it coming up next.

(source)

This is from only the second hole on the project from the current round of drilling.

AVM already has assays pending from one hole and another hole in progress right now.

(and 10+ more holes to follow)

So we should know a lot more about the high grade silver and the NEWLY developing additional copper-gold story soon.

This project also happens to be 23km from a giant silver AND gold mine... meaning that giant multi-metal deposits are a thing in this region.

Now AVM is probably thinking about its 22.4M ounce silver project as a potential ‘next San Dimas’.

What is San Dimas?

Glad you asked.

San Dimas is ~23km to the south of AVM’s project, owned by $12BN First Majestic and has historically produced 745 million ounces of silver and 11 million ounces of gold.

Read more: AVM: “Accidentally” hits 54.6m at 0.6% copper in extensional high grade silver drill result- sounds good to us.

Pursuit Minerals (ASX:PUR)

Remember lithium?

Well, it’s back - prices are up almost 300% inside the last ~12 months.

(The lithium batteries in the billions of autonomous AI robots and drones to be built over the next 10 years, PLUS general electricity storage, are going to need a LOT of lithium...)

With this lithium price rise, lithium projects that were previously put on pause are now being developed.

The past performance is not and should not be taken as an indication of future performance. Caution should be exercised in assessing past performance. This product, like all other financial products, is subject to market forces and unpredictable events that may adversely affect future performance.

And this week, our Investment Pursuit Minerals (ASX:PUR) started drilling its giant, advanced stage lithium project in Argentina.

(timed on a coveted “early July” slot - how good was the small end of the market sentiment at the back end of last week? A lot of green, with June tax loss selling beatdowns quickly reversing as we expected - read more on our general market take in yesterday’s note here.)

This is the first drill hole into the area of PUR’s project where blue sky exploration upside could come from (we explain why in the link below).

Drill success here could start to put PUR into the conversation amongst some of the biggest lithium projects in South America.

PUR’s project already has a 1.26Mt LCE (lithium) JORC resource at ~424mg/L.

PUR has also completed a Pre Feasibility Study (PFS) on the project and returned a US$364M NPV from CAPEX of ~US$135M and operating costs of ~US$6,500/t.

(costs in the lowest quartile of the global cost curve).

PUR also owns 100% of its project as well as a 250tpa pilot plant that is capable of producing battery grade lithium carbonates.

Here is a picture of that plant:

Read more: PUR: Lithium back. Market back? Drilling just started on the “blue sky” target

CNBC - Gold prices rose back above US$4,000 as cooling payrolls data and falling global oil prices dampened Federal Reserve interest rate hike fears, positive for the debasement trade macro.

GoldSilver - The global physical silver market faces its sixth consecutive annual structural deficit in 2026, drawing down 762M ounces from above ground reserves since 2021.

Chamath Palihapitiya via Substack - Chamath released a precious metals primer highlighting how central banks are currently holding more gold than US Treasuries for the first time since 1996.

This is a sign of global macroeconomic sovereign financial de-dollarisation trends and another sign of the debasement trade continuing to taking place.

US DoE - The US Department of Energy announced US$75M for five separate pilot projects to recover vital critical minerals and rare earth elements from domestic coal-based industrial feedstocks.

Reuters - Canada and Japan are exploring critical mineral joint stockpiling and mining partnerships to insulate their key industries from Chinese export controls and market dominance.

Figure - The BMW Group will deploy Figure AI's next-generation Figure 03 humanoid robot at its Spartanburg plant to execute complex sequencing tasks in logistics operations.

Bloomberg - Copper traders are aggressively shipping global physical supply to the US ahead of a June 30 deadline on potential refined metal tariffs.

Al Jazeera - Extreme summer heatwaves are threatening the US power grid as soaring global artificial intelligence data center electricity consumption drives record nationwide demand.

World nuclear - Deployable Energy's Unity microreactor successfully achieved initial criticality, fulfilling a US presidential mandate to bring three test reactors online by July 4.

FT - Nato chief Mark Rutte highlighted US$300BN in European arms orders sustaining 195,000 American defense jobs to secure Donald Trump's alliance commitment.

Bloomberg - The UK has scrapped its expensive next-generation Type 83 destroyer class, opting to build six cheaper, drone-controlling hybrid warships instead during the 2030s.

Kyiv Independent - The European Union has disbursed 3.9BN euros specifically for drone procurement under its massive €90BN Ukraine Support Loan framework.

Chamath Palihapitiya via X - Chamath posted another interesting take “The Great Descent”, where he claims that artificial intelligence will rapidly commoditise specialised human expertise due to the compounding effects of both the hardware and software cost curves.

IVR - Execution Mode Engaged - MST Access

SGQ - Araxá Funded and Firing - MST Access

MTH - A Silver District with High-Grade Gold

MTH CEO Interview - High-Grade Gold-Silver Resource, But is There Enough Scale? | Mithril Silver & Gold CEO Interview

MTH Webinar - Mithril Silver & Gold: Copalquin Project Update | Mithril Silver And Gold Limited

IVR - Kanmantoo to Paris: Investigator Silver's pure play Silver Project with MD Lachlan Wallace (ASX:IVR)

AW1 put up a couple of videos from the drilling program ongoing at the West Desert Project in Utah. This is currently the largest indium resource within the US, plus it has copper and silver.

“Indium is used in stealth aircraft coatings, and as we know the US is the world leader in stealth technology...”

BKB CEO Dennis Lindgren went through what’s next for the Shafter Silver Project, plus the steps required to bring it back into production, next on the list:

ION CEO Lewis Utting was in this short interview following on from the funding agreement announced on Monday “There’s an unmet demand, there's a problem that still hasn’t been fixed”.

This came after ION announced it had signed a letter of support for up to ~US$15M in funding to build a rare earths recycling facility in Oklahoma, USA.

PNN Exploration Manager Steven Cooper is keeping an eye on the drilling, first a drill core undergoing initial analysis with a XRF machine before heading to the core shed, there was also a drone shot of a nearby mine and local infrastructure:

LSR posted a couple of images from the copper project it obtained an option on back in February, “Drilling at our Los Loros Project in Chile is imminent!”:

PR1 interim CEO Rocco Tassone posted this infographic about the “Thermal Wall” that is restricting technological advancement in electronics such as humanoid robots and computing chips:

A word of caution...

While we aim to highlight developments in the small cap space, investing in early-stage and small cap companies - like those we cover - is inherently risky.

These companies often face funding challenges, regulatory hurdles, and market volatility. Announcements may reflect aspirations more than guaranteed outcomes.

Things can, and often do, change.

Just because a company has signed a deal, released drill results, or appointed a new director doesn’t mean success is assured.

Always assume delays, cost overruns, or results that don’t pan out.

We’re here to share insights, not offer personal financial advice - so please do your own research and speak with a licensed adviser before acting on anything mentioned.

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Bye for now.