Small caps are back baby

It’s been a while since Dollar Bill put pen to paper.

At first, it was deliberate. Then it became inertia. I also forgot the password to my trading account and took it as divine intervention. But markets have a way of dragging you back in - and lately, they’ve been anything but subtle. Something’s stirring in small-cap land - and it’s not just the usual background hum.

Just two weeks ago, the United States Department of Defence quietly became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, which owns the Mountain Pass mine in California, the only rare earths operation of scale on US soil. A sometimes canny and mostly sober colleague of mine, Bill McConnell, wrote about it immediately in Bulls N Bears. He was onto it the very day it broke. Others chimed in later, perhaps a tad slow to the party, but that’s not their fault. Most people get there eventually.

Then Apple Inc jumped in, slapping another half a billion dollars on the table for equity, taking the total cheque for MP to a cool US$1 billion - all in under a week. MP’s share price doubled, adding US$5 billion to its market cap pretty much overnight.

That alone sparked the headlines, but for Dollar Bill, the real leg twitch came shortly after through a combination of events. The ASX 200 and the All Ords smashed record highs last week, the latter sailing through 9000 points for the first time. These weren’t polite moves. These were rafter-shaking, hold-my-beer kind of surges.

Also, copper prices punched out a new record peak this month at the same time that silver nudged just under US$40 for the first time in more than a decade. Gold remains stubbornly above the $5000 mark.

Dollar Bill’s even overheard a few stuffed suits at the club whispering about a revival in lithium - and for once, they might be onto something. Lithium doyen’s Mineral Resources and Pilbara Minerals have both surged about 50 per cent in the past month. And when the big boys start moving, the minnows tend to follow. Just take a look at lithium junior Galan, which has hiked from about 9c to 14c lately.

Then there are the IPOs, those long-forgotten unicorns, which appear to be sniffing the morning air again. Apart from the odd ETF, 2025 has been a desert for new ASX listings - the driest year in more than a decade. But lately? There’s been the sound of hooves… and they’re moving.

Since June, eight new floats have landed on the boards, most were modest, sub-$100 million raises, but that’s exactly the kind of froth that signals early action. The most recent, Tali Resources, listed on a Friday and tripled by Tuesday.

Then there’s the capital raising frenzy. In just the past two months, Dollar Bill has spotted another eight raises, and every single one of them was either significantly or substantially oversubscribed. That sort of heat hasn’t been seen in a while and it’s starting to feel less like a fluke and more like a market waking up hungry.

The standout? West Coast Silver, which set out to raise $3 million and ended up fielding $11 million in bids. Management reluctantly capped it at six. The raise priced at 11c - but when the stock resumed trading, it launched out of the gate at 17c. That sort of leap used to be the stuff of IPO fairy tales. Now it’s turning up midweek.

As for Dollar Bill? I had my hand in the jar, already having a few of these puppies tucked away in the back pocket but I slept through the final bid window. Not the first time I’ve missed the party while dreaming of champagne.

Just this morning, Larvotto Resources lit up the boards with a $60 million raise - done virtually flat to its last traded price. If that’s not a bellwether for risk appetite returning to small caps, I don’t know what is. There’s a scent on the wind, and I’d swear it smells like capital.

Back to the IPOs, June saw more new listings than the previous five months combined and July is already on track to beat that again. If this keeps up, we could soon be watching an honest-to-goodness revival for small caps, not just in listings, but in appetite.

Altogether, it’s starting to feel like a genuine inflection point, or the world’s most expensive coincidence. Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. Right now? It’s humming a very familiar tune.

That’s not a dead cat. That’s a live wire.

And, while the big end of town may be printing records, the real money, the real movement, looks to be shifting back to the forgotten corner of the exchange – small caps.

Firstly, rare earths. This isn’t a fashion play. This is geopolitics at its best… in mining boots. It’s about who controls the guts of the new economy – electric vehicles, chips, weapons and energy.

So when both Apple and the Pentagon are betting billions on the same strategic metals that Aussie juniors have been betting on for some time, while commodities break records and the ASX roars - that’s not background noise. That’s the main event.

For Dollar Bill, this isn’t just gut feel. Shaw & Partners dubbed 2025 “the year to feast on ASX small caps,” citing lower rates, valuation resets and looming earnings upgrades as rocket fuel.

But let’s dig a little deeper and talk numbers - the ones that matter. Not the polished ASX 200 charts they wheel out at charity lunches. I mean the back-row battlers. The drill campaign dreamers. The micro caps.

People bandy about ‘small cap’ like it means something, but technically it covers ASX stocks ranked from 300 up to 101 - a $1 billion to $6 billion bracket. Not exactly minnows and not small cap but hey, that’s the technical explanation.

The real action lives in the ASX “Emerging Companies Index” which includes those ranked with market caps ranked from number 350 to number 600, generally between $350 million and $1 billion. That’s the real sharp end.

And for years now, that’s also the end that’s been bleeding. From April 2022 to April 2023, the Emerging Companies Index fell 28 per cent. It was flat through April 2024, then down another 10 per cent into April 2025.

Those three years of pain have driven Dollar Bill to the bottle.

Meanwhile, the ASX 200? Down just 2 per cent across the same timeframe. Stats don’t lie and these stats highlight the underperformance of small caps against the big board.

But the worm might now finally be turning. Since April, right when Trump detonated his ‘Liberation Day’ hand grenade with sweeping tariffs, the Emerging Companies Index is up 22.6 per cent. That’s better than the ASX 200’s own stellar 19.2 per cent rise.

That’s not just recovery - that’s outperformance.

Dollar Bill says when the market’s most bruised corner starts to beat the big boys, it pays to pay attention.

In late 2024, Simon Conn at Investors Mutual was already calling it. A “valuation disconnect,” he said, tipping rate cuts to trigger a shift back into quality small caps. The Reserve Bank chimed in cutting the cash rate in February and followed up again in May which coincided pretty much bang on with the outperformance in small caps – nice one Simon.

Add to that the roaring commodities market, copper surging, silver going vertical on solar and tech demand - and that soundtrack is getting louder.

Lithium doyen’s Pilbara Minerals and Mineral Resources have both hiked about 50 per cent in a little over a month, and there are plenty of reports out there predicting a supply deficit for lithium again in 2026.

Sure, yes, maybe it is all just coincidence. But generally speaking, elephants don’t dance without dust, and there’s a storm kicking up at the small end of the ASX. Dollar Bill has seen this movie and heard this tune before, and he’s already snagged a front-row seat. The Dollar is no prophet, but rest assured — right now the monocle is getting a right proper polish.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@wanews.com.au