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Little Aussie miner pushes back on Chinese control of critical minerals

Little Aussie miner pushes back on Chinese control of critical minerals

It's far too slow and incremental but the international effort to challenge China's dominance in the supply and processing of key critical minerals is taking belated shape.
Monday's ASX announcement of Japanese government interest in supporting Tivan, a small listed Australian would-be miner and processor of fluorite, is another minor signpost on that long road.
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Small caps are back baby
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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. '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.' 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 more than 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.

Small caps are back baby
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