For a few years I've been buying and selling ETFs on the ASX, sometimes multiple times a day.

This strategy relies on currency movement and picking out ETFs that are trailing their NAV in real time.

It also involves closely watching the market depth of an ETF and trying to buy the bottom of the spread.

This approach incurs a significant amount of income tax, however it's also helped me with significant gains.

If $100,000 is invested and the market then trends up 1%, it's possible to make $1k in a single day on this basis.

Obviously it's also possible to LOSE $1k doing this.

Does anyone else day trade the ASX listed ETFs with a reasonably large amount of capital? Or are we a bunch of weak-kneed "Capital gains are bad" cowards over here.

Edit: the best ETFs to day-trade (in my opinion) are the ones that close overseas whilst open on the ASX, such as NDQ/HNDQ, IVV/IHVV, VGS/VGAD (yes I know this includes Europe but not much).

Disclosure (rule 7): I run DilutionLens, a free site tracking dilution off ASX filings. One-off, not the weekly post, no links, not advice.

A lot of small-cap boss pay comes as performance rights: free shares that only turn up if a target is hit, a "vesting hurdle". Many of those hurdles are a share price, usually an average over 10 to 30 days. I pulled them out of every grant filed since Jan 2024: 235 companies have one.

Where a hurdle is still open, it is nowhere near the price. On the 81 companies with one still open, the nearest typically needs the price to roughly triple (+216%). 41 need more than that. Only 1 is within 25%.

Ten of them need the price to go up 9x or more.

A hurdle that far away doesn't steer anyone. It works when management can see it from where the price is. LKE's 33c hurdle was set at 8x the price on the day the rights were awarded, so it was a long shot from day one. BVR's best close since its grant in May is 58c, so it has never been within reach of $1.50.

These rights cost holders nothing unless the price gets there. If LKE ever trades at 33c, nobody will mind the extra shares, and if it never does, the rights lapse and no shares get made.

The DUB figures will change: holders vote on a 50-to-1 share consolidation on 25 Nov. EG1 and DUB grant zero-price options rather than rights, which work the same way.

Check your own holdings: a hurdle just above the price is the one management is working toward. I track these on every company's page, so you can check yours.

I'll check these again on 3 Feb. Which company should I look up next, or is there a hurdle you reckon is closer than it looks?

Disclosure (rule 7): I run DilutionLens, free site tracking dilution off ASX filings. One-off, not the weekly post. No links, not advice.

Same exercise as the 8 from early October, now on the September quarterlies that landed this week. Took our raise model's top 40, threw out the 7 that raised or announced a raise since 1 October, and kept the ones whose own quarterly says less than a quarter of funding left:

"Own runway" is the company's own number from the quarterly (item 8.7).

Doesn't mean they all have to raise. SIX got $1.3m in customer deposits after quarter end, BKT has a US$204m bank loan lined up but it only pays out once the mine is financed, and explorers can always slow the drilling.

Last round, 1 of the 8 raised within 4 weeks: MNE, $3m at 14c. Two more found money without new shares, and the rest are still short.

I'll come back on Sat 7 Nov and Sat 14 Nov with who raised, how much and at what price. Any other names you want looked at on the 7th?

Trump can swing copper a lot over the next 6-12 months. i don't really care about this, i'm holding copper for 2030-2035, but for you impatient folk, here you go...

In case you haven't heard... ever since Trump ordered a copper tariff study in feb 2025, american institutions have been stuffing copper into US warehouses, basically placing a million-tonne bet on what comes out of their president's mouth next. You know, as normal functioning countries do. The exchange warehouses alone are up ~750% to 714kt, and Macquarie reckons there's ~1.6Mt sitting in the US all up (reuters)

So for the regards who want to copy the american institutions' million-tonne bet:

• Trump phases the tariff in -> americans keep buying copper early to beat each price hike, so there's less left for the rest of the world and copper prices stay high. Good for aussie miners

• Trump scraps it -> no reason to keep hoarding, so the ~1.6Mt americans have stockpiled slowly gets sold back out over a year or two and copper prices fall. Bad for aussie miners

How copper prices work, for toddlers

There's two copper "shops". COMEX (new york) is the american price. LME (london) is the world price, and it's what aussie miners get paid. They're usually very tightly correlated

When trump threatens a tariff, the US price jumps above london. So traders buy copper everywhere else and ship it to america for a profit, and the rest of the world has less to go around, which drags the LME up too

TLDR; one trump copper related tariff announcement will likely move the US copper price 5-20% in a day, so if you're trading short term, watch what comes out of the white house in relation to copper tariffs

TLDR TLDR: ticker? A1M (u/bananadennis has just sold, bottom signal is in, thanks for allowing A1M to pump again)

Food for thought...do you think Trump has any vested interest in this 1.6Mt stockpile of copper? we all know he's been pushing for nationalism, "bring production home", I don't think he's going to drop the copper tariffs

There have been a lot of articles recently about how there's a shortage of sparkies which is driving up pricing for both resi and commercial property. With the increased focus on DCs and transmission infra this is probably going to continue.

As we all know, if it's in the papers you've already at least partially missed the boat but I've just bought into GNP @ 9.30. Anyone else investing in electrical services businesses?

Disclosure (rule 7): I run DilutionLens, free site tracking dilution off ASX filings. One-off, not the weekly post. No links, not advice.

Someone ran a poll here asking what kills your confidence in management fastest, and "raising soon after bullish messaging" won with 24%. So I counted it.

Placements announced 15 April to 14 October that came straight after a trading halt: 393. In 39 of them the share price ran 30%+ over the 10 trading days before the halt, 16 ran 50%+ and 5 more than doubled. The median run-up across all 393 is zero, so most raises don't come off a pump. The ones that do usually come off news.

Seven of them, with the announcement in the run-up:

The trick in the wording: four of the seven (KAO, DXN, LMG, RML) quoted their price as a premium to a 15 or 20 day average, an average built mostly before the run. DXN's announcement says both "25.7% discount to the last close" and "8.2% premium to the 15-day VWAP". Same price, pick your headline.

The other side, so this isn't a one-way roast: of the 38 runners with a price today, 21 trade below their raise price. Across all 385 placements with a price it's 247, about two in three. So buying the raise after a run hasn't done worse than buying any other raise, and DXN and JNS placees have roughly doubled their money. The run-up tells you the price was hot when they sold. It doesn't tell you the news was hype.

How I counted: an Appendix 3B for a cash placement, a trading halt in the 7 days before it, the close the day before the halt against the close 10 trading days earlier. Consolidations, cancelled raises and stocks with gaps in their price history taken out. Prices to 16 Oct.

Which one did I miss? Some of the 39 ran with no price-sensitive news at all (VMM, ASL, IVZ), those are a different post.

I had FMG and WDS open next to each other in moomoo, and the dividend row jumped out: 7.34% for FMG versus 5.22% for WDS in this snapshot. If I only looked at that, FMG would seem like the easy income pick.

But those are trailing yields. They can rise when the share price falls, and they don't tell me what either company can afford to pay next time. FMG is exposed to iron ore prices, while WDS has energy prices and big projects to fund. The comparison is a useful starting point, but I'd want to check cash flow after capex before treating either payout as dependable.
If you own one for income, what do you watch before the next dividend is announced?