SMALL CAP MOVERS: Bluejay Mining flies high; BOTB crashes as sales fall

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and former Microsoft head honcho Bill Gates may not be the most popular people in some quarters but the mere mention of their names was enough to propel the shares of Bluejay Mining higher this week.

The AIM-listed development company focused on Greenland and Finland saw its shares surge 57 per cent this week after an announcement entitled ‘JV with Bill Gates & Jeff Bezos backed Company’.

Full marks to the person who came up with the idea of putting those names in the stock market announcement’s headline.

Bluejay Mining shares rose this week after the AIM-listed company published an announcement entitled ‘JV with Bill Gates & Jeff Bezos backed Company’

The joint venture is with KoBold Metals, a company whose principal investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate & technology fund ‘overseen’ by Bill Gates and backed by luminaries such as Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, Ray Dalio, the hedge fund billionaire, and the aforementioned Jeff Bezos, the sometime astronaut (in space, nobody can ask you to pay taxes).

KoBold Metals is a mineral exploration company that uses machine learning to guide exploration for new deposits rich in the critical materials for electric vehicles.

It has got into bed with Bluejay on the latter’s Disko-Nuussuaq nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum magmatic massive sulphide project in Central West Greenland.

Sadly it is only a joint venture and not a merger so we can’t do the ‘Merger at the Disko’ headline, which is a shame as the name of KoBold’s chief executive, Kurt House, also offers up ample opportunity for dance music puns.

Under the terms of the agreement, KoBold can earn 51 per cent of Disko through a two-stage earn-in, Bluejay can maintain a 49 per cent interest through proportionate funding of the project and will manage field operations during this period.

In other ‘not a merger’ news, Powerhouse Energy Group has acquired 48 per cent of Engsolve, an engineering consultancy, for £99,990 in cash.

The waste-to-energy firm’s chief technology officer, Paul Emmitt, is also the managing director and founder of Engsolve and by taking this stake the company should ensure Engsolve’s continued support of the company’s projects and developments.

Powerhouse’s shares advanced 46 per cent to 4.6p.

Something that is not yet a merger but could well be is the strained courtship of TP Group by Science Group.

Science Group has been doing the equivalent of singing love songs beneath the balcony of TP Group, the provider of mission-critical software.

The board of TP Group, however, had been cocking a deaf ‘un to Science Group’s entreaties so Science Group acquired a 10.2 per cent stake in TP Group at 5p a share in the hope it would force TP’s top brass to the table to discuss a potential combination of the two companies.

Since then, things have gone a bit quiet although wheels may be in motion behind the scenes; in the meantime, TP shareholders are advised to take no action with their shares, which currently trade at 5.3p, up 36 per cent on the week.

A trading update from Pipehawk sent the underground radar and mapping group’s 39 per cent higher to 9p, with the company flagging up a sharp improvement in revenues in the second half of its financial year.

Turnover was roughly £4.1million in the first half of 2021, compared to £2.6million in the second half of 2020.

The sales pipeline (no pun intended) is so strong the group is looking to move to bigger premises.

Quadrise Fuels International motored 29 per cent higher to 3.79 after it said testing of its new low carbon alternative to heavy fuel bioMSAR oil has revealed a greater-than-expected reduction in CO2 emissions.

Minds + Machines Group (MMX) has completed a sale of its top-level domains (TLDs) and related assets to an affiliate of US domain registry giant GoDaddy, following the signing of a purchase agreement in early April.

MMX added that the proceeds of the sale implied a net asset value for the group of 9.6p per share and that it has approved a return of capital to shareholders through a tender offer of $80million to be completed in early autumn.

Shares in MMX currently trade at 8.55p, up 17 per cent this week.

Best of the Best, the online organiser of weekly competitions to win cars, saw shares crash

H&T Group climbed 15 per cent to 315p after it whacked up the dividend by 60 per cent in its interim results, The pawnbroker intends to return dividend distributions to historic levels as soon as trading returns to pre-pandemic levels.

Daily pledge levels are back to roughly 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels and continue to rise.

Previously high-flying Helium One Global came down to earth with a bump this week as it reported its drilling programme at the Rukwa helium project in Tanzania had encountered technical problems.

Wirelines logging of the uppermost interval of the first well drilled indicated good reservoir potential, with porosities of 15 to 20 per cent, but a petrophysical analysis indicated no free gas in this interval.

It was the only interval of the five that could be logged and tested further as the programme was hindered by poor and deteriorating hole conditions.

The shares, which a year ago were languishing at 4.25p, halved this week to 13.05p.

Another stock to halve was Best of the Best, the online organiser of weekly competitions to win cars.

The company had reported back in June that trading had softened since the UK had started lifting lockdown restrictions and this week it said it had seen a roughly 15 per cent fall in average weekly sales in the first 15 weeks of its new financial year compared to the preceding 15 week period (to 30 April).

The company has a fixed cost model so any dip in the top line hits the bottom line hard.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk