Great Scott! Is it 2012 again, or did I just hit 88 miles per hour in a DeLorean?

This week’s news jolted Team Proactive straight back to the past.

Rockhopper Exploration, that blast-from-the-past Falklands oil explorer, is launching an equity placing to fund the Sea Lion project.

For a split second, we half expected Marty McFly to appear, skateboard in hand, quoting oil reserves.

A lot has changed since Sea Lion was the talk of AIM, long before Trump, tariffs, Covid, AI, or even the phrase ‘net zero’ entered the mainstream.

Back then, big-money offshore oil plays still had their admirers. Now? Let’s just say the market’s patience is thinner.

Yet here we are: Rockhopper is seeking to raise $140 million to finally take its 500-million-barrel Falklands discovery into production.

It’s a test for AIM’s appetite for risk, and for the small-cap market’s ability to believe in a comeback story.

Rockhopper Exploration is launching an equity placing to fund the Sea Lion project in the Falklands 

All proceeds will sit in escrow, pending a final investment decision, so we’ll soon find out if this is Back to the Future or, to quote the great Yogi Berra, just déjà vu all over again.

As the FTSE 100 waded into record territory, the appetite for small-caps seemed to wane, with the AIM All-Share receding 2.5 per cent, wiping out any progress made in July.

Now, we haven’t done the maths on this one so it’s just a hunch at this stage, but the welter of fundraising ahead of the summer break could be the reason.

With growth companies issuing new shares in almost unprecedented numbers, this tends to be a short-term depressant on value; certainly, it doesn’t support a ‘risk-off’ narrative that would normally underpin such a sharp decline.

Back to this week’s movers and groovers. It was a great week if you bought shares in Tasty on Monday, just before the fun started.

For the uninitiated, Tasty owns the dim t and Wildwood restaurant brands. No, me neither.

Still, my ignorance isn’t shared by David Page, the restaurant entrepreneur behind Pizza Express and Fulham Shore’s success.

It emerged on Tuesday that Tasty is in advanced discussions to bring on board Page and former Fulham Shore finance director Nicholas Wong. It is also looking at funding plans. Cue a 50 per cent rise in the share price.

The week’s big break-out riser, up 84 per cent, was Empresaria Group, which said it had received a 62p-a-share indicative offer, valuing its staffing business at just over £33 million. Even after the strong rise, the stock is trading 20p shy of the indicative offer.

Arkle Resources ended the week 22 per cent higher after securing £500,000 of new investment by issuing shares at a significant premium to the market price. Well done to boss John Teeling and the team for pulling that one off.

Now on to the week’s list of casualties. Investors in Versarien, the graphene specialist, had a week to forget, with the stock falling 48 per cent.

The catalyst was the company’s failure to find a buyer for one of its businesses, which will now be placed into administration.

Versarien is now in cash conservation mode as it looks for ‘material’ outside investment. That said, its funding runway is short, hence the worrying lurch groundward in the stock price.

The share price chart of Metals One in the year to date resembles the outline of the Alps, with huge, steep rock faces and precipitous, craggy drops on the other side.

This week, the crampons were discarded for abseiling ropes as the stock dropped almost 40 per cent.

The reason was simple: the issue of new stock and the exercise of warrants. Long-term, the picture looks fairly positive, as the group has now increased its holding in a US uranium asset to 30 per cent.

Showing there is little margin for error, Cambridge Cognition lost almost a quarter of its market value after what analysts described as only a ‘slightly light’ performance.

The company, which focuses on tests and technologies for brain health, reported new sales orders of £6.9 million for the six months to 30 June. The order book rose to £16.4 million, up from £13.6 million at the end of 2024.

For all the market’s breaking small- and mid-cap news go to www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk

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