Stavely Minerals (ASX: SVY) - Does This Chart Tell You Anything?
Pull up the Stavely Minerals share price chart, and it looks like a company on the mend. The price is higher than it was six months ago, and it has had some big up days. This Chart Read checks whether that impression holds up, then goes through the twelve biggest one-day moves of the past year to see what was behind each one.
This is a Samso Chart Read. The subject is the Stavely Minerals share price and nothing else, not the projects, the resource or the studies. The question is the one most of us ask with a chart in front of us. It looks like it is going up, so is it? Every technical term is explained as we go, and there is a plain-English list at the back.
1. THE FIRST IMPRESSION. What the Chart Looks Like at a Glance
FIGURE 01 is two years of Stavely's daily closing price. The shares fell from 3.2 cents to 1.0 cent by late June 2025, climbed back to 2.5 cents by that October, and has bounced between 1.2 cents and 2.5 cents since. It closed at 1.6 cents on 18 September 2026 [R2].
Two things make that look like a recovery. The price is 10.3 per cent higher than it was 120 trading days ago, about six months. And it sits above what traders call its 200-day moving average.
A moving average is the average closing price over the last so many days, worked out again each day. The 200-day version smooths out the daily noise and shows the slow direction underneath. The rule of thumb is simple. If the price is above that line the long-run direction is up, and if it is below, the direction is down. Stavely is 4.9 per cent above it. Higher than six months ago and above the long-run line is the picture people read as a stock turning the corner.
2. THE TREND TEST. What the Trend Measures Say
So we test it. FIGURE 02 has three panels, and each is a different way of asking the same question.
The top panel adds a faster 50-day average to the 200-day one. It reacts more quickly because it only looks back ten weeks. The price is 4.9 per cent above the 200-day but 4.5 per cent below the 50-day, and the 50-day has edged down over the past fortnight. The two lines are saying opposite things. In our jargon, that is a range, which is a price moving sideways between a floor and a ceiling rather than heading anywhere.
The middle panel is MACD, and it is worth going slowly on because the name tells you nothing. It stands for moving average convergence divergence. It is widely attributed to Gerald Appel, an American money manager and newsletter writer, who set it out in his own booklet, The Moving Average Convergence-Divergence Trading Method, in the late 1970s. Take the average price over the last 12 days and call that the fast one, because it reacts quickly. Take the average over the last 26 days and call that the slow one. Subtract the slow from the fast and you have a single number. If recent prices are pushing higher, the fast average pulls ahead of the slow one, the number is positive, and the line sits above the zero mark. If prices are fading, the fast average falls behind and the line drops below zero. The second line on that panel, called the signal, is a smoothed version of the first [R4].
Traders read two things off it. Whether the MACD line is above or below zero, and whether it is above or below its signal line. Stavely's is below both. They point the same way, and it is not up.
The bottom panel is ADX, short for Average Directional Index. J. Welles Wilder set it out in New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems in 1978. That one book also gave the market the Relative Strength Index, the Average True Range and the Parabolic SAR, so a good deal of a standard charting screen comes out of it. It measures whether a price is going anywhere at all, which is a different question from which way it is going, and one most people never think to ask. Above 25 is usually called a trend, below 20 no trend. Stavely finished at 12.2. Over the year it sat under 20 on 100 of the 254 trading days and above 25 on 83, so it has been in and out of both. It is in the no-trend zone now [R5].
One more number. Over the last 60 trading days, about three months, the price finished exactly where it started. The six-month gain is measured from the lowest point of the year. Measure from anywhere else and it goes away.
3. THE SPIKES. What Was Behind Each One
That leaves the big days. A share price usually jumps because the company has told the market something. So we took the twelve biggest one-day moves of the past year and looked up what Stavely lodged with the ASX on each of those days and on the trading day before. FIGURE 03 shows what came back.
Seven of the twelve had nothing lodged at all.
The biggest was 9 June 2026. The price went from 1.5 cents to 1.9 cents, up 26.7 per cent, on A$146,434 worth of shares. Nothing was lodged, and the next day it gave the whole lot back. The one filing across those two days was a substantial holder notice, the form lodged when an investor's stake passes 5 per cent. It tells you a large parcel changed hands, not why anybody bought.
On 31 August 2026 the price rose 18.7 per cent, from 1.6 cents to 1.9 cents. The number of shares that changed hands was 65,076, which at that price is A$1,236.
The biggest move that did have something behind it was 10 September 2026, up 14.3 per cent. The filing that morning was a slide pack from an investor conference, and the company ticked the box saying it was not price sensitive [R1].
So on most of the sharp up days the company had told the market nothing. Something else moved the price, and whatever it was, it was not an announcement.
4. THE TICK. How Far the Price Moves in One Step
There is a mechanical reason those percentages look bigger than the information behind them, and it applies to every ASX stock under 10 cents.
Buy and sell orders on the ASX can only be placed at set prices, a fixed distance apart, and that distance is called a tick. Below 10 cents the tick is one tenth of a cent. That sounds tiny until you do the division. At 1.5 cents it is 6.67 per cent of the whole share price. So anyone wanting to bid above the best buyer has to move the price 6.67 per cent to do it [R3].
FIGURE 04 draws every price Stavely closed at over the past year. There are 20 of them and they sit as 20 lines across the chart. Fourteen sit on that one tenth of a cent grid. The other six sit halfway between two of them, which happens when a buyer and a seller are matched at the midpoint rather than at a quoted price, and ten of the 254 days ended that way. Either way the grid is coarse, and the smallest move Stavely made all year was 2.6 per cent.
So a 6.67 per cent day is one step and a 20 per cent day is three. The tick does get bigger as the share price does, but nowhere near as fast. On a 50 cent share the step is half a cent, so those same three steps come to 3 per cent. On a ten dollar share the step is one cent and three steps come to 0.3 per cent.
5. THE TURNOVER. How Much Money Goes Through in a Day
The other thing to weigh is how much money is actually going through.
FIGURE 05 sorts every trading day of the past year by the dollar value of shares traded. The typical day traded A$10,527. On 163 of the 254 days less than A$20,000 changed hands, on 94 of them less than A$5,000, and on eight days nobody traded at all. On 121 of those days, close to half the year, the price did not move at all. FIGURE 06 puts each day's move against the dollars behind it, and 31 August sits out on its own.
Chart reading rests on an assumption that is rarely said out loud. When traders talk about support, a price where buyers keep stepping in, or resistance, a price where sellers keep appearing, or a breakout, a price pushing past one of those, they are assuming the price is the settled opinion of a lot of people. A$1,236 is not the settled opinion of a lot of people. It is somebody placing an order.
That last step is Samso's own reading rather than a rule from the textbooks, and it is worth saying what it does not mean. A thinly traded price is not a wrong price. Plenty of companies trade quietly for years and are priced perfectly sensibly by the few people paying attention. The claim here is narrower. A price set by a handful of orders carries less information than one set by thousands, so a pattern drawn from it is a weaker piece of evidence, not a false one.
THE OTHER WAY TO READ THIS Someone who trades trends for a living would read this chart more kindly, and the case deserves to be put. The price is above the 200-day line and that line has ticked up over the past month. The faster 50-day line has been above the slower 200-day one on 158 of the last 254 trading days, which is the arrangement trend traders like to see. The 1.0 cent low of June 2025 has not been touched again in the fourteen months since, and the price held a floor at 1.2 cents even while new shares were issued below the market price. ADX is worked out from what has already happened, so a low reading describes the quiet spell just gone rather than what comes next. Read that way, this is a company building a base rather than drifting. What that reading still has to deal with is the tick and the money going through, which are true whichever way you call the trend. |
6. WHAT WOULD MAKE THIS WRONG. What Would Change This Reading
Two things, and neither is a price to trade against.
The first is how much money goes through. If the typical day moved back above A$20,000 and held there for three months, the price would be the product of a lot of people again and the patterns would start to mean what they normally mean.
The second is ADX. If it climbed back above 25 and held, with the 50-day average turning up through the 200-day, the measures would be describing a real direction rather than a sideways drift. ADX reached 52.3 on 19 June 2026, so it can get there, but it did not hold.
7. SAMSO CONCLUDING COMMENTS
The answer to the question at the top is no. The chart looks like it is turning up for two reasons, and both are weaker than they look. The six-month gain is measured from the lowest point of the year, and the price is above its 200-day line by only 4.9 per cent while sitting below the faster 50-day line. Everything else says sideways. ADX at 12.2, MACD below zero and below its signal line, and a price that has gone nowhere in three months. The big days do not rescue it either. Most had no announcement behind them, the biggest was reversed the following day, and one was three price steps bought for A$1,236.
None of this says anything about Stavely's ground, its drilling or its studies. The company is exploring and working through those studies, and they are what will decide where the share price goes. On a stock this thinly traded, with price steps this large, the chart is not carrying enough information to tell you much either way, and knowing that is worth more than reading a pattern into it.
Two checks will tell you the same thing about any small company on the ASX and they take a minute. Work out what one price step is as a percentage of the share price. Then look up what a typical day trades in dollars. If the first number is big and the second is small, the chart in front of you is a record of a few orders, and no technical analysis will turn it into more than that.
SAMSO TAKE Seven of the twelve biggest moves in Stavely's year had no announcement behind them, and the biggest of the lot was undone the next day. If the sharpest days on a chart are not reactions to information, what is a pattern drawn from those days actually telling you? |
ABOUT THE READING THE CHART SERIES Reading the Chart is where Samso analyses a company's share price and shows how the reading was arrived at. The measures, the window each is taken over and what would make the reading wrong are all stated, so a reader can run the same check on another stock. A Chart Read carries no Samso Call, and no entry, exit, target or position size. Samso does not tell anyone where to trade a price. |
THE WORDS IN THIS PIECE, IN PLAIN ENGLISH Trading day. A day the exchange is open. There are about 254 in a year, so 120 trading days is roughly six months, and 60 is roughly three. Tick. The fixed step a price moves in. On the ASX a share priced under 10 cents moves in steps of one tenth of a cent, so at 1.5 cents one step is 6.67 per cent of the share price. Value traded, or turnover. The dollars that changed hands in a day, being the number of shares traded multiplied by the price. It tells you how real a market is far better than the share count on its own. Typical day, or median. The middle day once every day of the year is lined up in order of value traded. It describes an ordinary day better than an average, which a handful of very busy days can drag upwards. Moving average. The average closing price over the last so-many days, worked out again each day. It smooths out the daily noise. The 50-day and the 200-day are the two most watched, and reading them as the divide between up and down is long-standing market habit rather than anything that has been proven. MACD. Short for moving average convergence divergence. Widely attributed to Gerald Appel, an American money manager and newsletter writer, who set it out in his own booklet, The Moving Average Convergence-Divergence Trading Method, in the late 1970s. The average price over 12 days minus the average over 26 days. Above zero, recent prices are pushing ahead of older ones. Below zero, they are falling behind. A second line, the signal, is a smoothed version of the first. ADX, or Average Directional Index. J. Welles Wilder's measure of whether a price is going anywhere at all, rather than which way. He set it out in New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems in 1978, the book that also gave the market RSI and the Average True Range. Above 25 is usually called a trend and below 20 no trend. Those cut-offs are convention, not a finding. Range. A price moving sideways between a floor and a ceiling instead of heading in a direction. Support and resistance. Support is a price where buyers keep stepping in and stop the fall. Resistance is a price where sellers keep appearing and cap the rise. Both assume enough people are trading for the level to mean something. Breakout. A price pushing up through resistance or down through support, which traders read as the start of a move. Substantial holder notice. The form lodged with the ASX when an investor's stake passes 5 per cent of a company. It records that a large parcel changed hands. It does not say why. Price sensitive. A tick the company puts on an announcement to flag that it could reasonably move the share price. An announcement without the tick is not expected to. |
References and sources
Every figure in this piece is Samso's own chart, drawn from the sources below. No third-party figure, map or photograph is reproduced.
[R1] ASX, Stavely Minerals Limited (SVY) company page and market announcements, asx.com.au, read 19 September 2026. Source for the company name, listing date, shares on issue, market capitalisation, and every announcement title and date quoted in FIGURE 03.
[R2] Yahoo Finance, daily price and volume bars for SVY.AX, 19 September 2024 to 18 September 2026, retrieved 19 September 2026. The price series behind every figure and the cover.
[R3] ASX Operating Rules Procedures, the tick size schedule. Under 10 cents the tick is 0.1 cents, from 10 cents to under A$2.00 it is 0.5 cents, and at A$2.00 and above it is 1 cent. Source for section 4.00.
[R4] Gerald Appel, the moving average convergence divergence method, late 1970s. Source for the MACD definition and the 12, 26 and 9 day settings used in FIGURE 02.
[R5] J. Welles Wilder, New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems, 1978. Source for the Average Directional Index and the conventional 20 and 25 thresholds.
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