Luca Monk

Luca is the founder and CEO of Cashu Group, an AI-native investor relations and marketing firm working with small-cap companies on the ASX, TSX, TSXV, CSE and NASDAQ. He writes across three areas that tend to feed into each other: macro, mining and frontier technology.

Macro. Luca takes a long view of markets. He’s more interested in how capital shifts between sectors over years than in what happens from one quarter to the next, and spends plenty of time on multi-decade charts looking for commodities, emerging markets and forgotten old-economy names that are finally breaking out of long ranges. Rates, currencies and commodity prices sit behind most of what he writes.

Mining. Hard assets get most of his attention: gold, copper, uranium, platinum group metals and the critical minerals that energy, defence and tech supply chains now can’t do without. He leans towards the junior end of the market, where one drill result, funding round or offtake deal can change a company’s value overnight. Regular conversations with management teams give him a close look at what it really takes to move a project from discovery into production.

Frontier technology. Luca cares less about software hype and more about where technology meets the physical world. That means automation and robotics in industries that can’t find enough people, AI applied to biology and genomics, advanced manufacturing and the long-term push into space. Privacy is a particular interest, from encryption and privacy-focused digital assets to the bigger question of who owns and controls personal data as AI ends up in everything. He thinks Australia should be making more of what it relies on rather than just exporting the raw materials, and he builds things himself too, including a pair of AI-connected heads-up display glasses he designed and 3D-printed from scratch.

The common thread is asymmetry. He looks for setups where the downside is clear and the upside isn’t priced in yet, usually at the smaller, less-covered end of the market.

Luca is based in Sydney, Australia.