Buy Hold Sell: 8 winners, losers and best ideas across ASX small-caps

Reporting season is done and dusted for another six months. And as my colleagues have pointed out in their respective wrap-ups, for all the angst heading in, Australian companies came out of it in better shape than many expected.

The backdrop, however, is a different story. Bond yields have pushed higher, the consumer is weakening, inflation remains sticky, and uncertainty is the only certainty on the horizon. If you had to sum it up in one line: it's tough out there.

We kick off this two-part reporting season wrap-up of Buy Hold Sell with the small caps, and in light of the doom and gloom, we asked our guests to bring a positive insight they took from the season. For Ben Richards of Seneca, it was the breadth of the market, with the Small Ordinaries rising 6% while the ASX 200 remained broadly flat. For Steve Johnson from Forager Funds, it was the return to form for software companies - reliable revenue, improving margins, and the SaaS apocalypse narrative finally creating some discipline in the space.

We unpack six small-cap stocks in this episode, the ones who were solid from the ones who were sold off, and sort out the winners form the losers (plus a few bonus picks).

Keep an eye out for our next episode with Tom Stelzer covering the large caps.