FCX Drops 9% in a Week — Analysts Split as Copper Sell-off Bites

Freeport-McMoRan is navigating its sharpest weekly sell-off in months, falling 9.4% to $69.38, with the copper sector broadly under pressure and analyst opinion fracturing at precisely the wrong moment.

The week's most striking contrast sits in the analyst community. RBC Capital's Sam Crittenden raised his price target aggressively today — from $73 to $85, a 16% lift — while maintaining a Sector Perform rating. That followed Bernstein's Bob Brackett moving in the opposite direction last week, cutting his target from $50 to $47 with a Market Perform, citing a more cautious outlook on copper prices. The two moves bracket a wide range of views: the bull camp, led by Barclays (Overweight, $82), JPMorgan (Overweight, $77), BofA (Buy, $80), and Goldman Sachs (Buy, $74), argues FCX remains undervalued against the electrification buildout. The sceptics see near-term commodity headwinds and balance sheet risks. The consensus price target of $72 sits modestly above the current $69.38, implying limited near-term upside by the Street's own math — though RBC's fresh $85 target shifts that picture if others follow.

The sell-off has company across the copper peer group. SCCO fell 9.2% on the week, close to FCX's own move. IE dropped 15.9% — the sharpest peer decline. HBM and CS each shed 12–15%. The breadth of the weakness points to a sector-level repricing rather than anything FCX-specific, which may explain why RBC chose this week to lift its target: the stock is trading near where it stood before copper sentiment improved earlier in the year.

Short positioning tells a more nuanced story. Shorts increased 20% over the week, taking SI to 2.1% of free float — notable in direction, not in absolute size. The jump came almost entirely between September 8 and September 10, when estimated short shares climbed from roughly 25.5 million to 30.7 million, coinciding with the sharpest part of the stock's weekly decline. Despite that build, the borrow market remains completely unconstrained: availability is essentially unlimited, with over 1.4 billion shares available to lend. Cost to borrow is 0.34%, close to the cheapest in the past 30 days. The options market adds a modest defensive tilt — the put/call ratio climbed to 1.02 on Monday, about 1.2 standard deviations above the 20-day mean of 0.98, near the upper end of recent ranges. Taken together, the picture is shorts stepping up incrementally on the sector move, but no squeeze pressure and no meaningful structural conviction.

The valuation backdrop has shifted slightly over the past month. EV/EBITDA compressed to 7.5x, down 0.4 turns over 30 days — a modest re-rating lower as the stock pulled back from July highs. P/E sits at 18.2x, and P/B at 3.8x; neither has moved dramatically. The factor profile is more encouraging: EPS momentum ranks in the 72nd percentile over 30 days and the 80th percentile over 90 days, and EPS surprise is also at the 72nd percentile — the earnings revisions story has been running in FCX's favour even as the price has given back ground. The ORTEX short score is stable at 31, low enough to suggest this is not a stock the bearish community treats as a conviction short.

Insider activity through late August was net negative. EVP & General Counsel Douglas Currault exercised options and sold 80,000 shares at around $78.56 on August 25, a net open-market sale of roughly $6.3 million after accounting for the exercise. A director, Lydia Kennard, sold a smaller 3,798 shares at $79.11 two days later. Both trades were executed above current prices, which at least confirms insiders were not selling into weakness — but there were no open-market purchases from C-suite executives to signal conviction at these levels.

The next earnings release is scheduled for October 23. The most recent Q2 print produced a 1-day decline of 3.7% and a 5-day decline of 2.4% — a pattern worth noting as the stock approaches that date already down sharply from its post-Q2 peak. What to watch between now and then: whether copper spot prices stabilise and whether the RBC target upgrade prompts further Street revisions, or whether Bernstein's more cautious read on pricing gains followers.