NEXA heads into the post-earnings session with one of the most dramatic re-ratings in the mining space this month.
The zinc miner closed at $15.99 on May 5, up 14% on the week and 44% over the past month. Q1 results just landed: sales of $888 million beat estimates of $828 million by a wide margin. Adjusted EPS came in at $0.67, just a whisker under the $0.68 consensus. Revenue won the day.
The rally has left the Street scrambling to catch up. The mean analyst price target is $11.81 — more than 25% below where the stock is trading now. That gap reflects how fast the stock has moved, not a change in analyst conviction. Citigroup raised its target to $12.50 on April 14, maintaining a Neutral rating, and Scotiabank holds a Sector Perform at $14.00. JPMorgan has a Neutral with a $7.50 target — clearly not updated in response to the recent run. None of the covering analysts are bullish. The Street consensus is neutral at best, leaving the stock trading well above the envelope of professional opinion.
The valuation re-rating has been swift and steep. The P/E multiple has expanded by more than 3 points over 30 days to 7.2x. Price-to-book has moved up 0.43 over the same period to 1.67x. EV/EBITDA at 3.4x remains low in absolute terms. Factor scores reflect the mixed picture: NEXA ranks in the 93rd percentile on analyst recommendation divergence — meaning the gap between where the stock sits and what analysts recommend is extreme — and in the 88th percentile on dividend score, supported by the special dividend of $0.1321 per share announced in March, payable in August 2026.
Borrow conditions tell a story of a name that was expensive to short and is now becoming less so. Cost to borrow peaked above 50% in late March and early April, then fell sharply. It now runs at 28%, down nearly 20% on the week and almost halved over the month. The lending pool is loose: availability is wide, and short interest is minimal at just 0.53% of free float — down from around 0.55% in mid-April. This is not a stock with meaningful short positioning. The sharp CTB decline suggests that the shorts who drove borrowing costs up in March have largely been flushed out by the rally.
Options sentiment has shifted noticeably toward caution. The put/call ratio hit 0.35 — its highest reading of the past year — against a 20-day average of 0.23. That's just over one standard deviation above the mean. The PCR has climbed steadily since mid-April, when it was below 0.10. The move does not signal panic, but it does show that more participants are now buying downside protection at elevated prices than at any point in the past 12 months.
Earnings history adds important context to the setup. The last three prints each produced sharp single-day moves: +12.3%, +22% and +7.5% respectively. The day-5 reactions were negative in both cases where data is available, with the stock giving back 6% and 9.5% in the weeks after the first two of those prints. A pattern of strong beats followed by mean reversion is visible in the recent record — though Q1's narrower EPS miss versus the sales beat gives a different texture to this result.
The institutional picture is highly concentrated. Parent company Hejoassu Administração holds 64.7% of shares, leaving a thin free float. Among external holders, Sagil Capital and Marshall Wace entered new positions as of December 2025, each building around 1% or less. Renaissance Technologies and Citadel also added. These are quantitative and multi-strategy shops — their presence reflects factor and event positioning rather than a long-term fundamental view.
With the stock well above every published analyst target and the put/call ratio at a 52-week high, the next question is whether the Q1 sales beat is enough to pull analyst targets materially higher — or whether the gap between market price and Street opinion begins to close from above.
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