Short sellers are digging in on MUX even as gold prices lift the entire sector — and that stubborn positioning makes today's Q1 print a direct test of whether the bear thesis still has legs.
The lending market tells the most charged part of the story. Borrow availability has collapsed to near-zero — just 1% of the lending pool remains unused, close to the tightest the borrow has been all year. That squeeze arrived fast: through late March and into early April, availability was fully exhausted for nearly two weeks straight. It eased briefly in mid-April, then snapped back. Short interest itself has climbed roughly 10% over the past month to 18.6% of the free float — a level that puts MUX firmly in the most-shorted tier of its sector. The ORTEX short score has nudged up to 79.7, its highest reading in the recent window. With borrowing costs sitting at just 0.65%, shorts are not paying a premium to hold — the borrow is tight but still cheap, which means there is no short-term mechanical pressure forcing them to cover.
Options traders are telling a different, calmer story. The put/call ratio is essentially glued to its 20-day average of 0.41, with a z-score near zero — no meaningful lean toward either hedging or speculation ahead of the print. That flatness contrasts sharply with the aggression in the short book and suggests the options market is not amplifying the bear case.
The bull-bear debate centres on two things: operational delivery and the Los Azules copper asset. Analysts covering the stock are unanimously constructive, with Roth Capital and HC Wainwright both raising targets in March after the last print — Roth moving to $35, HC Wainwright to $29.50 from $21.50. The bull case rests on gold and silver production stability in the US, Mexico, and Argentina, plus the rising copper price narrative around Los Azules as a future growth engine. The bear case is not about conviction against the company — it is about execution risk, political exposure in Argentina, and the possibility that prior valuations underestimated the sensitivity of the asset base to commodity prices in both directions. With MUX now trading at $22.82, up nearly 8% on the day and 6% over the past month, the stock has already begun pricing in some of the commodity tailwind. Peers moved hard too — PAAS gained 12% on the day, CDE 9.5%, and AEM 6.6% — so MUX is running with the sector rather than outperforming it on a relative basis.
Past earnings reactions at MUX have been sharp in both directions. The most recent event in March 2026 saw the stock fall 6.6% on the day and 21% over the following five sessions — a reminder that even a supportive commodity backdrop has not insulated the stock from post-earnings selling. The Q1 report is therefore less about whether gold prices support the thesis and more about whether operating costs, production volumes, and Los Azules progress have moved the fundamental story enough to justify a short book that has only grown larger while the stock has risen.
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