Nu Holdings enters the week after its Q1 print having confirmed the bears' thesis: the stock fell nearly 5% on earnings day and is now down 7% on the week, trading at $12.29.
The earnings result landed as feared. The May 14 print drove a 4.9% single-day decline — a softer drop than February's 8.9% sell-off, but still a loss. That makes back-to-back negative reactions to quarterly results, and the stock is now down roughly 20% over the past month. Pre-earnings notes flagged exactly this risk: the options market had already pushed the put/call ratio to a 52-week extreme above 0.73 before the number dropped. Post-print, options positioning has normalised sharply. The PCR pulled back to 0.67 on May 19, with a z-score of just 0.76 — well within one standard deviation of its 20-day mean. The defensive hedging that crowded the options market ahead of earnings has largely unwound.
Short interest tells a modestly more aggressive story post-earnings. Shares short climbed to 145.8 million, roughly 3.8% of free float — up about 1.3% on the week and 12.7% over the past month. That monthly build is meaningful, even if the absolute level stays far from extreme. Borrowing, however, remains almost entirely unconstrained. Availability is at the ceiling of the measurement range, meaning there is no shortage of shares to lend. Cost to borrow is 0.29%, low even by historical standards for this name, despite a 68% week-on-week jump from a very low base earlier in May. Shorts face no friction in building positions here.
The Street's direction of travel is cautious but not turning outright negative. UBS trimmed its price target today — from $18.10 to $16.90 — while holding its Buy rating, reflecting a post-earnings reassessment rather than a conviction shift. The mean analyst target across the coverage universe is $19.43, implying roughly 58% upside from current levels. That gap is striking. A P/E of 12.4x and P/B of 3.5x have both compressed meaningfully — the P/E is down more than 3 points over the past month — tracking the share price lower rather than expanding on a forward basis. The analyst recommendation divergence score ranks in the 92nd percentile, suggesting the Street is more bullish relative to market consensus than on almost any other stock in the universe. EPS momentum over 30 days ranks in the 81st percentile, so forward estimates are still moving in the right direction even as the share price drops.
BlackRock added 38 million shares in its most recent filing through April, lifting its stake to 7.0% of shares outstanding. Morgan Stanley also added 27 million shares in the same period. The institutional base is not visibly fleeing — two of the largest holders were buyers as recently as April. Tencent, the third-largest holder at 3.0%, last reported in September 2024 with no change; that position appears static.
The next scheduled earnings event is August 14. Between now and then, the key question is whether the Street's bullish consensus — and BlackRock's recent buying — reflects a credible recovery thesis or simply a slow-moving rerate of targets toward the new, lower price level.
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