Just noticed FCX has been on quite a run lately - up nearly 40% over the last three months. Pretty solid move considering the broader market barely budged. The real story here is copper. With all the EV and renewable energy demand, plus growing concerns about supply tightening, the red metal has been holding strong around $6 per pound. That's been a huge tailwind for miners like Freeport.

What caught my eye is how they're actually executing on expansion. They've got this Cerro Verde project in Peru that added 600 million pounds of annual copper capacity. Then there's El Abari in Chile - they're looking at potentially 20 billion recoverable pounds of copper from a new sulfide resource. In Arizona, they're working on pre-feasibility studies at Safford/Lone Star with completion targeted for 2026. These aren't just announcements; they're actually building capacity.

The balance sheet is solid too. They finished 2025 with $3.8 billion in cash and generated $5.6 billion in operating cash flows. Net debt sitting at $2.3 billion, which is actually below their $3-4 billion target range. That gives them real flexibility to fund these projects while still returning cash to shareholders. The dividend yield is modest at 0.5%, but the payout ratio of 17% suggests it's sustainable.

Now here's where it gets interesting - and a bit concerning. Their copper sales volumes took a hit in Q4, down 29% year-over-year to 709 million pounds. That's mainly because of the Grasberg Block Cave mine incident in Indonesia back in September. They're expecting Q1 2026 volumes around 640 million pounds, another 27% drop year-over-year. Lower volumes also pushed their unit costs up sharply to $2.22 per pound in Q4, and they're guiding to $2.60 per pound for Q1.

So the copper price per pound is favorable, but the operational headwinds from the mine incident are real. Their earnings estimates have been moving up over the past couple months, which is positive. They're guiding for an average unit cost around $1.75 for the full year, which suggests things should normalize once Grasberg ramps back up in Q2.

Valuation-wise, FCX is trading at a forward P/E of 24.87X, which is actually a discount to the industry average. Compared to Southern Copper and BHP, it's somewhere in the middle. The expansion pipeline is genuinely impressive - if they execute on even half of these projects, production capacity could expand significantly. But I'm watching the Grasberg restart closely. That's the key near-term catalyst. If they can get back to normal production volumes while copper prices stay elevated, this could have more room to run.