Market roundup: Why Nubank is leaving Brazil’s stock market

🔔 The dashboard: Brazil’s benchmark stock index Ibovespa lost 2.70 percent this week. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Real gained 3.10 percent against the U.S. Dollar.

• Biggest gains: Positivo Inf (hardware), + 12.81 percent.
• Biggest drops: Estacio (education), -14.10 percent.

Nubank says farewell to local listing and sends bad message to investors

Nine months after its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and double-listing process in São Paulo, Nubank announced that it no longer wants to be a publicly-traded company in Brazil. 

State of play. In December 2021, Nubank opted for a double listing to launch its NuSócios program, through which it donated Brazilian depositary receipts (BDRs) to around 7.5 million customers. In return, they had to sign up to the fintech investment platform.

• BDRs are certificates that represent shares issued in other countries and traded on the Brazilian market. Those who hold a BDR, therefore, do not directly own the company’s shares abroad. Instead, they invest in securities representing the deposited shares.
• Each Nubank BDR represents one-sixth of a U.S.-listed stock. In practice, Nubank will migrate its program from level-3 BDRs (issued by companies in Brazil) to level 1 BDRs (issued by foreign companies not listed locally).

Why it matters. The decision doesn’t make much sense to analysts and, therefore, to investors. “We were unable to see the tangible benefits of the change,” said Pedro Leduc and a team of analysts at Itaú-BBA in a report to clients. “We judged [the decision as] negative...