BMV's Second CapEx Haircut: "New Best Guidance," and the Peso That Pays Both Ways
Bolsa Mexicana printed 5% revenue growth and a 56% EBITDA margin, but the quarter's real news is a guidance walk-down dressed as discipline — and a currency whose damage to the P&L is also the engine of the derivatives boom
BOLSAA.MX · Earnings Call · 2026-10-21
The number that actually changed
BMV Group's third quarter was, on the surface, unremarkable: revenue up MXN 59 million or 5%, operating expenses up 12%, earnings per share of MXN 0.72, up 2%. Year to date, revenue is up 7%, EBITDA reached MXN 2 billion at a 56% margin, and EPS of MXN 2.25 rose 2.2%. For a company in year three of a self-described investment phase, that is the same shape analysts have been staring at for a year: the top line grinds, the cost line invests, the bottom line stalls.
The genuinely new item sits in the capital budget. Management cut its 2026 CapEx guidance from MXN 500 million to a range of MXN 340–370 million — the second consecutive reset of the same number, and this time it was given a name.
Our initial CapEx estimate was MXN 500 million. Our new best guidance is in the range between MXN 340 million, MXN 370 million. The difference in -- versus the original budget is primarily the result of discipline rather than execution issues.
That phrase — new best guidance — is this quarter's highest-ranked fresh keyword for the company, and it is doing a lot of work. In February the CFO guided to "close to MXN 500 million" for 2026; in April he repeated it; in July he described MXN 370 million as already committed out of a still-intact MXN 500 million budget. Now the budget itself has migrated down to where the commitments already were. The CFO's explanation is credible in parts — he cited using software instead of "a huge team of testers" to run platform tests — but a third of the original plan has quietly left the year, and part of it is being pushed into 2027, precisely the year he once said CapEx should be *lower*.
The cost line moved the other way. In July the technology expense guide was explicitly single-digit growth; on this call it became “the technology, this number should be in the low double-digit number” — Luis Rene Ramon, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-21 — a real, if modest, deterioration disguised as an aside. Personnel, the largest line, is now guided to grow "closer to inflation," which is the good news.
The peso paradox
Strip out currency and this was a much better quarter than reported. EBITDA would have been MXN 96 million higher on a constant-currency basis — 13% growth instead of 4%. That is the whole story of the reported numbers: BMV earns roughly 30% of revenue in dollars, and the peso's appreciation is a direct tax on the print. Financial income compounded the pain, down MXN 37 million year-to-date on lower local rates.
Here is the tension worth holding: the same currency move that depresses reported revenue is the demand driver for the franchise's best business. The derivatives segment posted volumes up 22% year-on-year and 26% year-to-date, led by dollar-peso futures up 38% year-to-date, “supported by a higher demand for currency hedging instruments among institutional investors amid the appreciation of the Mexican peso” — Jorge Formoso, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-10-21. Every peso of pain on the top line is a peso of hedging demand that BMV clears. It is a natural hedge, but an imperfect one — margin deposits at Asigna rose to MXN 43 billion on higher open interest, and clearing revenue is not growing fast enough to offset the translation hit.
This is also where BMV diverges sharply from the rest of this week's financial reporting cohort. The global tape's dominant themes are hiking cycle anxiety and retail deposits competition — FITB, HWC, WAL, ZION, MTB, RF and KEY all spent their calls on deposit pricing and rate-cut timing. BMV sits on the inverse exposure: no rate tailwind, no financial income cushion, and a currency that behaves like a competitor.
What management stopped saying
The loudest signal in the transcript is an absence. For four consecutive calls, the hedge fund secondary regulation was the marquee regulatory catalyst — a new class of market participants, a task force with the Treasury and the brokers' association, and a firm expectation of activity in 2026. In April: "hopefully, we will see something this same year." In July, more hedged: “I don't see this happening this year, but certainly the target is to start maybe by the end of the year to have the secondary rule out.” — Jorge Alegría, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) · 2026-07-22 On Wednesday it was not mentioned once, by management or by any analyst. That is not a resolution; that is a dropped thread, and it removes the one identifiable new-participant catalyst from the medium-term story.
The second wave shifted similarly. Repo clearing was described in July with a concrete start date — Roberto González said the intention was "to start by May next year" on a market where he expected "at least 30% of the repo market goes to the central clearing." This quarter it became softer: regulatory documentation to be submitted "in the near term," constructive engagement, confidence in long-term adoption. The derivatives platform (wave one) remains on track for Q1 2027 with end-to-end market testing starting in November; the CSD and equity CCP (wave three) target Q1 2028.
Even the AI language was upgraded without numbers. In July, “we have a small innovation lab where we are testing some AI, especially on looking at the markets and on education” — Luis René Ramón, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) · 2026-07-22. This quarter, AI is a "significant opportunity" with "business cases with clear economic value, measurable returns" — and no measurable returns disclosed. The keyword artificial intelligence is rising in BMV's own stack again, but it remains aspiration, not economics.
Inside the pipes
The operational detail is stronger than the P&L. Assets under custody at Indeval reached MXN 48 trillion, up 11%, yet the depository's revenue did not follow — the mismatch Carlos Gomez-Lopez has probed before. The explanation is structural: custody is about half the CSD, and the rest is the global SIC business, whose fees track transaction counts, and “these international transactions dropped in line with the value traded that you see in the equity markets” — Luis Rene Ramon, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-21. Local equity ADTV softened to MXN 17 billion for a 1% year-on-year gain, even as the year-to-date figure of MXN 20 billion ran 14% ahead; market share nonetheless climbed to 81%.
Capital formation is where the quiet progress is real. The first issuance under the simplified listing framework — Adventus Capital's MXN 560 million securitization — went from start to finish in about a month; CFE's MXN 20 billion deal was the quarter's largest; bond clearing now counts 11 registered members with 19 more in admission and, notably, its first pension-fund trade. Four confidential IPOs remain in process, and the debt pipeline runs MXN 50–60 billion monthly. The CFO guides 2027 revenue to “the high single-digit number” — Luis Rene Ramon, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-21 — better than the 1% years after COVID, but not the payoff a 12% opex year implies.
So the investment case now rests on one word management chose deliberately: capital efficiency. Spend less, spend later, and hope the derivatives platform and repo clearing arrive before patience does. The risk is that "new best guidance" becomes the descriptor of the earnings trajectory as well as the capex budget — and that the peso keeps paying BMV twice, once at the revenue line and once, more quietly, at the point where the analyst questions never change.