Palantir, a lesson in narrative investing
Palantir's stock surged about 29% after a Q2 earnings report that came in much stronger than expected and raised full-year guidance. Even so, at $160 (a market cap of $390B) it still sits roughly 22% below the all-time high near $205 it hit in November 2025, itself up from just $44 a year before that. A stock swinging this hard while the underlying business keeps outperforming is a signal worth paying attention to. It usually means the moves aren't really about this quarter's numbers. They're about how much of the price is a story about what the company might become, and how much of that story can actually be proven yet.
What is Palantir?
Palantir builds software platforms that help large organizations pull their scattered data into what it calls a single operating picture. It isn't really selling an app. It's selling an operating system, an approach it calls ontology-based data integration, on top of which Palantir's own engineers and its customers build specific tools.