Amazon employs 395 people for every 1 Palantir worker — guess which stock gets traded more?
Nearly $14 billion worth of Palantir shares have changed hands every day over the last five sessions, more than all but the largest stocks in American markets.
On Monday, Palantir closed at a record high. On Tuesday, it did it again.
The packaged software company deep in the defense scene, helmed by its talismanic, jargon-loving, hyperbolic CEO, who once said “Palantir is here to disrupt and make our — the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion, kill them,” has attracted a loyal army of retail investors the likes of which we’ve seen maybe only a handful of times before in Tesla and GameStop.
But, while the company’s valuation continues to fly in the face of every corporate finance textbook you’ve ever pretended to read, with PLTR consistently on a three-digit price-to-earnings ratio, what is arguably more remarkable is the sheer volume that is changing hands in the stock every day.
Data from FactSet reveals that over the last five trading sessions, $13.7 billion worth of Palantir’s stock has been traded on average every day — more than companies with economic footprints that are orders of magnitude larger than its own.
Amazon, for example, reported that it employed some 1.556 million people at the end of last year. Palantir’s roster was closer to a very large high school, at just 3,936, meaning that the e-commerce giant employs 395x as many people as Palantir, but its shares are less liquid. Tech juggernaut Apple has seen only $10 billion worth of trading activity in its shares in the last five days, 27% less than Palantir.
It’s not normal that the securities underlying those businesses are trading even remotely equivalent volumes — typically, of course, there’s a correlation between a company’s market value and how much its shares trade at.
Walmart, Apple, Nike, McDonald’s — Palantir is seeing more action than all of them. So meteoric has the run-up in Palantir’s shares been that, as Sherwood News’ Matt Phillips pointed out earlier, Wall Street analysts are even beginning to wonder if companies like Tesla should look at emulating parts of Palantir’s product portfolio.
So, relative to its size, is Palantir’s stock turned over more than any other in the S&P 500?
Interestingly, no. That honor falls to another volatile AI darling, Super Micro Computer, which has turned over 5.4% of its market cap in the last five sessions, slightly ahead of Palantir’s 4.5%. The median for the index is just 0.8%.
