UK Defence Secretary John Healey and Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp in September (Lucy North/Getty Images)

Palantir posts ninth straight earnings beat, boosts guidance

Here’s how the numbers look.

11/3/25 4:08PM

Defense and AI software maker Palantir Technologies reported its Q3 numbers after the close of trading on Monday, topping earnings estimates for the ninth quarter in a row.

Here’s how things shaped up for the retail trader favorite, which was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 last year:

Adjusted earnings per share of $0.21 vs. Wall Street expectations for $0.17.
Sales of $1.18 billion vs. an expected $1.09 billion, per FactSet data.
Q3 sales grew 63% year over year vs. a 50.5% Wall Street expectation. (Palantir CEO Alex Karp described it as “an accelerating and otherworldly growth rate.”)
Palantir now sees Q4 2025 revenue in the range of $1.327 billion to $1.331 billion, vs. Wall Street expectations for $1.18 billion.
Palantir now sees full-year 2025 revenue in the range of $4.396 billion to $4.400 billion, vs. its most recent guidance of $4.14 billion to $4.15 billion and Wall Street expectations for $4.139 billion.
US commercial software sales grew 121% to hit $396.7 million.
US government software sales grew 52% to $486 million.

Shares whipsawed after-hours and were recently essentially flat.

Palantir is on track for its second straight year of remarkable market gains. The stock — which has become a favorite of retail traders — is up more than 150% so far in 2025, and that follows the 340% return it notched in 2024 that made it a darling of retail investors.

“Palantir has made it possible for retail investors to achieve rates of return previously limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto,” Karp said in a letter accompanying the results. “And we have done so through authentic and substantive growth.”

At the same time, gains mean that even as Palantir has generated some of the fastest realized sales and profit in the S&P 500, that’s done little to fix the one persistent issue that’s been spotlighted about the stock: it has one of the most insane valuations ever seen for a company of its size.

But hey, it keeps going up.

Luke Kawa2m

AppLovin tumbles; company dismisses negative report as “false, misleading, and nonsensical”

AppLovin managed to finish well off the lows on Tuesday after initially getting clobbered in the wake of an incendiary report on the adtech firm published by CapitalWatch.

Nonetheless, shares are getting torched on Wednesday, ending down nearly 6%. An AppLovin spokesperson forcefully denied the allegations made by CapitalWatch, which included calling it “the ultimate monument to 21st-century new-type transnational financial crime.”

Per an emailed statement:

We categorically reject the claims made in this report, which is rife with false, misleading, and nonsensical allegations. AppLovin’s public filings transparently disclose our material investments, global operations, and information regarding significant shareholders.

Claims that AppLovin facilitated money laundering or its products are used for unauthorized downloads are patently false. AppLovin functions within a broader ecosystem that includes major app stores, operating systems, and payment providers, and the apps monetized through our platform must be publicly available on the major app stores and subject to their independent review and enforcement. Economically, the money laundering theory is implausible: publishers receive only a portion of advertiser spend, meaning any attempt to “launder” funds would require forfeiting a substantial share while creating a highly visible, auditable transaction trail across multiple independent companies. Accepting the report’s premise would therefore imply a systemic failure across the broader mobile advertising and app-store ecosystem, for which the report provides no evidence.

AppLovin craters after report from CapitalWatch alleges it’s a money-laundering operation for “transnational criminal kingpins”

Per an emailed statement:

We categorically reject the claims made in this report, which is rife with false, misleading, and nonsensical allegations. AppLovin’s public filings transparently disclose our material investments, global operations, and information regarding significant shareholders.

Claims that AppLovin facilitated money laundering or its products are used for unauthorized downloads are patently false. AppLovin functions within a broader ecosystem that includes major app stores, operating systems, and payment providers, and the apps monetized through our platform must be publicly available on the major app stores and subject to their independent review and enforcement. Economically, the money laundering theory is implausible: publishers receive only a portion of advertiser spend, meaning any attempt to “launder” funds would require forfeiting a substantial share while creating a highly visible, auditable transaction trail across multiple independent companies. Accepting the report’s premise would therefore imply a systemic failure across the broader mobile advertising and app-store ecosystem, for which the report provides no evidence.

Tasha Matsumoto, Nate Becker

19m

Stocks jump as Trump walks back European tariff threats

All sector ETFs traded higher in the broad-based rally.

Benny, the mascot for the Chicago Bulls, performs during a break between the Bulls and the New Orleans Pelicans at the United Center on January 14, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois.

Matt Phillips4h

Intel soars amid retail engagement, analyst chatter

Intel ripped toward a new 52-week high Wednesday, amid a flurry of activity in the options market and a couple of positive analyst assessments ahead of its earnings report due tomorrow.

Shortly after 11 a.m. ET, call options activity was roughly equivalent to the full-day average over the past 10 sessions. Bets on stock swings using call options have become a highly popular retail trade, suggesting that retail investors are getting interested in the shares ahead of the report from the partially nationalized American chip icon.

(That interpretation is buttressed by what we’re seeing on social sentiment-monitoring sites like SwaggyStocks, which at about 11:30 a.m. listed Intel as the fifth-most-mentioned stock on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum over the past 24 hours.)

Wall Street analysts are also chattering about the stock, with RBC and Bernstein Research both writing about it in the last 24 hours.

RBC — which has a “sector perform” (or neutral) rating on Intel — said it expects a “slight beat and largely inline outlook” when the company reports after the close Thursday.

Bernstein’s Intel watchers — who have a “market perform” (also neutral) rating on the stock — seemed a bit more cautious, writing, “Overall numbers going forward still looking high to us. Fundamentals and valuation keep us sidelined.”

“If there is no memory, there’s no AI.”

FLASH FORWARD

ByMattPhillips

WedJan 212026

Matt Phillips6h

BNP upgrades Seagate on more durable cycle

Seagate Technology Holdings was up in early trading after analysts at BNP Paribas upgraded the shares to “outperform” from “neutral” and lifted their price target to $380 a share, implying a gain of almost 15% from where the stock is currently trading.

The maker of the somewhat stodgy technology known as hard disk drives — or HDDs in tech lingo — was one of the top stocks in the S&P 500 for much of last year as it was swept up in the AI data center trade.

Data centers need tons of storage capacity, and demand from hyperscalers has driven up prices and created shortages for disk drives, an industry that is dominated by a duopoly of Seagate and Western Digital. (BNP also maintained its “outperform” rating on WDC in a note Wednesday.)

The analysts at BNP say they pushed by the buy button on the stock after becoming more convinced that the upswing in sales was durable, writing:

“We have witnessed a structural shift happening in HDD industry, toward 1) an effective duopoly, 2) higher mix toward data centers, and 3) disciplined capex investments. These have supported our expectations of long-term, through-cycle profitability for the HDD industry. We are now upgrading Seagate from Neutral to Outperform as we are gaining greater conviction that robust data center storage demand could drive an upcycle longer than we initially expected. We think a secular re-rating of Seagate (as well as Western Digital) to over 20x is justified.”