Palantir (Nasdaq: PLTR) opened Thursday trading slightly below where it closed yesterday. However, that situation quickly changed and its share price rapidly rose in early morning trading. For most of the afternoon, the stock has traded up around 7%.
Let’s look at three key storylines that could be moving Palantir’s stock north this week.
1. Wall Street Upgrades Keep Pouring In
After Palantir surpassed earnings expectations on Monday night, many Wall Street banks were capitulated and raised their price targets by significant amounts. On Wednesday, Citi raised their price target on Palantir to $110 from a previous target of $42, though they kept a neutral rating on the company’s shares.
Citi highlighted that Palantir’s booking looked especially strong. The company recorded triple-digit growth in its U.S. commercial bookings. There were numerous upgrades that targeted the stock but were more closely related to Tuesday’s gains. Bank of America took their price target up to $125 from a prior target of $90.
Other upgrades includes Jefferies increasing their price target from $28 to $60, which is still dramatically below today’s price. The researcher noted that Palantir would need accelerate growth to 50% and hold it for four years to trade at 18-times 2028 revenue estimates.
Mizuho upgraded Palantir to $80 from a prior target of $44, Morgan Stanley increased its price target from $60 to $95. RBC Capital previously had Palantir at only an $11 price target and was forced to begrudgingly raise that figure to $40.
2. Tighter Integration with Grok
This morning Palantir announced that Grok is officially available in AIP. Grok is the chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, a company that recently raised at more than a $40 billion valuation and is aggressively building massive data centers to keep it near the leading edge of the AI race.
While Grok integration won’t significantly move the needle on growth in the near term, it is a leading LLM with particular expertise in real-time data thanks to its deep partnership with X (Elon Musk is the CEO of both companies). The pitch from Palantir would be that AIP makes LLMs a commodity, as product users can easily switch between LLMs with unique strengths with the click of a button.
It’s worth noting that an Architect from Palantir posted a video more than 10 days ago revealing Grok was now a model option in AIP, but the post attracted little attention relative to Palantir’s announcement this morning.
3. Continuing Momentum from Earnings
Finally, we are likely seeing continuing momentum from Monday’s earnings call. As a percentage of shares sold short, Palantir isn’t one of the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. However, it does maintain a little below a 4% short interest, and Tuesday’s move may be squeezing much of that short interest out of the stock.
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