02-16-2021, 12:38 PM
(02-16-2021, 12:20 PM)fenders53 Wrote: Thanks Otter. Do they have a lockup expiring? I thought I read that. Seems like we are getting near a time for at least a small position. I know the stock is well loved on the internet.
Yes, lockup expiry happens right about now. Not as substantial a percentage of the float as your typical IPO lockup, due to their direct listing.
The only thing I didn't like in their earnings release was the huge amount of stock-based compensation (would be over $1bn/year at current rates). Would like to see that brought down.
The YoY revenue growth figures look solid.
I've always thought no one can accurately say what a growth company's share price should be. It's necessarily speculative, unlike getting cash dividends at a predictable yield. I just happen to have chosen PLTR as one of the growth picks in my portfolio, and am content to ride along with the volatility, as I like the business and think it will be a long-term leader in unstructured data analytics, which should itself be a rapidly growing sector of the economy in the coming years.
Businesses will do anything to increase productivity. From the early days of Taylorization when factory workers were timed at their tasks with stopwatches, through Six Sigma, and now to data analytics, the goal is to boost the bottom line. Companies that want that efficiency boost are part of the target market.
Governments are also a target market (and PLTR's primary customers for most of its history). They want more efficient analysis of data, too, as knowledge is power. Affects everything from national security, to delivering government services more efficiently and eliminating waste/fraud/abuse.
There are lots of companies that do data analytics. I dealt with tons of them when I was actively doing litigation work (all sorts of commercial platforms for sifting through eDiscovery). Most require data to be structured in certain ways for their technology to use it properly. PLTR excels at being able to take on the firehose of raw data, and tell companies and governments: here are a bunch of things you are missing where you could improve.
There were a ton of search engines in the early 2000s. I remember using Ask Jeeves. GOOGL had the algorithm and the marketing to dominate the market. I feel kind of the same way about PLTR. I might be wrong, but if the position goes to zero, I'll ultimately be fine.