Palantir is supposed to be the most expensive stock in the S&P 500. It is also, over the last twelve months, one of the most disappointing — and those two facts are the same fact. At $189.67, PLTR is up 5.9% over a year and 13.0% year to date. In that same year the company roughly doubled its revenue. The stock has gone almost nowhere while the business went vertical, which means the multiple did not expand. It collapsed. Palantir has spent twelve months de-rating in broad daylight, and almost nobody is describing it that way because the share price never fell far enough to make the story obvious.
Run the arithmetic that makes it concrete. Palantir’s Q2 2026 delivered 93% year-on-year revenue growth and management raised full-year guidance to $8.150–8.158 billion. Derive the diluted share count from the GAAP figures — $1.062 billion of net income at $0.41 per share implies roughly 2.59 billion shares — and $189.67 gives a market capitalisation near $491 billion, or about 60 times this year’s guided revenue. A year ago, at $179.12 and with a trailing revenue base less than half the size, the same stock carried a price-to-sales multiple roughly twice that. The best operating year in Palantir’s history has been spent paying down its own valuation. That is the whole story, and it is the reason the bear case is weaker than it looks and the bull case is slower than it looks.
Key facts
- PLTR closed at $189.67 on 25 September 2026, down 1.52% from $192.59 — stockanalysis.com daily closes
- Up just 5.9% over twelve months and 13.0% year to date, versus a 52-week range of $106.37 to $207.52 — FinanceFeeds calculation from daily closes
- Q2 2026 revenue $1.935 billion, up 93% year on year; US commercial revenue $764 million, up 149% — Palantir Q2 2026 results, 3 August 2026
- Rule of 40 score of 155%, GAAP net income $1.062 billion at a 55% margin — Palantir Q2 2026 results
- Full-year 2026 revenue guidance raised to $8.150–8.158 billion, adjusted free cash flow to $4.5–4.7 billion — Palantir Q2 2026 results
- Polymarket’s October market prices a close above $190 at 48.5% — a coin flip — with a 19.5% chance of touching $234 and a 28% chance of touching $156 — Polymarket, 27 September 2026
- The US Army moved TITAN into production on 1 September with a $127 million delivery order — reported September 2026
What the numbers actually say
Palantir’s second quarter, per the results filed with the SEC on 3 August 2026, is one of the strongest quarters any software company of this size has produced.
- Revenue $1.935 billion, up 93% year on year and 19% sequentially
- US revenue $1.573 billion, up 115%; US commercial $764 million, up 149%; US government $809 million, up 90%
- Closed total contract value of $3.373 billion, including a record $2.132 billion of US commercial TCV, up 153%
- US commercial remaining deal value $6.238 billion, up 124%
- GAAP operating income $912 million at a 47% margin; adjusted operating income $1.194 billion at 62%
- Adjusted free cash flow $1.220 billion at a 63% margin; cash and short-term Treasuries of $9.2 billion
- 220 deals of at least $1 million, 98 of at least $5 million, 73 of at least $10 million
“Demand for AI sovereignty has now been unleashed. And Palantir is the only company that has demonstrated it can transform tokens into actual economic value,” said Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and chief executive. “This quarter was otherworldly: our U.S. commercial revenue grew 149% year-over-year, our overall revenue grew 93% year-over-year, and our Rule of 40 score climbed to 155%.”
A Rule of 40 score of 155% is not a normal number. The convention holds that a healthy software business should have revenue growth plus operating margin summing to 40. Palantir is running at nearly four times that threshold while generating a 63% free cash flow margin. Whatever else is arguable about this company, the financial engine is not.
So why has the stock done nothing?
Because it started the period priced for exactly this. This is the part that separates Palantir from the rest of the AI complex, and it is worth sitting with.
Across 2026, Intel rose 212% while shrinking its workforce by tens of thousands. SanDisk rose 546% on a memory pricing cycle. Palantir rose 13% while nearly doubling revenue and posting a 55% GAAP net margin. The market did not reward the best fundamental performer in that group — it reclassified it. A year ago PLTR traded on a multiple that implied hypergrowth would continue indefinitely; today it trades on a multiple that implies hypergrowth will continue for a while. That is a downgrade in expectations dressed up as a flat share price, and it is why the chart above looks like a year of noise between $106 and $207.
The June low of $106.37 is the tell. At that point PLTR had fallen 49% from its November 2025 closing high of $207.18 — a genuine bear market in a company that was compounding revenue at 90%-plus. It has since rallied 78% off that low without making a new high. Investors who describe PLTR as “never going down” have not looked at the last twelve months.
Sentiment in the retail base has stayed durable through it. On r/PLTR, the most-upvoted comment on the September Army contract thread was simply “1 system to retire 9!!” — the community reading the deal as displacement of legacy vendors rather than incremental revenue. A separate thread was titled, flatly, “The thesis has STILL not changed.” That is a holder base arguing with a price chart, not with a business.
What the prediction markets price
Here is a data point almost no PLTR coverage uses: there is a live, continuously-priced probability distribution for this stock, and it disagrees with both the bulls and the bears.
As of 27 September 2026, Polymarket’s end-of-October market prices PLTR closing above $190 at 48.5% — statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip against a $189.67 spot. Above $200 is 35.5%. Above $178 is 64.5%. The touch market for October gives a 19.5% chance of trading at $234 and a 28% chance of trading at $156 at some point in the month.
Read that distribution properly. The market is pricing a slightly fat left tail over one month and treating the central case as dead flat. It is not pricing a blow-off top and it is not pricing a collapse. For a stock whose narrative oscillates between “the most important software company on earth” and “the most obvious bubble in the index,” the crowd with money on the line is remarkably bored. Note that these October contracts are thinly traded, so treat them as a sentiment reading rather than a deep, efficient market.
The government business and the ceiling problem
Palantir’s US government revenue grew 90% to $809 million in Q2, and the autumn news flow has been strong. The US Army moved its Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node — TITAN — into production on 1 September, with Palantir receiving a $127 million delivery order covering eight initial systems over 18 months, and the Army signalling a further order in fiscal 2027. Separately, Palantir holds a ten-year enterprise agreement with the Army carrying a $10 billion ceiling.
That $10 billion figure is where careful reading matters, and it is the single most misquoted number attached to this company. A ceiling is not a contract. It is the maximum the Army may spend over a decade, not obligated spending, and defence ceilings routinely go substantially unused. Palantir’s own definitions section makes an equivalent point about its commercial metrics: TCV and RDV “presume the exercise of all contract options available to our customers and no termination of contracts,” while “the majority of our contracts are subject to termination provisions, including for convenience.”
So the $6.238 billion US commercial RDV and the $10 billion Army ceiling are both real and both soft. Anyone building a bull case by multiplying headline contract values is double-counting optionality the customer has not exercised. The disciplined number is the guidance: $8.15 billion this year, which the company will almost certainly hit, having raised it twice.
Palantir’s government concentration cuts both ways in another respect too. We covered the FAA smart-contract award Palantir did not win earlier this month, a reminder that federal procurement is competitive even where Palantir is incumbent, and the restrictions Palantir and Nvidia placed on internal Anthropic model use show how tightly the company polices the data-sovereignty pitch that Karp built the quarter’s messaging around.
It is worth noting who else is exposed to the same federal demand. Government-AI comparables have had a far wilder year: our BigBear.ai scenario page covers a company chasing similar contracts at a fraction of the scale and with none of the margin profile. And on the ownership side, the rebuilt Peter Thiel 13F portfolio is a reminder that Palantir’s most-watched insiders have been reducing rather than adding through this period — a fact that sits awkwardly beside the retail conviction on display in r/PLTR.
Bull case: $285
The bull case is arithmetically simple and operationally demanding: grow into the multiple without losing it.
Assume 2027 revenue growth of roughly 50% — a sharp deceleration from 93%, which is what happens to every company at this scale — taking revenue to about $12.2 billion. Hold the current 60 times sales multiple and market capitalisation reaches roughly $738 billion, or about $285 per share, 50% above spot.
The conditions: US commercial has to keep converting. It grew 149% and closed a record $2.132 billion of TCV in a single quarter, so the pipeline supports it. Margins have to hold — at a 62% adjusted operating margin there is no cost lever left to pull, so growth must come from volume. And critically, the multiple has to stop compressing, which after a year of de-rating is the least certain assumption on the list.
$285 would be a new all-time high, roughly 38% above the November 2025 closing high of $207.18.
Bear case: $118
The bear case does not require the business to break. It requires the de-rating to continue at the same pace it has run for twelve months.
Take the same $12.2 billion of 2027 revenue and apply 25 times sales — still a rich multiple, roughly where premium software names trade at far lower growth rates — and you get about $305 billion, or $118 per share. That is 38% below spot and 11% above the June low of $106.37, a level this stock already visited in the last twelve months.
The triggers: a quarter where US commercial growth decelerates below 100%, a government budget cycle that defers the fiscal 2027 TITAN order, or simply a rotation out of high-multiple software. None of those is exotic. The June drawdown to $106.37 happened without any of them being dramatic.
The instructive point is that the bear case and the bull case share the same revenue forecast. The entire $167 spread between them is the multiple. Palantir is now, unambiguously, a valuation trade rather than a growth trade — which is a strange thing to say about a company growing 93%.
What happens next
1. The multiple keeps compressing through 2027, even if the stock rises. The causal chain: revenue growth mechanically decelerates as the base grows, and a 60-times-sales multiple cannot survive a deceleration to 40% growth. Expect PLTR to make modest price progress while its price-to-sales ratio falls further — the same pattern as the last twelve months. This is the single most likely outcome and the one least discussed.
2. The next fiscal-2027 Army order is the catalyst that matters, not the $10 billion ceiling. The Army has signalled a follow-on TITAN order. An actual obligated dollar figure would do more for the stock than any restatement of ceiling values, because it converts optionality into revenue.
3. Q3 revenue lands at or just above the $2.160–2.164 billion guide. Palantir has raised guidance twice this year and has beaten its own numbers consistently; the guide implies 12% sequential growth against 19% in Q2, which looks deliberately conservative. A beat is likely. Whether a beat moves the stock is a different question, and the last four quarters suggest it may not.
Palantir’s problem is not execution. It is that execution was already in the price in September 2025, and the twelve months since have been spent proving it rather than exceeding it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Palantir stock prediction for the next twelve months?
Our scenarios are a $285 bull case and a $118 bear case against a spot price of $189.67 as of 25 September 2026. Both assume roughly $12.2 billion of 2027 revenue; the difference between them is entirely the price-to-sales multiple, at 60 times versus 25 times.
Why has PLTR barely moved despite 93% revenue growth?
Because the multiple compressed. PLTR is up just 5.9% over twelve months while revenue roughly doubled, which means its price-to-sales ratio fell by around half. The stock started the period priced for the growth it subsequently delivered.
How expensive is Palantir stock right now?
At $189.67 with roughly 2.59 billion diluted shares, market capitalisation is near $491 billion — about 60 times the company’s own full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $8.15 billion, and roughly 116 times annualised Q2 earnings of $0.41 per share.
Is Palantir’s $10 billion Army contract real revenue?
Not directly. The $10 billion is a ceiling — the maximum potential value over ten years — not obligated spending. The concrete award announced in September was a $127 million delivery order for eight TITAN systems over 18 months. Palantir’s own filings caution that contract-value metrics presume all options are exercised and no contracts are terminated.
What do prediction markets say about PLTR?
Polymarket priced a close above $190 at the end of October at 48.5% as of 27 September 2026, with a 19.5% chance of touching $234 and a 28% chance of touching $156 during the month. The distribution implies a flat central case with a modestly fatter downside tail. These contracts are thinly traded.
What was Palantir’s lowest price in the past year?
PLTR’s 52-week intraday low was $106.37, reached on 25 June 2026 — a 49% drawdown from the November 2025 closing high of $207.18. The stock has since recovered about 78% from that low without setting a new high.
This article is analysis and information, not investment advice. Scenario levels are FinanceFeeds estimates derived from the sources cited and may be wrong. Markets can and do move outside modelled ranges.