Palantir Technologies Stock Forecast: PLTR makes YTD highs after SpecterOps deal
- Palantir stock has risen 133% since May 1.
- The prior support floor from 2021 at $20.55 is now the nearest price target for bulls.
- PLTR stock is overbought on the RSI’s weekly chart.
- Palantir has formed a new partnership with SpecterOps.
Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has been on a tear this summer. Since the beginning of May, the data analytics company has seen its stock rise 133%. Year to date, the stock is up 183%.
It is nearly a month since Raymond James gave Palantir a downgrade based on its strong performance, but PLTR stock has continued to produce gains. Now Palantir stock seems poised to pop another 14% at least from here.
Palantir stock gained 3.9% on Tuesday and reached 2023 highs during Wednesday trading, before closing the day flat at just above the $18 mark. NASDAQ 100 futures also ended the day almost neutral, slightly in the red.
Palantir stock news: FedStart will distribute BloodHound Enterprise software
On Tuesday, Palantir announced a new partnership with software provider SpecterOps. The latter’s BloodHound Enterprise software is a cybersecurity tool that equips government agencies with the ability to quickly respond to attacks on their active directories (AD).
“Designed to help organizations proactively and continuously identify, manage, and remediate millions of AD Attack Paths, [BloodHound Enterprise] gives IT Ops and SecOps professionals the tools needed to dramatically and measurably improve their AD security posture with minimal effort,” Palantir said in a statement.
Palantir will use its FedStart platform to make BloodHound Enterprise available to a multitude of its existing US government agency clients. FedStart is an accredited platform that software makers can use to run their software offerings within. This is because FedStart has created a secure environment that is already FedRAMP and IL-5 compliant. Without FedStart, companies often have to spend an inordinate amount of money and time to become federally compliant.
"We created Palantir FedStart with the goal of enabling companies to reduce friction and deliver solutions to the government at the speed of innovation," said Akash Jain, president of Palantir USG. "SpecterOps’ BloodHound Enterprise is one of those companies at the cutting edge of attack path management whose solutions should be in the hands of the government without delay."
This announcement comes just a week after Palantir announced a separate partnership with Carahsoft Technology to distribute its Apollo platform to more state and local governments.
AI stocks FAQs
What is artificial intelligence?
First and foremost, artificial intelligence is an academic discipline that seeks to recreate the cognitive functions, logical understanding, perceptions and pattern recognition of humans in machines. Often abbreviated as AI, artificial intelligence has a number of sub-fields including artificial neural networks, machine learning or predictive analytics, symbolic reasoning, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and expert systems. The end goal of the entire field is the creation of artificial general intelligence or AGI. This means producing a machine that can solve arbitrary problems that it has not been trained to solve.
What are AI applications?
There are a number of different use cases for artificial intelligence. The most well-known of them are generative AI platforms that use training on large language models (LLMs) to answer text-based queries. These include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard platform. Midjourney is a program that generates original images based on user-created text. Other forms of AI utilize probabilistic techniques to determine a quality or perception of an entity, like Upstart’s lending platform, which uses an AI-enhanced credit rating system to determine credit worthiness of applicants by scouring the internet for data related to their career, wealth profile and relationships. Other types of AI use large databases from scientific studies to generate new ideas for possible pharmaceuticals to be tested in laboratories. YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and other content aggregators use AI applications to suggest personalized content to users by collecting and organizing data on their viewing habits.
What are some stocks that fit into the AI field?
Nvidia (NVDA) is a semiconductor company that builds both the AI-focused computer chips and some of the platforms that AI engineers use to build their applications. Many proponents view Nvidia as the pick-and-shovel play for the AI revolution since it builds the tools needed to carry out further applications of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a “big data” analytics company. It has large contracts with the US intelligence community, which uses its Gotham platform to sift through data and determine intelligence leads and inform on pattern recognition. Its Foundry product is used by major corporations to track employee and customer data for use in predictive analytics and discovering anomalies. Microsoft (MSFT) has a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the latter of which has not gone public. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s technology with its Bing search engine.
Could artificial intelligence generate another stock bubble?
Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022, many stocks associated with AI began to rally. Nvidia for instance advanced well over 200% in the six months following the release. Immediately, pundits on Wall Street began to wonder whether the market was being consumed by another tech bubble. Famous investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has held major investments in both Palantir and Nvidia, said that bubbles never last just six months. He said that if the excitement over AI did become a bubble, then the extreme valuations would last at least two and a half years or long like the DotCom bubble in the late 1990s. At the midpoint of 2023, the best guess is that the market is not in a bubble, at least for now. Yes, Nvidia traded at 27 times forward sales at that time, but analysts were predicting extremely high revenue growth for years to come. At the height of the DotCom bubble, the NASDAQ 100 traded for 60 times earnings, but in mid-2023 the index traded at 25 times earnings.
Palantir stock forecast
Palantir stock easily broke above the $17.06 support floor that comes from a major sell-off in May 2021. The next prior support level, which could turn into resistance, sits at $20.55. That floor held up in both March and July of 2021, so it has more significance than the $17.06 level. A retest at $20.55 would amount to a 14% gain from here.
A break of $20.55 would give bulls a large open field to retest the $26 to $29 supply zone. This zone proved to be stubbornly resistant to a number of rallies during the first year after the stock’s IPO.
Still, bears will note that Palantir stock is overbought on the weekly chart’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) and has been for much of the time since mid-May. If a consolidation phase is in order, then that $17.05 level might serve a supportive purpose once again. Otherwise, the 8-week Simple Moving Average (SMA) sits at $15.63.
Palantir stock is currently trading around $18, which was the price target given by both Bank of America and Raymond James over the past month.
PLTR weekly chart
Author
Clay Webster
FXStreet
Clay Webster grew up in the US outside Buffalo, New York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He began investing after college following the 2008 financial crisis.
