How to buy, sell and short Palantir shares

How to buy or invest in Palantir shares

There are two ways to take a ‘buy’ position on Palantir shares. You can either trade on the price of shares rising with CFDs, or you can invest in the company directly by share trading.

How much would it cost to invest in Palantir?

Palantir is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the PLTR ticker, which makes it eligible for our best commission on US shares. This means that you can invest in Palantir shares for zero commission, provided you opened three or more positions on your share trading account in the previous calendar month.

If investing isn’t for you, then we also offer CFDs which enable you to speculate on the price movements of Palantir shares without having to own them directly. With CFDs, you’ll be able to:

• Go short on the share and profit from a decrease in share price.
• Get full exposure with a 20%-25% deposit on almost all of our tier one shares¹

How to sell and short Palantir shares

Selling Palantir shares means that you’ll be exiting your investment position, while shorting Palantir shares means that you’ll be taking a speculative position on the Palantir share price falling with CFDs.

Palantir live share price

Palantir shares: the basics

Palantir is listed on the NYSE under the PLTR ticker. The company started trading on 30 September 2020 at $10 a share, which was more than the reference price of the NYSE, set at $7.25 a share. This share price set the company’s market cap at the $16 billion mark, which was less than the estimated market cap of $20 billion.

Since the IPO, Palantir shares had remained within a band of $9 to $10 a share at the time of writing (27 October 2020).

Palantir: a brief history

Palantir has been around since 2003, when the company was founded by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and several others. Peter Thiel is still at the company as chairman, and the current CEO is Alex Karp – another founder.

The company has a history steeped in secrecy, with very little known about its operations of the projects that it has carried out for government entities until recent years. It has however, never struggled to secure funding from outside investors, managing to raise over $2.75 billion even before the company went public in September 2020.

Palantir key personnel

Palantir doesn’t have any definitive information about the company leadership on its website, but we do know the following roles, gathered from employee profiles on LinkedIn:

What is Palantir’s business model?

Palantir’s business model is based on big data analytics. The company operates business-to-business (B2B), and its data analytics platform is used by clients including the CIA, Centre for Disease Control, the US Army, the US Navy and the National Security Agency (NSA).

Plus, the company also worked on a track and trace system for the US government during the coronavirus pandemic, as well as foreign nations like the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

Palantir has three main projects: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry and Palantir Apollo. Each of these has a specific function.

Palantir Gotham and Palantir Foundry are platforms. Gotham integrates and transforms data from multiple streams – including emails, documents, images and videos – into a single data asset. Foundry reimagines how people use data by removing the barriers between back-end data management and front-end data analysis. Palantir Apollo is the delivery software that powers Palantir’s platforms in the public cloud and beyond.

Each of these projects has been integral to Palantir’s development as a cloud computer and data analytics firm since its founding – and they all have an essential role to play in the company’s business model.

How has Palantir been performing?

Before its IPO, Palantir has never reported a profitable year. But, for the first six months of 2020 the company reported revenue of $481.2 million – and this could be expected to increase in H2 2020, particularly now that the company’s stock is available to investors, which could help to boost expansion and revenue.

Who are Palantir’s main competitors?

Palantir’s main competitors include Tableau, Tyler Technologies, Verint, and Splunk. These are all technology companies that focus on business intelligence or data management. Splunk is the largest of these companies, with a market cap of almost $35 billion at the time of writing (27 October 2020).

Palantir share price: how to analyse Palantir shares

You should use both technical analysis and fundamental analysis to analyse Palantir shares and their value.

• Technical analysis looks at chart patterns, technical indicators and historical price action
• Fundamental analysis is based on the fundamentals of a company including its revenue, or profit and loss statements

Our trading platform has a range of tools to help you trade and analysis Palantir shares, including in-built newsfeeds from our expert team and Reuters, as well as technical indicators that can be overlaid at the click of a button.

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Footnotes
¹Deposits on leveraged trades are 20%-25% for 99.14% of tier one shares (correct as of 1 June 2020). For more information, view our share trading margin rates
²Tax laws are subject to change and depend on individual circumstances. Tax law may differ in a jurisdiction other than the UK.