Palantir's 11% Options Roulette: $1.9B Beat or Government Whack-a-Mole? 🎯

Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) heads into its second-quarter earnings after the U.S. market close on Monday with options traders bracing for an 11% move in either direction. Wall Street consensus points to revenue of about $1.81 billion and adjusted profit near 34 cents a share, while Palantir's own record hints at a print closer to $1.9 billion. The company has guided to revenue between $1.797 billion and $1.801 billion, a 10% step up from the prior quarter and the slowest year-over-year growth in a year. Revenue climbed 18%, 19% and 16% in the three preceding quarters. Palantir also has a track record of landing above the high end of its own range, beating by 5.7% in the fourth quarter and 6.3% in the first. Applying that pattern would deliver roughly $1.91 billion, or about $100 million more than consensus.

For the full year, Palantir raised its 2026 revenue guidance in May to between $7.650 billion and $7.662 billion, requiring about $4.22 billion in the second half, or roughly $2.11 billion per quarter. The bigger context is that even a clean beat has not guaranteed a friendly tape: after Palantir beat and raised in May, the stock fell more than 6% the next day, closing near $136 from about $146. "Valuation is part of it," Adam Coons, chief investment officer at Winthrop Capital, said in May, citing competition from OpenAI and Anthropic as a drag on Palantir's future value.

Options traders are paying for cover on both sides, similar to how investors hedged Apple's record June quarter last week. The split between Palantir's U.S. commercial and government arms is also in focus after a prior quarter in which the commercial unit produced $595 million, up 133% year over year, and the government unit produced $687 million, up 84%. The gap actually widened, with government leading by $92 million at quarter-end versus $63 million three months earlier, and forecasts for the current quarter put commercial near $717 million and government near $733 million. Palantir has committed to at least $3.224 billion of commercial revenue in 2026, which works out to roughly $876 million per quarter from here versus $595 million last quarter.

Overseas remains the laggard, with foreign sales of about $351 million, or a fifth of the total, growing 37% against 104% growth in the U.S. Shares closed Friday at $123.06 and traded near $125.38 on Monday morning.