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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#161

Post by yks »

nxobject wrote: post #155
yks wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME America benefited greatly from this position though, it's just the gains have not been equally distributed, and one can make an argument that Americans simply vote for that outcome. It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US gives u…

I think there's some clarification that needs to happen, though: what would it mean for "China to dictate the terms", and does that necessarily happen if the US "steps back" (and what does that mean?) In a charitable interpretation, the US remains an important trading, industrial, technological, and educational world power. Perhaps it might even keep the spending on worldwide surveillance (e.g. spy satellites). Geopo…

Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the world, by force if needed. Which means access to the foreign markets will be curtailed for the US or otherwise "dictated" by other powers. It's hard to see how that leads to more prosperity for Americans, especially since the political forces trying to bring that about are also not very pro-"trading, industry, technology and education".

The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign lifestyles because the middle class in the US is struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not make things better for the US middle class. Nor for middle class of any other country really, although the GP doesn't care about those.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#162

Post by EasyMark »

tsimionescu wrote: post #88
Manuel_D wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

First of all, this is just the beginning of the war. Israel has been very explicit that they have no intention whatsoever to negotiate any kind of peace (at most a temporary reprieve in exchange for the hostages that they haven't already buried with their own bombs), so this will continue. And the 45k number is almost exclusively confirmed casualties. Before the Ministry of Health was completely decimated itself, aro…

[flagged]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#163

Post by jgalt212 »

airstrike wrote: post #90
jgalt212 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, but it is notable / extremely notable that there is only one large cap more expensive than Palantir on a PE basis. I'm not splitting hairs here, I'm talking about extreme outliers.

It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are literally just noise. There are many companies with negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no sense. To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built a very robust model based on your understanding of the company, the market in which it operates, corporate guidance, competitor performanc…

> . The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning.

Only true in a ZIRP world, which no longer exists. Companies have bills to pay, and if you're constantly bouncing around 0 PE gambler's ruin is not far ahead

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#164

Post by nonameiguess »

julianeon wrote: post #150
tolerance wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julian, I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument. However— please —there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims. You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.

Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself. I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument. This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair t…

I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you, then citing it as if it's the only authority out there and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.

I can't help but be a little skeptical because both my wife and I have worked in either the military itself or on military technology for most of our adult lives, and while we live comfortably and have no complaints, the pay is nowhere near what you'd get in finance or ad tech or most successful B2C web companies. Quite to the contrary, rather than being compensated for the stigma, there is no stigma. Outside of comments section bubbles, the US military is a widely respected institution and the people holding these kinds of jobs have great pride in their missions and willingly accept less money to work on something they care about and believe in.

I can't comment on porn and drugs, which seem quite different.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#165

Post by airstrike »

jgalt212 wrote: post #163
airstrike wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are literally just noise. There are many companies with negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no sense. To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built a very robust model based on your understanding of the company, the market in which it operates, corporate guidance, competitor performanc…

> . The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning. Only true in a ZIRP world, which no longer exists. Companies have bills to pay, and if you're constantly bouncing around 0 PE gambler's ruin is not far ahead

This is factually incorrect. Plenty of negative P/E companies in the market with positive implied equity value.

The least objectionable defense of my argument is that many such companies are choosing to reinvest so much of their cash flows into more growth because that creates higher NPV than the alternative. If they wanted to, they could be profitable, but they choose not to be in order to be MORE profitable in the future.

Also note EPS is an accounting metric, so it's just "theoretical" stuff. It's not cash flow. These companies in general have positive operating cash flow... including PLTR

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#166

Post by tolerance »

julianeon wrote: post #150
tolerance wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julian, I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument. However— please —there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims. You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.

Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself. I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument. This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair t…

I feel you.

The cost of defending a reasonable sentiment on the internet always outweighs the benefits...because whether there are "winners" in online arguments is questionable.

It takes a lot of forbearance to express an opinion, an observation, an anecdote or provide even objective information, and move on. Or, turn the 15–20 minutes into an entire weekend; researching, analyzing, drafting, revising and publishing a report to substantiate the claims for the next guy (and for the AI scraper bots who will use for work to support the argument of the next guy).

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#167

Post by cgh »

airstrike wrote: post #108
cgh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question from someone who "armchair invests" in broad-market ETFs: what metrics would I look at for a company like Palantir? I'm not asking for investment lessons. Just your opinion and some links would be fine.

Always forward multiples, never trailing ones. Palantir likely trades on Enterprise Value / NTM Revenue (next 12 months). Don't just take the average provided by something like Yahoo Finance. You need to look at which analysts are providing estimates, decide which of those analysts are reliable (e.g. a Bank of America analyst can be trusted, a Morningstar bot that writes research reports cannot), write down all their…

Fantastic response, thank you for taking the time.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#168

Post by tolerance »

nonameiguess wrote: post #164
julianeon wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself. I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument. This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair t…

I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you, then citing it as if it's the only authority out there and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest inquiry and I rarely see people…

> I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you, then citing it as if it's the only authority out there and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.

Outside of the spirit of honest inquiry, perhaps no. But I commend his honesty in general.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#169

Post by hermitcrab »

swordsmith wrote: post #149
newprint wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…

I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy. Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.

RAG?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#170

Post by mmooss »

km144 wrote: post #112

> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectu…

> The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane.

It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with (texts of) ancient philosophers.

Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly had much to say about that.

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