PLTR

Original Thesis

Palantir is the rare government-defense software platform with a credible commercial wedge. The Artificial Intelligence Platform represented the unlock moment — a repeatable way to deploy AI on private enterprise data with genuine switching costs and network-effect moats. The combination of durable government revenue and accelerating commercial ARR at an early inflection made a speculative position in the Roth IRA compelling.

What Changed

The commercial thesis played out faster and at greater scale than the entry setup anticipated. Within 14 months PLTR more than tripled. At those levels the stock was discounting 10–15 years of uninterrupted hypergrowth. EV/NTM Revenue expanded north of 70×, pricing near-perfection into the multiple. The business was executing; the valuation had run far ahead of even an optimistic base case.

Why I Exited

Valuation discipline. When the implied growth hurdle becomes implausible to clear, maintaining the position is not conviction — it is hope. Capital was reallocated toward positions with genuinely asymmetric setups and lower embedded expectations. Exiting a stock still in an uptrend is uncomfortable; exiting when the math stops working is sound portfolio management.

Lesson

High-conviction names are not exempt from valuation risk. The entry thesis can be correct and the exit can still be correct. Tracking implied expectations against realized results is the right discipline — when the stock price prices in best-case outcomes years out, the margin of safety disappears regardless of business quality.