The Motley Fool on $PLTR (Nov 3, 2026)

Coming up after the break, we're going to dive into Shopify and Palanteer's earnings. Palunteers are down about 3%. Pre-market, the reaction was much much worse.

and Palanteer was perhaps a little bit slower than expected. So, a little bit of slightly missed expectations in the in the market here. But guys, what were you seeing? Uh, Lou, you follow Palunteer more than Shopify.

Matt, more Shopify. So, we'll start with you on Palunteer. What did you see in this most earnings report? And was this an overreaction, underreaction kind of part for the course?

>> I think it's the right reaction, but let's be clear here. These were two excellent reports. And it's funny because these companies don't have a lot of overlap. I don't think they're competing for a lot of customers, but this was almost the same story on both.

And what we're, it's an expectation story. Both companies delivered great results. Both companies that in a vacuum, these are what you want the business to be doing.

But when you're Palanteer and you're trading at 110 times forward earnings or with Shopify trading at only 80 times expected earnings, you are, as the cliche goes, priced for perfection.

And anything short of perfection gets you stung.

On the uh Palunteer side, great quarter, but slower commercial bookings than we saw. We kind of had a crazy quarter-over-arter number last time, 153% up, but 11% bookings growth since the last quarter.

That's not 110 times forward earnings sort of number. It was their lowest bookings gained since 2023. So again, not the momentum you see. Lowest customer at in a long time. They only added 33 net new customers.

So great quarter, great grow growth, everything you want to see. But again, when you're trading at these expectations, it is really hard to please the market. And sure enough, the market wasn't pleased.

Yeah, high expectations is always one of the hardest things to achieve in the market these day. I I do want to follow up though because I heard we've discussed Palunteer many times before and one of the things that you have said is you know government can only result in so much growth because government only has so much money to hand out to Palanteer.

We're still seeing relatively strong growth on the government side of this business. Uh maybe not again not the as fast as it used to be but still respectable overall. Is there perhaps more legs to the government contract growth rate than you might have originally anticipated?

>> Again, it's all about expectations. I never I I never meant to say if I said that Palunteer couldn't grow its government business, but it can't grow it to the extent that you justify its multiple.

It has to do the heavy lifting on the commercial side to get anywhere near because again for all we talk about the Pentagon you know a trillion dollar budget 700 million of that goes into just kind of uh soldier pay health care for families things like that you know you just can't capture enough revenue even if you captured all of the revenue to justify the multiple

so we do need we need just crazy sort of growth on the commercial side we got slightly less we only got gaga growth grow. We didn't get crazy growth. We didn't get full on crazy.

And I think again, it's it's it's fine. It's great. Most companies would beg to have their problems, but for investors who have high expectations, it is a problem.

>> Well, it it it tanked and then came back. So there there was it wasn't a straight path. >> Yes. But uh I've been trying to make sense of Palunteer's valuation for about five years now and I haven't been able to do it yet.