Palantir Gets Price Hike From Wedbush Amid High Valuation

Key Points

• This week, Palantir shares jumped 6.8%, fueled by bullish analyst upgrades and strong enterprise deal momentum.
• Wedbush analyst Dan Ives raised his price target on PLTR stock to $160, expecting it to rival Oracle in scale.
• With a P/S over 120x, some investors still eye potential pullbacks despite explosive growth.

Palantir Technologies Inc. NASDAQ: PLTR continues to defy expectations. As of midday trading on July 14, PLTR stock is trading at $147. That’s more than 6.8% in the last week. It also puts the stock within an eyelash of the psychologically significant $150 level.

At least one analyst believes it will get there. Dan Ives of Wedbush, who described Palantir as the “Lionel Messi of AI,” has another bullish prediction. Ives believes that PLTR stock is on the “golden path to become the next Oracle” in the coming years.

Despite acknowledging that the valuation is expensive, Ives raised his price target on PLTR stock to $160 from $140. However, Ives believes the company’s positioning in the AI revolution will make it a core winner in the technology sector, as companies spend trillions of dollars on AI in future years.

Can the Growth Trend Continue?

Palantir expects to generate between $3.89 billion and $3.9 billion in revenue for the full year 2025. That would include the company’s first $1 billion quarter. However, the real story may be in Palantir’s operating margin. The 36% growth in revenue bumped the company’s operating margins to 36%. That was a

Analysts expect Palantir to achieve 9.6% earnings growth in 2025, a 24% year-over-year (YOY) increase. This reinforces a point several analysts have noted for some time: as Palantir generates more revenue, each dollar it brings in is more profitable.

In the last quarter alone, Palantir closed 139 deals worth at least $1 million. Of those deals, 51 were valued at at least $5 million, and 31 were valued at at least $10 million.

Skeptics will say that earnings reports are backward-looking. What about the current and future quarters? Since the company’s first quarter earnings report in May, it has announced at least six new deals. Those deals don’t include the expectation that Palantir will be one of the companies selected to assist the United States with its Golden Dome project.

The Bad News About the Wedbush Price Target

Even if Palantir hits Wedbush’s $160 price target, it’s already trading at around $142 per share. That’s a gain of over 10%. However, investors who were to buy into PLTR stock now are looking for larger gains than that.

Many investors patiently wait for a pullback in PLTR stock. History suggests it could happen. The recent surge in PLTR stock has pushed the company’s price-to-sales (P/S) ratio to 120.47x.

Context is important, but not necessarily bullish. Most software companies trade at a multiple of 10x or 20x sales. For example, Microsoft Corp. NASDAQ: MSFT trades at around 15x sales, and Oracle Corp. NYSE: ORCL trades at around 11x sales.

But the comparisons get tricky. First, because Palantir’s market cap is about half that of Oracle’s and about 1/10th of Microsoft’s. Second, because Palantir isn’t a company that promotes easy comparisons. One such company is BigBear.ai NYSE: BBAI.

However, BigBear.ai has a market cap of only $1 billion and is not yet profitable. Palantir is well on its way to transitioning from a niche data contractor to a mainstream enterprise AI leader.

A Higher Floor Will Keep Retail Investors Engaged

The exciting news for long-term Palantir shareholders is that its floor continues to move higher. With the new price targets from Wedbush and Loop Capital included, the Palantir analyst forecasts on MarketBeat now give PLTR stock a consensus price target of $90.37.

That would be a dip of over 38%. However, just three months ago, analysts had a consensus price of $74.95, and one year ago, the consensus price was $21.25.

That means in a single year, analysts have increased their consensus price on PLTR stock by 325% despite persistent valuation concerns. Perhaps even more importantly, institutional investors have significantly increased their buying in the last year. To be fair, some of that is due to Palantir’s inclusion in the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100. However, both of those are long-term catalysts for future growth.

A higher price target also means that retail investors, many of whom bought Palantir stock when it was under $20, or even under $10 per share, will likely view a pullback to $90 as a buying opportunity, not a reason for panic selling, as some skeptics predict.