$PLTR I do believe there will be some election ramifications for Palantir related to government growth, but Palantir will still see growth there. US Commercial is continuing on a tear, in part thanks to Agent Camps.
But what will be particularly interesting is international expansion. This has been Palantir's slowest growing segment, but there are significant tailwinds in this space next year, which may offset Gotham growing a bit less rapidly.
Of note, Changshin and Palantir announced a partnership today, but the large uptick in international growth is likely coming in Q2 or Q3 of next year.
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What's particularly interesting here with Predictions Markets is we have extreme validation that they are effective at predicting outcomes.
As I noted last night, there was a disconnect between polling data (which favored Democrats) and predictions markets (which favored the Blue Tsunami).
Of course, volume comes with issues. I saw $HOOD experienced issues with filling events contracts last night. Hopefully they resolve that for the next time when volume spikes.
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Kalshi absolutely dominated election night with ~$2.6B in midterm trading volume.
That’s more than 4x the ~$600M traded on Polymarket.
This is more what I expected. It's still low liquidity though.
Also, go $AEHR!
I guess the markets actually hate gridlock?
I guess the markets actually hate gridlock?
This is becoming a Blue Tsunami, not just a Blue Wave…
- EARLY EXIT POLLS SHOWING DEMS WILL WIN THE SENATE AND HOUSE DECISIVELY
- PREDICTION MARKETS SHOW A 95% CHANCE FOR DEM SENATE CONTROL, 99% CHANCE FOR HOUSE CONTROL JUST 15 MIN AFTER FIRST POLLS CLOSE
Market’s reaction even after knowing for the past month that democrats had a very strong chance of winning?
$QQQ Nasdaq down 1.25%. I guess the market didn’t expect it to be this blue.
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There's a fairly wide spread for most somewhat close/contested races in prediction markets vs what we see in the polls.
If we see the outcomes come out very differently than the predictions markets are showing, there's a good chance that some were intentionally stacking the deck in favor of one candidate, knowing that these markets are often used in lieu of polls.
The good news is it's a self-correcting problem, as this spread between PM and polls would be seen as an opportunity.
Tonight will be interesting either way.
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$FIGR Very strong CLM weekly numbers from Figure, who reports earnings next Thursday AM.
$PLTR While the RPO didn't increase much this quarter, billings absolutely did. These, along with deals landed in the prior two quarters, are what helps me project the revenue with fairly close accuracy.
After 2023, revenue the following quarter has always exceeded billings, and that spread has widened.
Over the past 4 quarters, this spread has averaged 11.69%. If that average holds, Palantir will post $2.74b in Q4, representing 95% Y/Y growth and a significant beat over the $2.45b the street expects and is higher than the ~$2.65b Palantir guided for.
It wouldn't surprise me to see $2.8b given the cadence of deals landed in Q2.
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$PLTR One of the "bearish" parts of the earnings for Palantir was the lack of Q/Q growth in RPO.
While we may see some slowdown from the nearly 100% growth they are putting up, it's not as significant as the RPO #'s might indicate. Per Glazer,
"As a reminder, RPO is primarily comprised of our commercial business, as it does not take into account contracts with an initial term of less than 12 months and contractual obligations that fall beyond termination for convenience clauses, both of which are common in most of our government business."
Palantir noted that they signed multiple 8-figure deals that were shorter than typical, and are likely to expand in terms of duration and monetization.
This is worth keeping an eye on for sure, but I believe it explains the sequential weakness for the RPO figures.
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$AEHR And the market is loving it.
$AEHR People are waking up to Aehr Test Systems after yet another phenomenal earnings. They posted a triple beat, trouncing EPS expectations, while revenue exploded. In addition to the results, the earnings call itself was their best I've ever heard over the past 5 years.
Here's what stood out to me.
GUIDANCE
Aehr raised guidance to $150m for the year. If you look at revenue in Q1 ($33m) and their effective backlog, most (if not all) which will be delivered in this fiscal year, that gets them to $142.3m.
When asked by an analyst on how conservative these figures seemed, CEO Gayn Erickson said, "We just thought 150 is a pretty nice, clean number for us to be conservative at this point."
This is more than just being conservative, and more than just sandbagging, implying that they will only receive and deliver $7.7m beyond the backlog and realized revenue through next June!
Let's pretend they don't get a single new order for units. Servicing revenue alone likely gets them to $150m. On top of that, contactors revenue is only partly built into the backlog. Yet the customer that is ordering tons of Sonoma units, and "Importantly, the customer forecast that this second processor will ultimately reach higher production volumes than its first processor currently in production on Sonoma." That's upside.
Given the cadence of new orders and what they said regarding their lead Hyperscaler, there's a decent chance we see $AEHR land on around $200m on the year. While that doesn't sound impressive in isolation, it represents a 4x over the prior year's numbers.
LINES IN THE WATER
There are a number of whales that are circling, and many are massive. The most significant and nearest one to landing is probably $AMD or $NVDA, as Gayn explicitly ruled out the ASIC guys last October, and the description and ramp can match either.
This engagement went from potential, to showing fantastic results during engineering qualifications last quarter (expanding to two other product lines for those tests), to an order for one unit put in the company's OSAT production line. We won't see any orders from this company until next year at earliest, and revenue might not be realized from them until the 2nd half of next year, but this would instantly become their largest client, as these are the premium Fox-XP systems, which command higher prices and better margins.
Gayn has said in the past when this wasn't going well (an issue with the clock speed a couple of quarters ago). And he has been clear when something is pretty far away or uncertain. There is no guarantee here, but from the context of the earnings call, it sounds like they are engaged with both $AMD and $NVDA, probably all (or all but one) Hyperscaler, and multiple other customers.
They won't win them all, but per Gayn, "But you pick off one, two, three high runners, and these are big numbers. You get a customer who's saying, 'I would like to consider this for all my devices or most of my devices or every device you cold do it,' and all of a sudden, it becomes the biggest deal you've ever looked at before.
THEY DID THE MATH FOR US
Gayn laid out the TAM opportunity in the AI processors space. For every 1m units shipped, the production line would require 5-10 of Aehr's systems, delivering 45-90 wafers of capacity (each system configured for AI processor tests has up to 9 racks). That comes to $35-$70m for each million units of production.
Gayn stated AI accelerator markets in '27 are 25m units across $NVDA, $AMD, and the ASICs guys, and CPUs are 2x this.
The customer mentioned above, if landed, would generate around $250m in FY '27 revenue for the company alone. This is why Aehr keeps expanding production capacity and outsourced production of their PLBI Sonoma units to an OSAT. They HAVE to demonstrate the ability to deliver, and there is plenty of room for some massive orders in the queue.
Per Gayn, "I am pressing on the team to be able to put a lot more than that in place for the following year or maybe even pull in. There are ways that we are working with our subcons."
THE COMPETITION / MOAT
Three notes on competition.
One, they indicated that their first WLBI customer provided a lot of visibility into the space, and these guys all know each other. "They, we believe, have been very visible to other customers who are aware of it. Either they walk by it at the OSATs or they're just aware of it. There have been even some rumors about them going up and publicly talking about it that I'm not ready to verify yet right now... they all feed on each other, not dissimilar to some of the stuff that was going on in SiC before, obviously, the EVs sort of just went quiet, right? We were starting to win EVERYTHING."
Second, on $TER moving upstream to PLBI, it's competition for sure, but not quite in the way that the market fears. Gayn gave a lot of technical details on this, from voltage, to how the burn-in process isn't quite what Teradyne's Titan unit is made for, to SLT burn-in (which is not great), to throughput (1/4th a wafer at a time with 9 wafers in parallel vs one device at a time).
"We are playing with a different set of deck of cards, if you will, than our competitors are."
Lastly, they're still really the only game in town for WLBI testing.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
This is the first I have heard of the "super-duper Wafer Paks" (they call them Die temperature control - DiTC, but I like Larry's affectation).
"It has the ability to actually independently manipulate the thermals of each of the die under test at the wafer level, which is nuts. People have never even contemplated that before. It's integrated into our WaferPak and custom-designed for each of the wafers under test."
Beyond just thermal runway avoidance, which Gayn talked about, this is going to improve ATE outcomes tremendously.
"The die do not all burn in and have the same leakages, so they are all going to generate different power and different heat, self-heating. The way people will do that is they will look at the hottest die and control the temperatures on that one to avoid it from going into thermal runaway. But when they do that, the coldest die is not at the burn-in condition. And their customers are like, "Well, what are we going to do?" So, that device is actually not burnt in optimally, so that infant mortality or that failure rate will sneak through all the way to the data center."
Honestly, this would have sounded like science fiction two years ago. This will be in production at the start of the year. People question how a little company like this can stay ahead of the giants (Advantest and Teradyne), but their R&D continues to strengthen their moat.
This has tremendous upside with fantastic execution and a very clear roadmap. Yes, I added shares.
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$PLTR This is a great catch. People have complained that insiders only sell the stock. Thiel looks like he is going to be buying by December 16th.
Page 88 of the 10-Q.
Insider sales aren't always bearish, but buys are always bullish.
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Peter Thiel has set up a plan to buy more $PLTR stock after reducing his stake for years. Every other insider plan in the 10-Q is for selling.
This would allow his holding company to potentially buy up to 4M shares until December 2027.
He already owns about 98M shares. This would add about 4% more.
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Between demand, expanding use cases, tight supply, tokenomics improving fueling Jevons paradox and stock valuations, this appears to be the opposite of a bubble.
I know it has been incredibly rough to be positioned anywhere near AI or the second half of this year, but this appears durable.
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BofA: AI may be structurally opposite [to the 90s dot-com bust]: abundant demand chasing scarce compute🔥🔥
$MU $ARM $SNDK
$PLTR One of the "bearish" parts of the earnings for Palantir was the lack of Q/Q growth in RPO.
While we may see some slowdown from the nearly 100% growth they are putting up, it's not as significant as the RPO #'s might indicate. Per Glazer,
"As a reminder, RPO is primarily comprised of our commercial business, as it does not take into account contracts with an initial term of less than 12 months and contractual obligations that fall beyond termination for convenience clauses, both of which are common in most of our government business."
Palantir noted that they signed multiple 8-figure deals that were shorter than typical, and are likely to expand in terms of duration and monetization.
This is worth keeping an eye on for sure, but I believe it explains the sequential weakness for the RPO figures.
Show more
$AEHR People are waking up to Aehr Test Systems after yet another phenomenal earnings. They posted a triple beat, trouncing EPS expectations, while revenue exploded. In addition to the results, the earnings call itself was their best I've ever heard over the past 5 years.
Here's what stood out to me.
GUIDANCE
Aehr raised guidance to $150m for the year. If you look at revenue in Q1 ($33m) and their effective backlog, most (if not all) which will be delivered in this fiscal year, that gets them to $142.3m.
When asked by an analyst on how conservative these figures seemed, CEO Gayn Erickson said, "We just thought 150 is a pretty nice, clean number for us to be conservative at this point."
This is more than just being conservative, and more than just sandbagging, implying that they will only receive and deliver $7.7m beyond the backlog and realized revenue through next June!
Let's pretend they don't get a single new order for units. Servicing revenue alone likely gets them to $150m. On top of that, contactors revenue is only partly built into the backlog. Yet the customer that is ordering tons of Sonoma units, and "Importantly, the customer forecast that this second processor will ultimately reach higher production volumes than its first processor currently in production on Sonoma." That's upside.
Given the cadence of new orders and what they said regarding their lead Hyperscaler, there's a decent chance we see $AEHR land on around $200m on the year. While that doesn't sound impressive in isolation, it represents a 4x over the prior year's numbers.
LINES IN THE WATER
There are a number of whales that are circling, and many are massive. The most significant and nearest one to landing is probably $AMD or $NVDA, as Gayn explicitly ruled out the ASIC guys last October, and the description and ramp can match either.
This engagement went from potential, to showing fantastic results during engineering qualifications last quarter (expanding to two other product lines for those tests), to an order for one unit put in the company's OSAT production line. We won't see any orders from this company until next year at earliest, and revenue might not be realized from them until the 2nd half of next year, but this would instantly become their largest client, as these are the premium Fox-XP systems, which command higher prices and better margins.
Gayn has said in the past when this wasn't going well (an issue with the clock speed a couple of quarters ago). And he has been clear when something is pretty far away or uncertain. There is no guarantee here, but from the context of the earnings call, it sounds like they are engaged with both $AMD and $NVDA, probably all (or all but one) Hyperscaler, and multiple other customers.
They won't win them all, but per Gayn, "But you pick off one, two, three high runners, and these are big numbers. You get a customer who's saying, 'I would like to consider this for all my devices or most of my devices or every device you cold do it,' and all of a sudden, it becomes the biggest deal you've ever looked at before.
THEY DID THE MATH FOR US
Gayn laid out the TAM opportunity in the AI processors space. For every 1m units shipped, the production line would require 5-10 of Aehr's systems, delivering 45-90 wafers of capacity (each system configured for AI processor tests has up to 9 racks). That comes to $35-$70m for each million units of production.
Gayn stated AI accelerator markets in '27 are 25m units across $NVDA, $AMD, and the ASICs guys, and CPUs are 2x this.
The customer mentioned above, if landed, would generate around $250m in FY '27 revenue for the company alone. This is why Aehr keeps expanding production capacity and outsourced production of their PLBI Sonoma units to an OSAT. They HAVE to demonstrate the ability to deliver, and there is plenty of room for some massive orders in the queue.
Per Gayn, "I am pressing on the team to be able to put a lot more than that in place for the following year or maybe even pull in. There are ways that we are working with our subcons."
THE COMPETITION / MOAT
Three notes on competition.
One, they indicated that their first WLBI customer provided a lot of visibility into the space, and these guys all know each other. "They, we believe, have been very visible to other customers who are aware of it. Either they walk by it at the OSATs or they're just aware of it. There have been even some rumors about them going up and publicly talking about it that I'm not ready to verify yet right now... they all feed on each other, not dissimilar to some of the stuff that was going on in SiC before, obviously, the EVs sort of just went quiet, right? We were starting to win EVERYTHING."
Second, on $TER moving upstream to PLBI, it's competition for sure, but not quite in the way that the market fears. Gayn gave a lot of technical details on this, from voltage, to how the burn-in process isn't quite what Teradyne's Titan unit is made for, to SLT burn-in (which is not great), to throughput (1/4th a wafer at a time with 9 wafers in parallel vs one device at a time).
"We are playing with a different set of deck of cards, if you will, than our competitors are."
Lastly, they're still really the only game in town for WLBI testing.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
This is the first I have heard of the "super-duper Wafer Paks" (they call them Die temperature control - DiTC, but I like Larry's affectation).
"It has the ability to actually independently manipulate the thermals of each of the die under test at the wafer level, which is nuts. People have never even contemplated that before. It's integrated into our WaferPak and custom-designed for each of the wafers under test."
Beyond just thermal runway avoidance, which Gayn talked about, this is going to improve ATE outcomes tremendously.
"The die do not all burn in and have the same leakages, so they are all going to generate different power and different heat, self-heating. The way people will do that is they will look at the hottest die and control the temperatures on that one to avoid it from going into thermal runaway. But when they do that, the coldest die is not at the burn-in condition. And their customers are like, "Well, what are we going to do?" So, that device is actually not burnt in optimally, so that infant mortality or that failure rate will sneak through all the way to the data center."
Honestly, this would have sounded like science fiction two years ago. This will be in production at the start of the year. People question how a little company like this can stay ahead of the giants (Advantest and Teradyne), but their R&D continues to strengthen their moat.
This has tremendous upside with fantastic execution and a very clear roadmap. Yes, I added shares.
Show more
The September JOLTS numbers are out with a tremendous 400k beat.
Some were beginning to be concerned by employee cuts via the likes of $MSFT and $DIS, but so far AI has added to jobs being created, not taken away.
The market initially reacted negatively as the Fed won't see a need to cut rates due to weakening labor conditions.
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$AEHR is one of the few companies in the space whose stock is flying after excellent earnings.
It wasn't just the numbers. That call was their best since 2021, perhaps their best ever. They provided crystal clarity (mixed with conservative guidance) that shows absolutely tremendous opportunity at these prices.
I'm working on my earnings recap now, but man, I am impressed.
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$PLTR There is a delicious irony from Palantir's earnings this quarter.
- In 2023, people criticized Karp for Palantir not building a LLM.
- In 2024, people called AIP an "AI wrapper" (and some continue to do so).
- In 2025, people questioned what moat Palantir has, saying (not always ironically) that Palantir could be vibe-coded.
- Earlier in 2026, people questioned how Palantir would do if the US government heavily restricted Anthropic (and OS/OW Chinese models) from usage.
- Now, Palantir is fine-tuning models to specific enterprises and applications, providing tangible ROI. In some cases (see McCarthy and $LHX reads below) the results seem almost impossibly good.
LLMs are the commodity. That has some value, to be sure. But Palantir has a moat.
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$PLTR Beyond the numbers, this interview was frankly incredible, especially on how they plan to scale.
“We have to scale because it's our kind of obvious goal that we're going to get to $15 billion run rate in U.S. commercial in 2028."
This implies at least 86% annualized growth in US commercial through Q4 2028, reaching $3.75b in US commercial alone. That's nearly a 4x in 9 quarters!
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I spoke w/ $PLTR CEO Alex Karp:
“We didn't even have a commercial business when you and I started talking. Now, Department of War is only 30% of our business. Most of our market cap now is covered, if not our whole, just by our commercial business.
“Luckily, we had the F shares [special founder voting shares], or the private equity people would be trying to fire me and break out the commercial business.”
Karp says: “In the American industry, it's just going to be a have and have-not world, and that's a problem. That's something we have to solve because you can't have ‘the haves’ being four or five companies like us and Anthropic, OpenAI, or something. You have to figure out how to expand that, and we're really trying to train our partners to be independent of us.”
This is where it gets interesting for
@PalantirTech – and its partners:
“What's actually happening is we're taking our product, putting it in enterprise, and teaching them how to both use it internally, and then strongly suggesting to them, and it's beginning to work that they then use it externally, meaning they build their products inside our ontology and they distribute them with their people. So basically, we're empowering a Mini Palantir at our partners," says Karp.
Why?
“We have to scale because it's our kind of obvious goal that we're going to get to $15 billion run rate in U.S. commercial in 2028. And how do you do that with a motley crew of 4000 people? We have to scale,” says Karp.
“It's a fork in the road, and we cannot meet the demand. We need partners.”
@CNBC $PLTR
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$PLTR Palantir's Net Dollar Retention is absolutely insane. Most SaaS companies are very happy with 120%.
$AEHR I prefer the name super duper wafer paks.
This is new information to me. Very interesting.
$AEHR Big-time things may be coming for Aehr. Within AI processors:
"For every million units shipped in a calendar year, that system would need to test you would need somewhere between 5 and 10 of our systems per million units per year. That assumes pure linearity, meaning it ships the same amount the first day of the year as the last day of the year.
Keep in mind that this is x9. That is 45 to 90 wafers of capacity. If you multiply that times our ASPs, that can range including the consumables $6-7 million+, it's $35-$70m for each million units. Looking at the accelerator markets that we have been seeing, accelerator markets in 2027 alone are somewhere around 25m units or so total. This is between the GPUs of $NVDA and $AMD and the TPUs and other ASICs from everybody. The CPUs are double that. Therefore the numbers are staggering and sobering for us."
Interesting they mention AMD and NVDA specifically - that's the whale that's on the line that might buy next Spring. No guarantees, but that could add $250-$350m alone from one of those guys.
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AEHR Stock Q1 Earnings LIVE | Btlg Wkly