Is Palantir's goose finally cooked?

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Today’s links

Oh the irony! The young not only buy vinyl records but now are apparently reading more physical books!
Maybe social media feeds are not all bad and could even be driving people to get off them - for example to read real physical books?

Is China about to give the US a loss of face in space and is Elon Musk’s Starship program doomed?
China beating the US back to he moon would be a psychological blow to the US and American’s don’t like to have their pride injured, nor does Trump. Would guarantee some fiscal cheddar thrown after the space program, which has shrunk in fiscal terms if not necessarily in absolute terms (largely because of SpaceX’s massive cost efficiencies with the Falcon program) in recent years, even as private space applications are taking off. This will intensify the focus on whether Musk’s Starship will ever make it with crunch time just ahead and if not, what is plan B for the US space program? BTW, another super-critical take on whether the Starship program is utterly doomed from someone with an obvious political axe to grind, but still making some technically critical points.

Privatization can have its drawbacks
Convexity Maven speaks against the privatization of government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the outfits that traditionally provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the housing market by buying mortgages from lenders, pooling them, and selling them as mortgage-backed securities to investors.

Chart of the Day - Palantir (PLTR) weekly

Palantir is a fantastically successful company and has featured eight consecutive quarters of accelerating growth, a feat it is expected to extend to a ninth quarter and it will undoubtedly grow massively in the further quarters and years ahead. But its valuation has run so wildly ahead of its impressive growth rates that few Wall Street analysts are even willing to place an overweight, much less a buy rating on the stock. Its woes here are likely in part on noted activist short seller Andrew Left of Citron Research out speaking against the stock’s insane valuation, comparing it with OpenAI’s imputed valuation based on a recent funding round for perspective. It’s usually futile to “pick tops” in a bubble stock, and who is to say that the company can’t eventually grow into the current share price way down the road at a much larger size and once it establishes a major buyback program. Amazon peaked in the dot com bubble at a split-adjusted share price of 5.65 in late 1999 (revenues before falling to 27.5 cents (!), a drop of 95% before rising to its early 2025 high of 242.5, an 88,000+% turnaround and even a nearly 4,200% gain from the bubble high. Akamai Technologies is one of my favourites - the content deliver network company peaked at 345.50 in early 2000 (a year when it posted $89 million in revenue) before falling to 56 cents in late 2002 - a drop of 99.8% only to recover to as high as 129.17 in early 2024 (with revenues of $4 billion), never recovering to even half of its bubble high. Even Palantir has had its own initial bubble round trip - falling from its first bubble high at 45 in early 2021 to as low as 5.92 in late 2022 (-87%) before recovering to its recent 190 high (> +3,100%). Regarding the technical situation here for Palantir currently, in the chart below, it will be interesting to see the weekly close, especially if we close near here or lower - a climactic semi-evening star formation, though so far the correction of 17% is way less climactic than the Feb-Apr correction that was over 45%.