In this segment of Motley Fool Live, recorded on Dec. 7, Fool contributor Lou Whiteman discusses the performance of Palantir (PLTR 1.65%) stock over the past year in relation to three other defense IT firms.
Lou Whiteman: Boy, did it have a reception. It went public first day of trading, Sept. 30, by Dec. 10, we'll get to why I put Dec. 10 there in a second, 184% up.
They priced this too low. There was a lot more demand, that is a heck of a first couple of months of trading. Around that time, a young wanna-be analyst put out something on Motley Fool, saying "I'm not so sure about this guys."
That's what we're going to talk about today in the spirit of accountability. It was one year ago that I wrote, forget Palantir, here are three defense stocks that are better buys. What I proposed is, is that despite the hype, Palantir is still basically a defense firm, trying desperately not to be a defense firm at some point, but it's still is.
I would rather buy a basket of these three defense IT firms based on Palantir's valuation. Like I said, that was published Dec. 10, we're not quite there, so caveat, asterisk, all that. But I thought in the spirit of accountability we should come back and look at how things are going.
The results are basically you shouldn't have bought any of them if we're honest. Because let's look at it. I apologize, it's all sorts of gobbledygook, but that's basically the price at the time is in the first column, the price now, the difference, and where we all are.
You can see Palantir down 27% from there. Two of those three I picked are down too, if you average that out, they're down about 10% per. Which is beating Palantir but not doing great versus the market. There we are.
I think the interesting thing here is that Palantir, I think is still riding the coattails of that first few months. This has been a stock that has been underwater since then, and underwater in a pretty big way. I didn't update that with the opening trading today so I don't know where it is today, but that's basically where we are with the company.
