Veteran trader who correctly picked Palantir as top stock in 2024 reveals best stock for 2025
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Rob Lenihan
5 min read
For a house divided, Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is doing pretty well.
Two of the big data-analytics company's founders — entrepreneur Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp — find themselves opposite each other regarding the country's highly volatile political scene.
Karp, who supported Vice President Kamala Harris in the recent presidential election, said Thiel's public embrace of President-elect Donald Trump had made it "harder to get things done."
That friction hasn't, however, been reflected in the stock price. Palantir was the S&P 500's top performer in 2024, with its shares more than quadrupling (up 340.5%).
"We are deeply grateful to be admitted to the S&P 500," the company said in a Sept 7 post on X. "Only in America!"
As Karp noted in November during the company's earnings call with analysts, "we absolutely eviscerated this quarter, driven by unrelenting AI demand that won't slow down."
A team of analysts at Wedbush led by Dan Ives included Palantir on its 10 Tech Winners for the "AI Revolution" in 2025, along with heavyweights such as Nvidia (NVDA) , Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (CRM) .
The analysts dubbed Palantir the Messi of AI, a nod to Argentine soccer superstar Lionel Messi.
Analyst says Palantir could be next Oracle
"With AI spending expected to ramp significantly within IT budgets in 2025, ... the Messi of AI, Palantir, is in a prime spot to continue expanding its pipeline/deal flow," the analysts wrote.
At the same time Palantir, with its "comprehensive suite of [artificial intelligence/machine learning] solutions," will find more use cases for AI "to address critical problems across industries and empowered data-driven decision-making," Wedbush said.
Machine learning enables computers to learn from data without explicit programming.
Wedbush said the AI software era is now here, and the two best software players in the AI Revolution going in 2025 are Palantir, which was added to the Nasdaq on Dec. 23, and Salesforce, (CRM) the giant provider of customer-relationship-management systems.
"[Palantir] has a credible path to morph into the next Oracle (ORCL) over the next coming decade with [its artificial-intelligence platform] leading the way as many [on Wall Street] continue to be huge skeptics of the Messi of AI," the firm said. The remark is a hat tip to the software juggernaut co-founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison.
AIP enables organizations to build and deploy AI applications.
While the U.S. government is Palantir's largest client, the company put Santa's workshop through an AI overhaul in a holiday-themed X post on Dec. 23.
"We've taken Christmas magic to the next level," Gautham Senthilnathan, forward deployed engineer, said. "Imagine Santa's workshop as the ultimate global enterprise facing the challenge of delivering billions of personalized gifts worldwide in a single day."
Palantir AI agents, he added, "go far beyond simple chat interfaces to tackle these complex operational challenges from manufacturing toys to handling last-minute wish-list changes."
"Our AI Elves work seamlessly alongside Santa and his team," Senthilnathan said. "They're not replacing the holiday spirit; they're enhancing it."
Now the holidays are over, Donald Trump is returning to the White House, and TheStreet Pro's Stephen Guilfoyle, also known as "Sarge," is unveiling his stock pick for 2025.
Veteran trader unveils top pick for 2025
By his own admission, Guilfoyle, whose career goes back to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1980s, is no fan of "stock pick of the year" articles.
"While I whine about doing these pieces, it's fairly obvious that I crushed 2024 with perhaps my best 'stock of the year' ever," he wrote on Dec. 31. "In December 2023, I gave you Palantir Technologies for 2024."
Guilfoyle has been a bull in the name for several years. Back in December 2023, he named Palantir as his stock of the year for 2024 rather than tech icons Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft.
And in May, the Sarge named Palantir as his single best trade, pointing to the chipmaker’s “consistently growing sales and its footprint” and added that the company is “seemingly in a class by itself.”.
"All hail the mighty Sarge, who picked the winner of winners for 2024," he declared. "I'd like to pause now and pat myself on the back ... OK, I'm done. What about 2025?"
So, yeah, Sarge, what about 2025?
Well, it turns out that Guilfoyle has named Palantir as his top stock for the second year in a row.
"Why?" he asked. "Because the deals keep rolling in. Because so many of these deals are made with the federal government with a focus on national security. Because the business of the corporate side is growing rapidly, as well."
He wrote that Palantir seems to be the one firm, or at least one of the few firms on the software side, that has figured out how to best monetize the still-coming revolution in generative artificial intelligence.
"Yes, the race into AI has gotten ahead of itself for most companies, but not for Palantir," he said.
"The big-data-focused AI revolution is the next industrial revolution. True, I thought about going with a quantum computing firm such as Quantum Computing (QUBT) , but in my heart, I feel that quantum is going to be a 2026 or 2027 story."
Guilfoyle, who has a $90 price target on PLTR stock, called Karp both brilliant and perfect for this specific job "in a Satya Nadella-kind of way," referencing Microsoft's CEO.
"The kind of smarts that makes other smart people shut their pie holes and listen," he said.
The Wall Street veteran described Palantir as a generational investment, stating that "I am in Palantir not just for myself, but for my children and for their children."
"Can that change?" he asked. "Everything can always change. That's why I keep you up on what I am thinking and what I am doing.
"Now, have a happy and healthy New Year, my friends, to you and yours. Long live Rock & Roll."
