New York, February 26, 2026, 08:11 EST — Premarket
- Palantir shares rose in the previous session, with investors looking to stabilize the AI-software trade.
- Automatic insider sales connected to vested stock awards have cropped up in recent SEC filings.
- Next up for risk sentiment: U.S. data and software sector earnings updates.
Shares of Palantir Technologies Inc climbed 4.15% Wednesday, ending the day at $134.19. Investors continued to sift through fresh AI-related filings tied to the software company going into Thursday. (Reuters)
This is relevant right now, with Palantir turning into a high-beta gauge of the market’s appetite for “AI” narratives—or its demand for hard numbers. Put simply: investors are leaning away from faith, toward math.
U.S. stock futures showed little movement early Thursday. Nvidia edged up 1.2% premarket after posting results, but Salesforce dropped 3.7% as its revenue outlook disappointed. “Investors want to see tangible results of AI monetization,” said Raffi Boyadjian, lead market analyst at Trading Point. The S&P 500 software and services index has shed nearly 21% so far this year, according to Reuters. Investors are watching for weekly jobless claims later Thursday, with January producer prices on tap for Friday. (Reuters)
Traders are finding their best short-term signals buried in filings. Insiders’ stock moves show up in Form 4s—the SEC’s transactional disclosures.
Palantir President and Secretary Stephen Cohen on Feb. 20 converted 327,088 Class B shares to Class A, then sold the same number of Class A shares, according to a Form 4 filed Feb. 24. Sale prices ranged from $131.34 up to $136.14. The filing notes those sales were automatically made to cover tax withholding tied to vested restricted stock units, which vest over time. (SEC)
Chief Financial Officer David Glazer unloaded 17,438 Class A shares on Feb. 20, according to another Form 4 dated Feb. 24. The transactions, like the previous ones, were marked as automatic — all linked to the same vesting milestone. The filing notes Glazer’s sales ran through a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, a mechanism that allows executives to lock in trade timing ahead of time. (SEC)
Not every insider sale sends a message about the stock—often, it’s just tax season. Even so, these transactions add to the available shares, and they’re hitting the tape just as investors are showing zero patience for “AI” names that fail to deliver results.
Retail trading continues to stir things up, especially as more traders pile into single-name stocks. Direxion is looking to up the ante, filing plans for a batch of single-stock leveraged ETFs that would triple the daily performance—up or down—on 20 names, Palantir among them, if they get the green light. “The vast number of launches illustrates the market’s growing reliance on speculation,” said Bryan Armour, an ETF analyst at Morningstar. Mo Sparks, who oversees products at Direxion, noted that “interest in trading the volatility in markets has grown,” though the SEC isn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat for these kinds of aggressive leverage products. (Reuters)
Palantir, which supplies data analytics tools to both governments and corporates, has become a magnet for investors wagering on a boom in enterprise AI budgets leading to steady software income. Earlier this month, the shares grabbed headlines when the company posted a jump in quarterly revenue, boosted in large part by U.S. defense contracts, according to Reuters. (Reuters)
But this setup isn’t one-way traffic. Should Thursday’s data or cautious software guidance add to worries over spending, or if investors get impatient with the AI “payoff” timeline, Palantir could tumble alongside the rest of the trade.
Up next: weekly jobless claims hit Thursday, followed by Friday’s producer price index. Traders are eyeing both, watching for any move in rate expectations or appetite for high-multiple growth stocks.
