Palantir had two things happen to it in the course of one week this August: It posted one of its best earnings reports ever as a public company, and it showed everyone that popularity on Robinhood does not mean a stock is a good buy. Within a week of the company’s second-quarter results, which were released on August 3, shares were over 30% higher, and Michael Burry was again making headlines for a new block of put options shorting the rally. That’s both true about PLTR right now. One of the most held stocks on the Robinhood app, and one of the most debated stocks on Wall Street.
That mix is what makes it so that people come up with PLTR and Robinhood in a single breath. Perhaps you already have it but want to know what’s making it move up and down. Perhaps you are a beginner investor, and you can’t seem to get Palantir off your radar. In any case, it is easy enough to learn the mechanics of owning PLTR via Robinhood in a few minutes, and the more important part, whether or not the stock is worth buying at its current price, takes more than a few minutes. It’s both: how to actually get a PLTR position on Robinhood and the actual bull and bear case underneath the ticker.
What Palantir Actually Does
Palantir is not a company that you can describe to new investors by simply taking them to a shelf to look at a product, which is part of the reason for the confusion. The company is developing software to enable large organizations to connect disjointed and dirty data and take action. The original product, called Gotham, is designed for intelligence and defense customers who are required to integrate and collate information from dozens of sources into something a human analyst can use. The commercial version of the same concept is called Foundry, which is sold to manufacturers, banks, healthcare systems, and energy companies. Apollo also does the dirty work of deploying and updating that software on the client’s own servers or cloud configuration. The more recent one is the Artificial Intelligence Platform, AIP, which enables clients to use large language models with their own data rather than conversing with a generic model in a browser tab.
Revenue can be divided into two on-screen categories that repeatedly appear in the reporting of the stock: government part of which includes the U.S. military and the intelligence community, and commercial, where Palantir has been enjoying the highest growth as AIP becomes more commonplace among corporate America. It’s also where the company gets some of its criticism: government business. The same contracts related to defense, immigration enforcement and overseas deployments have received backlash from privacy and civil-liberties groups and, as a shareholder, that’s fair to consider when considering the valuation issue discussed further on in this guide. Started in 2003 by Stanford Law School classmates Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, who continue to serve as the company’s founders, operators, and de facto controllers. Karp is the public face of Palantir, and he doesn’t shy away from an opportunity to speak, whether it’s a shareholder letter or a television interview, which is why the stock attracts such retail interest to begin with.
Why Palantir Keeps Showing Up on Robinhood’s Most Popular Lists
Robinhood actually releases a monthly list of the most sought-after stocks among its users, and PLTR has been on the top fifteen for a long time now. By buy order dollar value in the UK in August 2025, it was the top stock on Robinhood, even more popular than Tesla, Nvidia, and Robinhood’s own stock. That’s a somewhat unusual dynamic because, among the top-10 names Wall Street’s own firms hold with high ratings, Palantir is consistently covered, the same way that Microsoft is. But retail-favorite stocks and Wall Street darlings don’t always align, and for long periods of time, that’s not the case with PLTR.
That’s partly about getting into it. A single share of Palantir is even less expensive than a share of, for instance, Netflix or Costco, meaning that it’s quite accessible without fractional investing at all, although they do have the option. It’s partly because of the volatility: A stock that can swing double digits on one day after an earnings report is going to have active traders as well as long-term investors. A part of it is narrative: Palantir is firmly in the AI space, the headlines about government contracts don’t fade away, and Karp is making plenty of headlines in the public sphere that keep Palantir front of mind for retail investors, something enterprise software companies never seem to achieve. The trend will be familiar to anyone who has observed how Tesla is trading on Robinhood. For some, and for a couple of reasons, two of the platform’s longest-running retail favourites are TSLA and PLTR.
How to Buy PLTR on Robinhood
The real time of purchase is less than the time it takes to read this section. Open the app, type in PLTR in the top bar, and tap through to the detail page where you’ll be able to see the live price, a chart that you can expand on various timeframes, and a section that displays a news feed from outlets that are reporting about the company that day. Tap Trade and then Buy. Then you select the amount of investment that you want to make in the number of shares or in dollars, and select the type of order. A market order will be executed at whatever price is available as soon as the Order gets placed. A limit order will only execute at the limit price or lower, so it may not execute at all if the stock never reaches your limit price.
The difference is more significant with PLTR than with a less volatile blue chip. This is a stock that has been moving a few percentage points up and down after one earnings release, and if you’re buying at the market, it can be beneficial to place the order in the first few minutes after the open or as the news comes out to fill at a level that is away from the last price you saw. Many more aggressive PLTR traders choose to use a limit order for this reason, in exchange for the possibility of not filling the order, at least they know that they will not be paying more than the limit order price.
In case the entire share price is too high to buy at once, Robinhood’s fractional share feature allows users to invest in PLTR in dollar increments as small as $1, meaning that a $50 deposit would get a user just a fractional share of one share at the price of that share at the time of purchase. The detail page also includes a feature to automate recurring purchases: Buy a fixed dollar amount of PLTR on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. As this particular stock can be volatile on news, it is more of a practice for long-term investors to dollar-cost average into the position than to try to time the market.
Trading PLTR Options on Robinhood
Not surprisingly, Palantir is one of the more actively traded options chains on the whole platform, as its share price is one of the more volatile on the entire exchange, and Palantir is a hot topic of discussion on the exchange in general. Rather than a direct claim on shares, an option is a contract that is related to the price of PLTR. A call option allows the buyer to buy at a fixed strike price before the option expires, and a put option allows the buyer to sell at a fixed price before the option expires: both options have a fixed expiration date after which they cease to exist.
While options trades are free on Robinhood, the small regulation fee is tacked on to the premium of each contract. Access isn’t automatic, though. Prior to trading options, you will be required to go through a brief survey that asks about your experience with trading, income, and risk tolerance, and then will approve your account level based on your responses. Most often, entry-level approval is granted for purchases of calls and puts outright. The higher tier levels allow for multi-leg strategies and selling options, which are different risk levels than buying a contract, as the most you can ever lose is your premium with a call or put, whereas selling options can have a much bigger loss profile. Robinhood doesn’t offer uncovered, or naked, options trading at any approval level.
PLTR is volatile enough to warrant measuring its premiums as real, and it is drawing both traders looking to capitalize on a move and traders looking to sell premium to profit on a holding. Either approach will do. Either can still go wrong really fast if the stock is moving against the trade before expiration, and that’s why such a popular name features so prominently in the options-education literature geared toward newer traders.
Extended Hours and Why They Matter for a Stock Like PLTR
While normal trading hours on the Nasdaq are 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern, PLTR will also be available during extended trading hours for Robinhood, 7 a.m to 9:30 a.m and 4 p.m to 8 p.m Eastern, as well as during Robinhood’s 24 Hour Market, which will open at 8 p.m. Sunday and close at 8 p.m. Friday Eastern and will allow limit orders to be placed around the clock. During the out-of-session, only limit orders are accepted due to the fact that during this time of day there is lower volume and market orders may not be filled at the price they are submitted at.
This is important to Palantir, since so much of the price action for the stock is generated outside the 9:30-4 trading hours. Revenue from earnings after the bell. Government contract news, budget announcements, and geopolitical headlines don’t wait at the opening bell either, and a considerable amount of market-moving political and policy news seems to always arrive at the right time for anyone watching the tape. We’ve explored this in more depth in our breakdown of how market-timed announcements impact trading. In the past, Michael Burry’s own disclosures on his PLTR positions have appeared in his newsletter well outside of market hours, and the stock has moved as a result before the next regular session has even begun. When you see PLTR gap sharply at Monday’s open without any indication at Friday’s close, it is most likely due to this.
What Actually Moves PLTR’s Stock Price
Palantir’s movements aren’t random, although they might be on a day-to-day basis. The primary one is quarterly earnings, and the second quarter earnings of the company bear witness to why. The revenue totaled $1.94 billion, an increase of 93% from the previous year, with the U.S. commercial revenue increasing by 149% with more enterprise customers adopting AIP beyond the pilot phase into production. The company’s adjusted earnings exceeded estimates, it shipped over 220 deals totaling at least $1 million in the quarter, and it upgraded full-year revenue guidance to approximately $8.15 billion, which projects about 82% growth for 2026. The reaction of the stock was both instantaneous and overwhelming.
Government contract news is the other big motivator, and it goes both ways. Shares can climb or fall depending on big contracts such as a growing Pentagon role or political opposition, funding concerns, or news about contract disputes. A significant portion of Palantir’s revenue is derived from government contracts, which means that defense industry budget news matters more for Palantir than federal spending news matters for other software companies. There’s a larger AI sentiment. As enthusiasm for spending on AI infrastructure is running hot, PLTR often follows suit. Any questions or doubts about whether that spending is creating results, which have at times been raised during the past 12 months, are likely to lead to a steeper decline for PLTR compared to the average AI-related stock, as so much of the stock’s valuation is based on years of above-average growth.
The Valuation Fight: Michael Burry’s Puts vs. Wall Street’s Buy Ratings
The valuation argument is a part of any discussion about PLTR, and currently, this argument has a very distinct face. In mid-August 2026, Bearish investor Michael Burry revealed that he had taken another bearish stance on Palantir, purchasing put options that expire in March 2027 at prices between the low and mid $100s. This wasn’t his first attempt at the stock. He was also short the stock earlier this year and had reduced the amount of that short at $107 a share prior to this rally, which was led by strong earnings. He’s not arguing about the business itself, his argument is about valuation: At current revenue growth, Burry has pointed out that the stock is valued at more than 50 times projected 2026 sales and close to 100 times free cash flow by some estimates, and he’s wondered how much more multiple expansion the market is willing to extend.
The overall Wall Street sentiment is far from the same. Most analysts covering the stock rate it a buy, and price estimates range anywhere from the low $190s on average, to as high as $255 from more optimistic shops like Bank of America, and as low as $80-$90 from others who are more skeptical, such as RBC. It’s a pretty large spread for a large-cap stock and is indicative in itself: Not everybody is in agreement, and one is screaming. Both sides have real ammunition. The bulls signal a rare occurrence in a software company of any size: triple-digit revenue growth and an increase in FCF margin. The bears note that Palantir’s own recent stock issuance to employees was massive, there’s little room for a weak quarter with a premium this big, and a modest dip in growth pace, not a collapse in the business, would be ample to slam the multiple.
What it’s important to understand is that Burry won’t need Palantir to fail as a company in order for his puts to pay off. The only thing he needs is for the stock to be valued to be on earth, and that’s not the same thing as the business coming to an end. That is the whole question for anyone considering purchasing PLTR now, or waiting for a pullback.
Robinhood Gold and What It Actually Costs to Trade PLTR
Whether you’re trading a single share or a 100, there’s no fee to buy or sell PLTR shares on Robinhood. The existing costs are tiny and can be overlooked: a small fraction of sales cost for regulatory fees, a small per-contract cost for trading options, and margin interest if you are trading on borrowed money. Robinhood Gold, the platform’s $5-a-month subscription service, isn’t PLTR-specific, but it alters a couple of things that are important for anyone trading this stock. Gold unlocks Nasdaq Level II market data, which provides an indication of the depth of bids and asks and not just the top of the order book, if you plan to place a limit order during an extended hours session and want to know how thin trading is at the time of the order. It also gives you access to Morningstar’s research on the stock and includes an estimate of the stock’s fair value and a risk rating, to provide a second opinion other than whatever’s trending on social media that day. Gold accounts additionally receive a larger instant deposit limit and zero interest on the first $1,000 borrowed, which is important for traders that wish to trade the day a headline or earnings report is released, as opposed to waiting for the bank transfer to clear. But-and-hold investors don’t necessarily need it.
To be fair, and generally speaking, it’s important to understand how Robinhood makes money from trades that don’t involve a commission. As with most no-fee brokers, a significant portion of the proceeds is from payment for order flow, which is the practice of the market makers paying for the right to execute orders for customers, which regulators would have to require as a best-execution standard, no matter which market maker would execute a particular order, with the proceeds being funneled to the broker. All this does not affect the cost of trading PLTR. But it doesn’t mean that anyone doesn’t get paid on the other side of your transaction when you see commission-free.
Beyond the Common Stock: The Leveraged, Inverse, and Income ETFs Built Around PLTR
If you search for PLTR stocks on Robinhood, the common stock isn’t the only option. There has been a proliferation of exchange-traded funds dedicated to Palantir’s volatility, and each has a different strategy. On the leveraged-long side, funds such as PLTU, PLTG, and PTIR are configured to make about twice Palantir’s daily gain, while they have their inverse counterparts, such as PLTD and PLTZ, which are designed to counter the stock’s move for traders who are looking for a pullback. There are other funds, such as PLTY, PLTW, and PLTI, which rely on strategies of selling options against PLTR to create distribution returns of capital that can often make the yields look like they are unbelievable, especially when part of it is a limitation on the upside of the fund.
They all reset daily, which is the catch. The 2x fund won’t necessarily give them 2x Palantir’s weekly or monthly return, particularly in a choppy market, where the 2x rebalancing daily compounds in a different way. None of them are a replacement for the stock held if the desire is to have long-term exposure to the underlying company, and all of them have significantly more risk than the stock they are based on, and typically higher fees as well.
PLTR’s Move to Nasdaq, Its Unusual Share Structure, and the Tokenized Version
Several structural aspects of PLTR don’t often get front page coverage, but they can help provide context for PLTR shareholders. It has developed an unusual background, listing the stock in an unusual direct listing in 2020 with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange before switching to the Nasdaq Global Select Market in November 2024, which made the stock eligible for the Nasdaq-100 index, after it was added to the S&P 500 in the same year. Palantir hasn’t split its stock once, unlike some of the other tech giants. Unlike most large-cap companies, voting control is also concentrated: Karp, Thiel, and company president Stephen Cohen have a combined stake designed to ensure they maintain a meaningful voting stake even as they work to reduce their personal holdings over time, a fact that came to light during the IPO process and is subject to discussion in governance matters involving the stock today.
If you’re one of those investors who already considers both stocks and cryptocurrencies, then there’s an additional crypto-adjacent twist here. Robinhood has been investing in crypto infrastructure over the past year that extends beyond just coin trading, such as the exchange it acquired, Bitstamp, and the launching of its own blockchain settlement layer, Robinhood Chain, for tokenized assets. With that infrastructure, Robinhood’s international arm has been launching tokenized versions of U.S. stocks including PLTR, allowing traders outside the U.S. to obtain price exposure to the stock via a tokenized form on a blockchain, instead of a traditional brokerage position. It is a real structure different from owning shares, because there are no shareholder voting rights, different custody, and all this is part of a broader movement, in which a wallet to hold self-custody is also included in the app. In any case, if you’re going to place a PLT alongside an actual holding of cryptocurrency in your portfolio, you may want to use the same degree of scrutiny you would apply to the stock itself: What is it backed by, and does it have actual use behind the price?
Keeping Your Account, and Any Crypto, Safe From Scams
When there’s a stock like this that is extremely popular, the amount of hype around it is predictable, such as fake trading groups promising guaranteed PLTR returns and messages pretending to be from Robinhood’s support or security alerts. But all of that is not what’s unusual about Palantir, and a stock that draws this much retail interest is more of a target than a stock that doesn’t draw that much retail interest. The rules remain the same: enable two-factor authentication, never enter your credentials via any text message, email, etc., that asks you to confirm your account immediately, and never trust a seemingly urgent message asking to confirm your account instantly.
Whether you’re transferring crypto or a tokenized stock position, if you’re using crypto at all, the destination wallet address is the most important aspect to consider, as there is usually no way to retrieve funds that are sent to the wrong or a spoofed address. A few seconds is all it takes to scan an address before sending something, and it can prevent your money from going out of your wallet if it’s already been identified as having scam activity. The wallet address checker does just that, and it’s available for any wallet address you want to send money to, not just for addresses associated with a Palantir trade, and it’s free of charge.
Selling PLTR, Taxes, and the Dividend Question
The sell process is the reverse of the buy process: open the PLTR position, click on the Trade button, click on Sell, select either the number of shares or a dollar amount, select the order type, and send the order. Fractional positions can be sold fractionally as well, down to the minimum $1, and Robinhood will allow you to sell the remaining position in one click if it’s less than a full position.
The tax treatment will depend on how long you have been in the job. Buy or receive and sell within a year, and the profit is short-term and taxed at the ordinary income rate. Some investors with a profitable PLTR position may prefer to wait out the calendar year rather than sell early because it would be taxed at the lower, long-term capital gains rate if they waited out the calendar year. One thing to note is that Robinhood provides a consolidated 1099 once per year detailing realized gains and losses, and repurchasing does not reset the wash sale rule if you sell at a loss and buy PLTR back within 30 days. On the dividend front, Palantir doesn’t pay any dividends and does not have a history of paying dividends since it went public, so any income strategy based on the stock, such as the options-selling ETFs mentioned above, is, again, synthetic.
Weighing Palantir’s Bull and Bear Case Before You Buy
I don’t think there is ever a good way to conclude a guide like this with here’s what you need to do, and any article about PLTR will tell you that, so be wary. What’s fair is that they’ve been quite transparent about it. Palantir is a large-cap stock that’s traded pretty much as a pure play today, and as a result, it’s a pretty divisive company.
There are numbers at the heart of the bull case: revenue rising at 90% plus in the most recent quarter, with commercial revenue increasing even faster than the government revenue that got the company started, free cash flow on the rise, and management continually lifting guidance instead of dialing it back. Today’s valuation may seem a bit of a bargain if AIP were to continue expanding at the rate it has been. The bear case is the same set of real numbers, but with just a different point of view: a stock that trades at a valuation of years of near-flawless execution, a founder-controlled governance structure that lessens shareholder influence, dilution from generous stock-based compensation, and a company that remains focused enough on government contracts that shareholders face a genuine political and budget risk, not merely a theoretical one. Michael Burry’s puts and Wall Street’s buys are not in dispute as to whether Palantir is a good company. They’re disagreeing about whether a good company can still be a bad stock at the wrong price.
This is not individualized investment advice and is not sponsored nor affiliated with Robinhood. This article, as well as any research tools within the application, is informational in nature, not a recommendation to buy or sell. It may be best to test the figures with a licensed financial advisor who has your entire financial situation in mind before putting any real money into PLTR, whether via options or one of the leveraged ETFs described above.
Getting Started
By this point, you’ll know more about trading PLTR on Robinhood than most other people downloading the app in search of the green Buy button. It’s easy to find and purchase the stock. The ones that are worth slowing down for are the ones listed below: what type of order are you placing, how much are you putting in, do you even really want to place this type of order options and leveraged ETFs over your regular risk tolerance, and are you funded correctly to do this trade and do you have the time to catch the news when this particular stock is trading outside of regular hours?
