Will Healy, Justin Pope, and Jake Lerch, The Motley Fool

Sun, Jun 8, 2025, 4:00 AM6 min read

• Palantir's optimism and valuation are reminiscent of a bubble from years past.

• High valuation metrics don't tell the full story of every stock.

• An analysis of the analytics stock makes owning Palantir difficult to justify.

• 10 stocks we like better than Palantir Technologies ›

One of the fastest-growing stocks in artificial intelligence (AI) over the last year is Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR). Its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) brought eye-popping productivity gains to its customers. Investors took notice, as the stock is up by 420% over the last year.

Unfortunately for investors who have recently taken an interest, its forward P/E ratio is 205, and it sells for 96 times sales. Knowing that, three analysts from The Motley Fool have weighed in to determine whether its stock is still worth buying at these levels.

Justin Pope: Separating noise from signal is arguably the most challenging aspect of investing.

For Palantir, the noise is a red-hot stock price. Shares of Palantir have risen a mind-melting 1,770% since 2023. In other words, buying the stock up to this point has looked like a genius move. Anyone seeing this, especially on social media, where people aren't always humble, might feel tempted to jump into the stock.

But here is the signal. The stock is rising faster than Palantir's underlying business has grown. Don't get me wrong, I think Palantir is an excellent AI stock, and the company is executing at a high level, particularly since launching AIP two years ago.

It can make a stock appear invincible when prices only go up. However, investors have seen this movie before. Cisco Systems ran to wildly excessive valuations during the infamous dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. It lost most of its value when the bubble burst, and still hasn't revisited its all-time high, a whopping 25 years later.

That doesn't mean that Palantir will suffer the same fate, but check this out. Cisco's P/E ratio peaked at approximately 234, and its price-to-sales (P/S) ratio peaked at around 39. Palantir is even more expensive today than Cisco at its peak.

At the very least, it's hard to imagine much more rational upside in Palantir from these levels. Even worse, any market downturn or misfire in Palantir's business could pop that valuation bubble. Investors should tread very carefully around Palantir stock these days.

Jake Lerch: Here's a sentiment that I often hear: "I love the stock, but it's too late to buy it now."