Homeland's favorite stock... Palantir is the secretive software company that crunches data for big clients like intelligence agencies. Since going public in October, Palantir has been a little less mysterious (at least, its finances have): shares plunged 9% for the week after Palantir reported a $148M loss for last quarter — and $1.2B for the full year. Still, average revenue per customer was a whopping $7.9M last year. 2020 sales beat expectations, as Palantir won contracts with the US Army, the Air Force, and the FDA (and they probably didn't even get a free trial).
Up, in a bad way... US jobless claims hit a four-week high of 861K for the week ended February 13th, rising for the second week straight. Despite a steady drop in Covid cases as vaccines roll out, ~10M Americans are still unemployed. And the pace of recovery is slowing: in January, the US economy added just 49K jobs. Investors are looking forward to more help from Uncle Sam. Dems are on track to (narrowly) pass President Biden’s $1.9T stimulus package, which includes boosted unemployment aid and $1.4K payments to most Americans.