(Jakub Porzycki/Getty Images)

Palantir cofounder Cohen sells over 20% of his stake in planned sale

Palantir cofounder and director Stephen Cohen sold shares worth more than $310 million over three days last week, as part of a trading plan adopted in December.

Matt Phillips

3/18/25 10:47AM

After a couple days of solid gains, Palantir is once again among the large-cap laggards putting downward pressure on the blue-chip S&P 500 index Tuesday.

There’s little fundamental news on the stock, though eagle-eyed equity analyst Brent Thill over at Jefferies spotlights more selling of the stock by company insiders. (Thill was one of the first to take note of a surge of selling by cofounder and CEO Alex Karp over the past year that reduced his holdings in the data analytics software company by 20%.)

Not to be outdone, Stephen Cohen, Palantir cofounder as well as president, secretary, and board member, sold more than 20% of his stake in the company over three days last week, according to Thill:

“We highlight a resumption of PLTR’s insider selling via Rule 10b5-1 trading plans in 2025, with co-founder and President Stephen Cohen selling $310M worth of shares over the last few days (~23% of his overall stake in PLTR).”

To be sure, the company signaled that some selling could be coming, writing in its annual report that Cohen had established new trading plans that would allow him to sell more than 4 million shares through September, without running afoul of Rule 10b5-1, the SEC rule on insider trading. (Karp also disclosed new stock-selling plans.)

Cohen’s sales last week represented the exercise of options for 3.75 million shares, which he immediately sold.

What’s to be made of all this selling? As we’ve said before, there are all sorts of reasons why insiders sell. So it’s a bit of a stretch to make these sales out to be a sign of things to come for Palantir shares.

After all, Cohen also dumped nearly 4 million shares in conjunction with the company’s IPO on September 30, 2020, generating proceeds of about $38 million.

That’s not a bad day’s work. But if he’d held onto that pile of stock, it would be worth more than $330 million now. According to FactSet data, Cohen has sold stock worth more than $750 million since the company went public. Karp has sold more than $3 billion worth.

Max Knoblauch1h

Rivian sure picked a bad time for its AI Day as investors dump tech stocks

The event coordination team at Rivian is probably having a bad one, as investors dumped the stock ahead of its “Autonomy and AI Day” amid a broader AI trade sell-off.

Heading into the event that began at noon ET, Rivian shares were down 5%, following a strongly negative reaction to Oracle’s earnings results. The stock began climbing as Rivian’s event started, but remains in the red on the day.

A year flush with tariffs and the end of the EV tax credit has pushed Rivian to pitch a techier version of its future. During Thursday’s event, Rivian said its forthcoming vehicles would ditch Nvidia chips for its own AI chips produced by Taiwan Semiconductor.

The vehicles will feature lidar sensors, enabling “level 4” autonomous driving (similar to Google’s Waymo), the company said. According to CEO RJ Scaringe, the updates will allow Rivian to “pursue opportunities in the rideshare space,” hinting at future robotaxi plans, which rivals Tesla and Lucid have already begun.

Wall Street appears skeptical of Rivian, with Morgan Stanley this week downgrading the stock to “underweight” and dropping its price target to $12. Lucid, which in October announced it’s planning a privately owned autonomous car built with Nvidia tech, also received a downgrade.

Rivian turns to AI, autonomy to woo investors as EV sales stall

Luke Kawa2h

Robinhood tumbles after November trading volumes post monthly drop across equities, options, and crypto

Robinhood Markets is getting crushed today, and not just because it’s the place where people go to buy AI stocks (which are under big pressure after Oracle’s earnings report). As stocks retreated in November, activity on the platform did, too.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

The brokerage reported that November trading volumes fell across equities, options, and crypto compared to October. Equity notional volumes were down 37% month on month, options contracts traded were off 28%, and crypto notional volumes fell double digits. The bright spot: its prediction markets business is still in boom mode, with 3 billion contracts traded, up 20% versus the prior month.

Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brett Knoblauch trimmed his price target on the shares to $152 from $155 following this release, noting that this monthly decline was somewhat expected.

After a quarter century, Cisco surpasses dot-com bubble closing high

Matt Phillips2h

Luke Kawa3h

Oracle’s underwhelming results are kneecapping the AI trade

The nasty reception to Oracle’s quarterly results, which included a small revenue miss along with much more capex and cash burn than analysts had anticipated, is cascading through the rest of the AI trade.

Among the names getting hit hard:

AI chip behemoths Nvidia, Broadcom, and Advanced Micro Devices.
Neoclouds CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN, and Cipher Mining.
Infrastructure providers GE Vernova and Vertiv Holdings.
Server companies Super Micro Computer, Dell, and HP Enterprise.

While stocks have recovered strongly since their November 20 intermediate low, that’s been more about bullishness on Google and its partners as well as global growth than the AI trade broadly.

Only one member of the VanEck Semiconductor ETF is negative during this time: Nvidia. The second-worst performer of the bunch over this stretch is AMD, another AI GPU provider.

J. Edward Moreno3h

PetMed soars after disclosing $4-per-share buyout offer from investment firm

PetMed Express soared after disclosing that it had received a take-private buyout offer from Singapore investment firm SilverCape Investments, valuing the company at a significant premium.

SilverCape would pay $4 per share, a 125% premium from the $1.77 the stock closed at on Wednesday. Shares soared 50% in early trading to $2.65.

PetMed said its board would evaluate the offer.

The company, which has been public sine 1997, has reported stagnating sales and slipped into unprofitability in 2024. The online pet pharmacy is down 60% this year and down 96% since its peak in 2018.