Palantir loses crown as top S&P 500 stock this year

It’s no surprise to find a dominant player in a crucial technology is atop the S&P 500 leaderboards this year.

But it is slightly surprising that the technology in question is the disk drive.

Seagate Technology Holdings, a maker of ubiquitous data storage devices known as hard disk drives, has ridden a nearly 50% gain over the last three months to the top of the list of best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year.

Investors have good reason to be impressed. Seagate’s last five quarterly results have beat expectations on both the top and bottom lines, as the company has increasingly tilted its business to provide higher-capacity — and more profitable — disk drives designed for use in AI and cloud computing data centers.

But Seagate’s rise to the top was also aided by recent sputtering in performance from the previous market leader, Palantir, which is down almost 20% since it notched a high on August 12.