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Palantir (PLTR)
Shares in analytics software company Palantir closed the previous session nearly 5% higher, after Barron’s reported on Wednesday that chairman Peter Thiel had completed selling stock in his latest trading plan.
Thiel reportedly sold 12,412,322 shares from 27 September through to 1 October for $457m (£347m).
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Year-to-date Palantir is up nearly 129%, with the stock having surged in August on the back of the company’s second-quarter results.
Palantir posted second-quarter revenues of $678.1m, a 27% increase year-on-year, against expectations of $652.8m.
The company raised its revenue guidance for the 2024 fiscal year to between $2.742bn and $2.75bn. It also raised its adjusted operating income guidance to between $966m and $974m.
Tech giant Meta has continued to hit fresh highs over the past week, with the shares up to $583 in pre-market trading on Friday morning.
Shares have climbed higher following a developer event last week, in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Meta’s newest artificial intelligence (AI) model, Llama 3.2. Meta also revealed its new “Orion” augmented reality glasses, as well as its latest Ray Ban smart glasses and mixed-reality Quest headset.
Meta said back in April that it planned to spend between $35bn and $40bn over the course of 2024.
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Speaking to Yahoo Finance on Thursday, Barton Crockett, Rosenblatt’s senior research analyst, explained why he was bullish on the stock.
“The devices that they were showing off at their recent Meta Connect [are] more resonant with the consumer than even what Apple is doing right now,” he said. “And their Ray-Ban glasses could actually be something of a hit this Christmas.”
Meta announced earlier this week that it is set to release its third-quarter results on 30 October after market close.
Amazon (AMZN)
Another technology company trending with investors is Amazon, which closed Thursday’s session nearly 2% in the red but was up 1% in pre-market trading on Friday.
Amazon said it was planning to increase the number of advertisements across films and television shows on Prime Video in 2025, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.
Kelly Day, vice-president of Prime Video International, told the FT that advertising would “ramp up a little bit more into 2025”.
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Amazon began rolling out ads on its Prime Video streaming service earlier this year, with Day saying that it had started with a “very light ad load”.
Prime Video has more than 200m subscribers globally and Day reportedly said that the “churn” of people leaving its Prime service had been “much less” than the e-commerce giant anticipated.
Year-to-date Amazon shares are still up nearly 20%.
JD Wetherspoon (JDW.L)
Back in the UK, shares in pub chain JD Wetherspoon were little changed, despite the business reporting that sales had hit $2bn in the 2024 fiscal year ended 28 July.
That represented nearly 6% growth on 2023, while profits before tax “after separately disclosed items” was 33% lower at £60.6m.
Wetherspoons also brought back its dividend for the first time since before the pandemic, with the recommended payout coming in at 12p per share.
Tim Martin, chairman of JD Wetherspoon, reiterated an estimate that the company “has potential for about 1,000 pubs in the UK”.
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In the results, Martin also hit out at a proposal that had been circulating that pubs should sell beer in quantities of two-thirds of a pint, instead of the traditional size, calling it “slightly daft”.
Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, said: “Even though some of the metrics have surpassed pre-pandemic levels, overall profitability has been hamstrung by a number of subsequent headwinds in the meantime, such as the previously noted ‘ferocious’ inflationary pressures, particularly in regard to energy, food and labour, although more recently some of these pressures have started to ease.”
“The market consensus of the shares as a strong hold reflects some conviction in Wetherspoon’s ability to continue to fight its corner, while also adding some caution into a challenging mix,” he added.
Shares in US electric vehicle (EV) charging company EVgo surged on Thursday, closing the session up nearly 61%, after the company company received a conditional $1.05bn commitment from the Department of Energy to scale its charging network.
The company said that access to this low-cost financing would facilitate its building out of around 7,500 additional fast charging stalls across the US. If the financing is finalised, EVgo said it expected to complete the deployment of these new stalls by 2030.
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EVgo estimated this buildout project would create more than 1,000 jobs, more than 700 of which would be contracted roles.
“EVgo shares the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of increasing EV charging access in the communities that need it most,” said Badar Khan, CEO at EVgo.
“This historic investment would meaningfully accelerate our network expansion to provide public charging to EV drivers across the United States,” he added.
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