Palantir Proves the Second-Wave Trade Right, Now AMD and SpaceX Must Deliver

Dear readers,

Three billion dollars. That’s where Amazon’s market cap landed this week, a number so large it almost obscures the more interesting story underneath: investors are getting restless waiting for AI infrastructure spending to show up as actual profit at the mega-cap level, and capital is starting to vote with its feet. Today handed us the clearest evidence yet of where that money is headed. Palantir just proved that AI can be monetized at software-level margins, AMD and SpaceX are about to find out if they can do the same, and crypto’s biggest holders are quietly rewriting their playbooks. Call it the second wave of this rotation — and it’s arriving with real numbers attached.

Palantir Silences the Software Skeptics

For months, the question hanging over the AI trade was when the boom would actually reach pure software companies rather than just chipmakers and cloud providers. Palantir answered it this morning. Second-quarter revenue jumped 93% to $1.94 billion, blowing past what Wall Street had modeled. The U.S. commercial segment did the heavy lifting, surging 149%, and that growth dropped straight to the bottom line: operating profit climbed nearly 240%, pushing the adjusted operating margin to a striking 62%. Management didn’t hedge — it raised full-year guidance to at least $8.15 billion, and the stock rewarded the confidence with a premarket spike of roughly 20%. The takeaway for investors is straightforward: artificial intelligence generates real cash well beyond the hardware layer, and the application layer is where some of the fattest margins now live.

AMD’s Moment of Truth

Nvidia still owns the room, but tonight, after the closing bell, AMD gets its chance to argue it deserves a bigger seat at the table. Analysts are looking for quarterly revenue of $11.3 billion, with the data-center segment — pegged at roughly $6.5 billion — expected to account for a striking 91% of total growth. The stock has already been testing the $500 level in anticipation. The question that actually matters for portfolios: can AMD show that demand for its EPYC server chips and Instinct AI accelerators is strong enough to pull real market share away from Nvidia, not just ride the industry’s overall growth? A confident outlook tonight would reinforce the idea that this market is large enough to support a genuine second player at scale.

SpaceX and the Billion-Dollar Options Bet

Away from the usual tech names, SpaceX delivers its first quarterly report since going public, and the numbers being modeled are anything but comfortable: roughly $7 billion in revenue against an expected operating loss of $1.55 billion. The options market is pricing in a swing of about 15% in either direction for a stock that has already shed roughly 30% since its IPO — a move that would translate into a $225 billion swing in market capitalization. What makes this print especially tense is timing: the lockup on more than 910 million shares expires this Thursday. Investors are being asked to hold their nerve through a genuine collision — long-term enthusiasm for Starlink’s profitability running headfirst into the risk of a massive supply of newly tradeable shares hitting the market within days.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying AMD?

Crypto Matures: Institutions Rotate, Whales Trim

Bitcoin remains anchored near $63,000, a level it’s held for days now as Middle East tensions and a wave of long-position liquidations keep a lid on any rally. But the more telling story is what large holders are doing beneath that flat price. Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s biggest bank, slashed its position in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) by a striking 94%, and redirected that capital into its staked Ether ETF holding, which it tripled to over $7 million. MicroStrategy, meanwhile, sold 1,638 Bitcoin for roughly $105 million — not out of distress, but to fund its 12% STRC dividend payments and ongoing share buybacks. This is a genuine shift in behavior: passive “just hold it” strategies are giving way, even among the largest institutional players, to active portfolio and yield management. Add to that a fresh security scare — the recent Coldcard hardware wallet exploit — and OKX reports record sums flowing back onto centralized exchanges as holders trade self-custody risk for platform convenience.

Mid-Caps Make Their Case

The broadening market showed up loud and clear in mid-cap earnings today. SoFi Technologies jumped more than 10% after guiding to second-half adjusted EBITDA growth of 29%, to roughly $902 million, while also announcing it’s opening its dollar-pegged SoFiUSD stablecoin to its nearly 15 million members. Snap posted 19% revenue growth, and Wix.com beat estimates as well. For stock pickers, the message is simple: the risk-reward math in the second tier of the market currently looks more favorable than it does among the priciest mega-cap names.

The Bottom Line

The real test comes over the next 48 hours. If AMD’s guidance holds up and SpaceX gets through its lockup expiration without a disorderly selloff, this rotation stops looking like a one-day curiosity and starts looking like a durable repricing of where AI profits actually land. For portfolios, that means the case for looking past the Magnificent Seven isn’t just an interesting idea anymore — it’s becoming the more defensible way to stay positioned for further gains.

Best regards,
The StocksToday.com Editorial