Cathie Wood’s ARK funds kept buying Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR | PLTR Price Prediction) into the teeth of its 2026 drawdown, picking up roughly 81,254 shares for about $9.7 million on June 23 and another 41,601 shares for roughly $4.5 million on June 26 across multiple tech names. That extends a months-long pattern of averaging down on weakness, and it sets up the only question that matters for a retirement-focused investor watching from the sidelines. Is she finally right, or is she catching the most expensive falling knife in enterprise software?
The setup is genuinely two-sided. Palantir hit a 12-month low near $107.27 before bouncing about 5% to roughly $115 as of this writing. PLTR stock is down sharply for 2026 and roughly 45% below its November 2025 high. Year to date through June 26, shares are off 31%. ARK is buying that.
The bull case ARK is underwriting
Wood’s pattern here is a slow, mechanical accumulation as the price falls. The June 23 and June 26 prints sit inside a months-long sequence of dip-buying that began after Palantir rolled over from its 52-week high of $207.52. ARK is signaling that the selloff reflects sentiment and valuation, not the business itself.
Moreover, the fundamentals support that read. Q1 2026 revenue grew 84.7% year over year to $1.633 billion, beating consensus, and U.S. commercial revenue jumped 133% to $595 million. Management raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $7.650 to $7.662 billion, about 71% growth, and is guiding to adjusted free cash flow of $4.2 to $4.4 billion.
CEO Alex Karp framed the quarter this way: “Palantir’s Rule of 40 score has soared to 145%. We have shattered the metric, a feat matched only by other fellow AI infrastructure companies: NVIDIA, Micron and SK hynix.” Add the $10 billion Army Enterprise Agreement and you get the ARK thesis in one sentence. Growth is accelerating, the government anchor is locked in, and the price is wrong.
The bear case Burry has been winning
The other side has real substance. Even after the drawdown, Palantir trades at a forward PE of 77x and a price-to-sales ratio of 53x. Those multiples assume the moat holds. The bear argument, articulated forcefully by Michael Burry in early June and amplified across Reddit’s r/stocks community, is that the same AI advances powering Palantir’s AIP today will eventually commoditize the enterprise software layer Palantir sits on.
If cognition becomes cheap, the premium compresses. Burry’s “sand castle supported only by AI applications narrative” post drew 402 upvotes and 159 comments and dragged r/stocks sentiment scores into the 18 to 35 range for two days. His short has worked. The stock is down hard in 2026, and ARK’s average cost on those late-June lots is already above where Palantir trades now.
Why following ARK is a bet on the multiple
So is Wood finally right? She is right about the business and unproven on the multiple. Palantir is compounding faster than almost any enterprise software company in history, and a 46% GAAP operating margin is not a sand castle.
But buying a 77x forward multiple while the chart breaks down requires you to believe AI infrastructure pricing power survives the next two years intact. Burry is betting it does not. Wood is betting it does. For a retirement-focused reader, the useful takeaway is that following ARK here is a bet on multiple stability as much as on Karp’s execution, and those are very different risks.
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