Palantir's 2020 Q4 Earnings call goes live in half an hour.

The waiting room is now up.
In the mean time, you can read their just-filed 8-K:

https://t.co/3N0lyABVAA
Which is essentially just a re-direct to this press release:

https://t.co/1EVKCNVoy6
Palantir's Consolidated Statement of Operations is pretty interesting.

They lost more than twice as much money in 2020 ($1.17B) as in 2019 ($580M). Despite a $12.6M tax benefit in 2020 vs. $12.4M tax provision in 2019.

But stonks.
Almost certainly they will repeat the talking point from their last webinar that their operating income is up vs. 2019.

You can see that their gross profit is up 2020 vs. 2019 ($740M vs. $500M).
Kind of surprised they led with a mining company (Rio Tinto) in their summary.
And it's live.

You can follow along with the presentation they're showing at the top of their investor relations page.

https://t.co/LqyBBJAVhr
Karp is back on his bullshit. This time claiming Palantir's numbers are "unbelievably strong".

Karp is emphasizing Palantir's usage by "clandestine services" and "oil companies".
Karp just said [software] "sets off a dialectic of learning".
(CC @moiragweigel)

"It can make your military slightly more efficacious"
Karp just quoted Wittgenstein in German and translated to "to believe you are following the rules is to follow the rules".
Karp again spoke of a "dialectic between macro and micro".
Palantir is opening up on congratulating the Space Force's Kobayashi Maru for winning a software innovation award and talking about their IBM partnership.
Palantir emphasized that their partnership with Rio Tinto allowed them to "increase production" and create a "digital twin".
They invoked the "digital twin" term for their partnership with PG&E as well.
Now Palantir is describing their "five year" "nine figure" partnership with BP. Palantir described its digital twin of BP's systems as the "backbone" of BP's simulations.
One of the slides rehashed Palantir's award to prototype the Army's Common Data Fabric through TITAN.

Difficult to quickly summarize, so read:
https://t.co/2d9KMFBWlN
There were several slides emphasizing their revenue growth (as opposed to their skyrocketing net loss of > $1B in 2020) and then they provided this summary of their current customers.
Back to Karp waving his arms in the snow.

He is on a long overview of the history of noone believing Palantir could succeed. Whether due to their maniacal data focus or their transfer from government to business ('which had no history').
He then pivoted to describing focuses on quarterly earnings as destroying businesses and causing them to serve Wall Street instead of their customers.

(Hard to disagree on that one.)
Back to revenue (again: I doubt they are going to mention >$1B 2020 loss).
Now a slide on their government revenue.

It would be interesting to compare this to public procurement to estimate the amount of non-public government / non-US/UK contracts.
Here is the operating income slide.
Now from the perspective of the contribution margin.
(Not going to lie -- I had to look up what a contribution margin was. I'm used to sourcing 10-K Consolidated Statements of Income/Operations and that hasn't been relevant.)
Now onto Q&A.

First Q: "Should investors expect choppy growth rates?"

Response is that Palantir is expanding through channel partnerships -- potentially to "(tens of?) thousands of customers" and drops the "sensor to shooter" income from DoD. "It's about the power of Apollo"
Next question is on how the Demo Day was received by customers.

COO Shyam Sankar again answered this one. He mentions Demo Day Double-Click in April that should be announced soon.
I missed the third question about small and medium-sized businesses, which was to (Rob?) rather than the COO (Shyam). The answer is invoking the contribution margin numbers.
The COO (Shyam Sankar) says that Palantir is "aggressively pursuing" partnerships with the large primes (i.e., Boeing, Raytheon...) which would look like "Palantir in every missile...or drone" by retrofitting their AI capabilities.
COO Shyam Sankar: "We're now...able to address the roughly quarter trillion dollars of DoD weapons spend."
It's possible I misheard 'billion' as 'trillion', but I think he said 'trillion'.
Had to take a phone call so missed a minute or so.
Question from Morgan Stanley to Dave on understanding the income statement. Curious about volatility in revenue.
Had to take another call but Palantir (probably Dave?) was going on about channel partnerships (e.g., with IBM) again.
Next question is on how Foundry's modularity is impacting customers. Response was marketing speak on "meeting customers where they are".
Next question on "triple-digit growth in sales headcount". Question is how much sales rev was captured by sales vs. forward-deployed engineers.

A: Half of growth is driven by sales reps. But more in government. Not comfortable fully commenting on productivity yet.
And the Q&A is over. Probably worth circling back when the video is posted to fully transcribe the segment on the "aggressive" pursuance of weapons primes.
Hmmm. I don't think Palantir is going to post a video.

A replay is supposedly available at the following numbers, but I called both and the person on the other end said you need the ID associated with the replay (which Palantir doesn't seem to provide).

https://t.co/nuEzDfgFGT

More from Finance

Last week Hizbollah's finance institution Al Qard el Hasan was hacked by Spiderz. A group of people took that Data and tried to make sense out of it. Below are the findings

https://t.co/eGLqvb28o5


Loans are provided to borrowers for gold deposits or other guarantees, to the association's members and to unsecured applicants.

AQAH had a carried forward loan balance of $450 million as of December 31, 2019. This balance has been increasing at a yearly rate of 13.4%.


AQAH laundered around $475 million in 2019 in the form of disbursed loans paid to more than 20,000 borrower accounts; mostly to borrowers with gold deposits.

Deposits accounts have been offered to 307,000 members of the association, 83,000 contributors as well as to 600 companies. AQAH closed 2019 with an overall depositors accounts balance of around $500 million.
Ok here is the explanation. Grab a cup of coffee and read on. If you have not read/noticed this, you will see intraday options movement in a new light.


Say we have two options, one 50 delta ATM options and another 30 delta OTM option. Normally for a 100 point move, the ATM option will move 50 points and the OTM option will move 30 points. But in a high volatile environment, the OTM option will also move nearly 50 points

To understand why this happens, first understand why an ATM option is 50 delta. An ATM option has the probability of 50% of expiring as ITM. The price just has to close a rupee above the strike for the CE to be ITM and vice versa for PEs

Now think of a highly volatile day like today. If someone is asked where the BNF will close for the day or expiry, no one can answer. BNF can close freakin anywhere, That makes every option of an equal probability of being ITM. So all options have a 50% probability of being ITM

Hence, when a huge volatile move starts, all OTM options behave like ATM options. This phenomenon was first observed in the Black Monday crash of 1987 at Wall Street, which also gave rise to the volatility skew/smirk
THREAD: Who are the rising stars of Chinese elite politics in the central Party-State bureaucracy?

For @MacroPoloChina I analyzed last year's ministerial-level promotions to posts in Beijing

TLDR: Ties to Xi Jinping—or a Xi ally—are very helpful! (1/14)

https://t.co/kO2A0Efyq2


Seven politicians were promoted to ministerial-level positions in central Party agencies last year

All are likely to feature on the next Central Committee selected at the 2022 Party Congress

Some could make the CCP's elite 25-person Politburo (2/14)

https://t.co/kO2A0Efyq2


Likeliest for the Politburo is Meng Xiangfeng, new Executive Deputy Director of the CCP General Office

He would replace Xi ally Ding Xuexiang as CCP chief-of-staff if Ding is promoted further in 2022

Meng worked under Xi allies Cai Qi in Hangzhou and Chen Xi in Liaoning (3/14)


Less likely for the Politburo but still important is Jiang Jinquan, new Director of the CCP Policy Research Office

He replaces 5th-ranked leader Wang Huning who led the Party's brains trust for 18 years

Wang remains prominent and will be <68 in 2022, so he'll stay around (4/14)


Other notable central Party promotions include Li Shulei and Liang Yanshun, who both assisted Xi when he led the Central Party School from 2007-2012

Li is a political conservative who is said to be quite close with Xi, even drafting his 2014 speech on culture and art (5/14)

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