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The Street
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Rob Lenihan

Veteran investor sets his sights on Palantir, SoFi and Rocket Lab

Stephen Guilfoyle is going long.

While football season kicked off last week, TheStreet Pro contributor and veteran investor is looking beyond the gridiron to the world of investing.

Related: Palantir stock surges on big S&P 500 boost for data analytics group

Guilfoyle recently shared his thoughts about going long on three stocks. And when we say long, we're talking real long. Like passing on to the next generation long.

"These are long-term investments that I believe have a chance to have an outsized positive impact in the future," he wrote on Sept. 6. "These investments may be for me, but more than likely, these investments are for my children and for Guilfoyles I haven't even met yet."

This has been a kind of queasy time for the market, with Bespoke Investment Group noting that "September didn’t start well." 

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, during the FoundryCon event in Palo Alto, Calif., on Thursday, March 7, 2024. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Palantir CEO: 'Playbooks of the past no longer working'

"Since 1953 when the five-day trading week in its current form began, this year ranks as the worst first week for the S&P 500 on record," the firm said in a Sept. 9 newsletter. "Before this year, the record for worst start to kick off the ninth month of the year was 2001 with the other years being 1987, 2008, and 2015."

Using a basketball analogy, Bespoke said "these years are to bulls what the Detroit Pistons were to the rest of the NBA in the late 1980s and early 1990s."

Related: Three hot stocks — one a surprise — will join S&P 500

"The market is trying to figure out just how hard or soft this landing is going to be," Guilfoyle said. "Markets are also trying to figure out if the Fed should kick off their brand new and easier brand of monetary policy on September 18 with a small (25 basis point) or large (50 basis point) short-term rate cut."

Guilfoyle pointed to Palantir Technologies  (PLTR) , Rocket Lab USA and SoFi Technologies, three stocks that he's "been accumulating on weakness for quite some time now."

Palantir was surging on news that the data-analytics company, which has been trading publicly for only four years, will be added to the S&P 500 as of Sept. 23. 

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The Denver data-analytics group, which went public in 2020, has added more than $35 billion in market value over the past year, replacing stalwart American Airlines  (AAL)  in the S&P 500.

Last month, Palantir posted quarterly profit of 6 cents a share as sales surged 27% thanks in part to surging demand for its AIP Logic platform, which tests and improves artificial-intelligence-related strategies.

A big boost in commercial-division sales indicated that Palantir, which was cofounded by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, is successfully expanding its overall business outside its legacy government-client list.

"The playbooks of the past are no longer working," CEO Alex Karp said in his letter to shareholders. "And even the people who had believed in them now know this."

More recently, on Sept. 9, Palantir and oil giant BP BP said they were extending their strategic relationship and introducing new artificial intelligence capabilities with Palantir’s AIP software as they build on relationship that started in 2014.

Guilfoyle: RocketLab selloff an opportunity

Guilfoyle said that Rocket Lab USA  (RKLB)  had been trading lower "and is now testing the highs of July," prompting him to take advantage of the selloff "and add to this long position at a price that I haven't seen in a month and a half."

 More Tech Stocks:

Rocket Lab, which is up nearly 11% year-to-date, recently beat Wall Street's second-quarter earnings expectations. Founder and CEO Sir Peter Beck said "Q2 was a huge quarter for Rocket Lab in a lot of ways but especially in terms of revenue."

"By owning launch and spacecraft, we’re at a distinct advantage when it comes to establishing our own space capabilities or constellations," Beck told analysts during the company's Aug. 9 earnings call. "We can build and launch our own spacecraft at cost and we don’t have to wait in line for limited launch capacity."

Last week the aerospace company said it had set the launch window for its 53rd Electron Launch, the second of five dedicated launches for the French company Kineis.

The “Kineis Killed the RadIOT Star” mission is scheduled to launch from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand, during a 14-day window that opens on Sept. 17, Rocket Labs said.

Investor Guilfoyle lauds SoFi CEO

And then there's SoFi Technologies.  (SOFI) Guilfoyle was impressed with Chief Executive Anthony Noto recent appearance on CNBC, as the former U.S. Army Ranger said that the fintech "is seeing improved deposits, improved net flows and improved spending."

Guilfoyle said SoFi stands to benefit from the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision not to reinstate the Biden administration’s student loan repayment plan, which aims to lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers.

“By taking the weight off of the taxpayers and placing it back on the borrowers, such a ruling obviously plays well for lenders such as SoFi Technologies,” he said.

Related: Veteran fund manager sees world of pain coming for stocks

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