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Why Palantir's Options Market Still Favors Bulls Despite AI Bubble Fears

MarketDash Editorial Team
4 days ago
While Michael Burry and others bet against PLTR stock amid AI bubble concerns, a quantitative analysis of the company's risk structure suggests near-term opportunities remain for bullish traders willing to understand the mathematics.

Here's the thing about Palantir Technologies (PLTR): it's been one of the year's best performers, but financial markets don't care about your recent winning streak. Markets are what mathematicians call non-linear and non-ergodic, which is a fancy way of saying that past success doesn't guarantee future stability. You can have perfect fundamentals and a string of earnings beats, and still get knocked sideways by a volatile shock that nobody saw coming.

Right now, the big worry isn't just normal market corrections. Investors are increasingly vocal about a potential bubble forming in artificial intelligence and related technologies. The anxiety has gotten loud enough that Wedbush analyst Dan Ives felt compelled to push back against what he sees as excessive doom-and-gloom thinking.

But the bubble skeptics aren't backing down. Michael Burry, the investor who famously called the 2008 housing crisis in "The Big Short," recently revealed he's holding a bearish position against PLTR stock through two-year puts. That's his timeframe for expecting things to go south.

Here's where it gets interesting, though. Predicting what happens two years out in financial markets is extraordinarily difficult. We're talking about one of the most complex environments imaginable, featuring randomness, chaos, feedback loops, and constantly shifting volatility patterns. Burry's puts might eventually prove prescient, but they assume a specific two-year window for trouble to arrive. That leaves plenty of room for PLTR stock to move around in the meantime.

And right now, the stock just flashed a quantitative signal that could increase the odds of near-term upside. Even better, we can measure the potential impact of this signal using a framework called trinitarian geometry, which helps visualize the shape and structure of risk itself.

Understanding Where PLTR Stock Actually Wants To Go

Nobody has a crystal ball that can tell you exactly where PLTR will trade on any given day. But what you can do is break the stock's price action into multiple trials and discover where prices tend to cluster after running those trials many times over. It's the difference between guessing and using probability to understand likely outcomes.

Trinitarian geometry combines three mathematical disciplines: probability theory from Kolmogorov, behavioral state transitions from Markov, and kernel density estimation from calculus. Together, these tools help identify probability density, which represents the point where prices tend to cluster most frequently. Instead of treating probability as some abstract concept, this approach treats it like a physical object you can see and measure, giving you the visual shape and structure of risk.

When you can visualize risk as a mathematically tangible object, the entire options trading game changes.

Using this framework with multiple price iterations, we can map out where PLTR stock is likely to land over the next 10 weeks. Based on an anchor price of $174.40, the forward 10-week median returns arrange themselves into a distributional curve with outcomes ranging between $172 and $197. The primary price clustering appears likely around $185, with secondary clustering prominent near $178.

That's the baseline assessment using all trials since Palantir's initial public offering. But we're focused on something more specific: a 4-6-D sequence. Over the trailing 10 weeks, PLTR stock printed four up weeks and six down weeks, with an overall downward slope. This particular pattern matters.

Under this condition, the forward 10-week returns shift to a likely range between $167 and $204, with price clustering now expected to be predominant around $188. When you compare the primary clusters between the baseline structure and this current pattern, the positive variance is only 1.62%. That might not sound like much, but it's not the most interesting part of this analysis.

How To Actually Profit From Understanding Risk Structure

The real value here is that we now understand the structure of risk, information that the vast majority of retail traders simply don't have. With this knowledge, we can implement a strategy that buys the premium associated with the realistic side of the distributional curve while selling the unrealistic side through a vertical spread.

One compelling trade is the 185/190 bull call spread expiring January 16, 2026. This trade needs PLTR stock to rise through the $190 strike price at expiration, which aligns with the $188 price clustering forecast. The breakeven price sits at $186.80, which looks very reachable based on historical analogs. The maximum payout for this spread is nearly 178%.

Now, bull spreads have an obvious limitation: you don't get rewarded for anything above the second-leg strike price because both the risk and reward are capped by design. But in this case, that limitation might actually work in your favor, and the math shows why.

While PLTR stock may cluster around $188 over the next 10 weeks, the probability density between $190 and $195 drops by roughly 58%. From $195 to $200, the density plummets by nearly 91%. In other words, once you understand the shape of risk, you can see that PLTR's exceedance ratio starts falling off a cliff from $190 onward.

That portion of the distributional curve represents probabilistic mass that we can sell because those underlying events are unlikely to materialize. What is likely to materialize are prices up to around $190. That's precisely why the 185/190 spread makes sense: the premium is tied to a future value that's rational and supported by probability, not some fantastical moonshot scenario.

You're essentially buying the part of the curve where things are likely to happen and selling the part where things probably won't. That's how you turn mathematical insight into actual trading edge, especially when everyone else is either blindly bullish or getting spooked by bubble talk without understanding the underlying probability structure.

The AI bubble concerns are real, and Burry's bearish position deserves respect. But two-year puts and 10-week call spreads are playing completely different games. One is betting on an eventual reckoning, the other is capitalizing on near-term probability patterns that favor upside movement. Both can be right, just at different times.

Back to News

Why Palantir's Options Market Still Favors Bulls Despite AI Bubble Fears

MarketDash Editorial Team
4 days ago
While Michael Burry and others bet against PLTR stock amid AI bubble concerns, a quantitative analysis of the company's risk structure suggests near-term opportunities remain for bullish traders willing to understand the mathematics.

Here's the thing about Palantir Technologies (PLTR): it's been one of the year's best performers, but financial markets don't care about your recent winning streak. Markets are what mathematicians call non-linear and non-ergodic, which is a fancy way of saying that past success doesn't guarantee future stability. You can have perfect fundamentals and a string of earnings beats, and still get knocked sideways by a volatile shock that nobody saw coming.

Right now, the big worry isn't just normal market corrections. Investors are increasingly vocal about a potential bubble forming in artificial intelligence and related technologies. The anxiety has gotten loud enough that Wedbush analyst Dan Ives felt compelled to push back against what he sees as excessive doom-and-gloom thinking.

But the bubble skeptics aren't backing down. Michael Burry, the investor who famously called the 2008 housing crisis in "The Big Short," recently revealed he's holding a bearish position against PLTR stock through two-year puts. That's his timeframe for expecting things to go south.

Here's where it gets interesting, though. Predicting what happens two years out in financial markets is extraordinarily difficult. We're talking about one of the most complex environments imaginable, featuring randomness, chaos, feedback loops, and constantly shifting volatility patterns. Burry's puts might eventually prove prescient, but they assume a specific two-year window for trouble to arrive. That leaves plenty of room for PLTR stock to move around in the meantime.

And right now, the stock just flashed a quantitative signal that could increase the odds of near-term upside. Even better, we can measure the potential impact of this signal using a framework called trinitarian geometry, which helps visualize the shape and structure of risk itself.

Understanding Where PLTR Stock Actually Wants To Go

Nobody has a crystal ball that can tell you exactly where PLTR will trade on any given day. But what you can do is break the stock's price action into multiple trials and discover where prices tend to cluster after running those trials many times over. It's the difference between guessing and using probability to understand likely outcomes.

Trinitarian geometry combines three mathematical disciplines: probability theory from Kolmogorov, behavioral state transitions from Markov, and kernel density estimation from calculus. Together, these tools help identify probability density, which represents the point where prices tend to cluster most frequently. Instead of treating probability as some abstract concept, this approach treats it like a physical object you can see and measure, giving you the visual shape and structure of risk.

When you can visualize risk as a mathematically tangible object, the entire options trading game changes.

Using this framework with multiple price iterations, we can map out where PLTR stock is likely to land over the next 10 weeks. Based on an anchor price of $174.40, the forward 10-week median returns arrange themselves into a distributional curve with outcomes ranging between $172 and $197. The primary price clustering appears likely around $185, with secondary clustering prominent near $178.

That's the baseline assessment using all trials since Palantir's initial public offering. But we're focused on something more specific: a 4-6-D sequence. Over the trailing 10 weeks, PLTR stock printed four up weeks and six down weeks, with an overall downward slope. This particular pattern matters.

Under this condition, the forward 10-week returns shift to a likely range between $167 and $204, with price clustering now expected to be predominant around $188. When you compare the primary clusters between the baseline structure and this current pattern, the positive variance is only 1.62%. That might not sound like much, but it's not the most interesting part of this analysis.

How To Actually Profit From Understanding Risk Structure

The real value here is that we now understand the structure of risk, information that the vast majority of retail traders simply don't have. With this knowledge, we can implement a strategy that buys the premium associated with the realistic side of the distributional curve while selling the unrealistic side through a vertical spread.

One compelling trade is the 185/190 bull call spread expiring January 16, 2026. This trade needs PLTR stock to rise through the $190 strike price at expiration, which aligns with the $188 price clustering forecast. The breakeven price sits at $186.80, which looks very reachable based on historical analogs. The maximum payout for this spread is nearly 178%.

Now, bull spreads have an obvious limitation: you don't get rewarded for anything above the second-leg strike price because both the risk and reward are capped by design. But in this case, that limitation might actually work in your favor, and the math shows why.

While PLTR stock may cluster around $188 over the next 10 weeks, the probability density between $190 and $195 drops by roughly 58%. From $195 to $200, the density plummets by nearly 91%. In other words, once you understand the shape of risk, you can see that PLTR's exceedance ratio starts falling off a cliff from $190 onward.

That portion of the distributional curve represents probabilistic mass that we can sell because those underlying events are unlikely to materialize. What is likely to materialize are prices up to around $190. That's precisely why the 185/190 spread makes sense: the premium is tied to a future value that's rational and supported by probability, not some fantastical moonshot scenario.

You're essentially buying the part of the curve where things are likely to happen and selling the part where things probably won't. That's how you turn mathematical insight into actual trading edge, especially when everyone else is either blindly bullish or getting spooked by bubble talk without understanding the underlying probability structure.

The AI bubble concerns are real, and Burry's bearish position deserves respect. But two-year puts and 10-week call spreads are playing completely different games. One is betting on an eventual reckoning, the other is capitalizing on near-term probability patterns that favor upside movement. Both can be right, just at different times.