Not gonna lie, for weeks there’s been this one Palantir superfan on Twitter who thinks he’s a stock market prophet. Every single day, he’s been preaching about how he saw the vision, how Palantir is going to space, and how the rest of us are just low-IQ peasants fumbling around in the dark. Well, congrats, buddy… your favorite stock just got taken out back and disciplined like a red headed stepchild.

Early this morning, Palantir dropped nearly 12%... its worst single-day loss ever. The AI-driven defense contractor took a one two punch right to the groin after CEO Alex Karp revealed a new stock sale plan, and the Pentagon announced 8% budget cuts. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth essentially told government contractors, “Yeah, that bottomless well of taxpayer cash? It’s over.”

Palantir, which is essentially the government’s nerdy little IT guy, felt the pain immediately. (I saw someone on Twitter say, “We still don’t even know what Palantir actually does” and I’ve never felt more seen.) Oh, and just to be factual, at the time of this writing Palantir is only down 4%... so I guess it’s recovering fast.

With that backdrop, Wall Street wasn’t looking much better. The Dow tumbled -1.2%, the S&P 500 lost 0.6%, and the Nasdaq followed suit, shedding 0.6%. Investors who were just celebrating new record highs two days ago suddenly remembered that stocks can, in fact, go down. Walmart played the co-lead role (right next to Palantir) in the sell-off, tanking over 6% after its 2026 sales forecast fell flat. Even though Wally World delivered solid Q4 earnings, the company expects sales growth of just 3-4%... a slowdown that has the entire retail sector freaking out.

Target and Costco decided to make Walmart’s bad news about themselves, both shedding over 12% as Wall Street started questioning whether the American consumer is broke.

And of course, gold hit fresh record highs as investors panic-bought safety, while Treasury yields dipped, taking down banking giants like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (-5%) with them.

And in today’s “Wait, what?” news… Amazon finally wrestled creative control of the James Bond franchise away from Barbara Broccoli (real name) and Michael Wilson, ending years of power struggles. The search for the next 007 is officially in Jeff Bezos’ hands (Jeff has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever). That said, investors aren’t impressed considering Amazon stock is down 1%.

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.