Update, August 2, 2026: the fix promised at the end of this piece has shipped. Every score the site displays now carries the quarter it was computed from — Palantir's header reads R40: 99 · 2024 Q4 rather than a bare R40 99, and the homepage list, the stocks index and the ten sector tables date each row, so Palantir's 99 from 2024 Q4 is visibly a different vintage from Nvidia's 145 from 2026 Q2 in the same sorted column. What is described below as a table that ranks quarters against each other with nothing on screen saying so is therefore how the site looked when this was published, not how it reads now. The data gap itself is unchanged: Palantir's cash-flow series still stops at 2024 Q4, so the score is still five quarters behind the revenue line — it now says so.
The header on Palantir's page reads R40 99. That score is computed from Q4 2024. Every quarter Palantir has reported since is missing from it, and nothing on the page says so.
This is not a rounding problem. In the quarter the score comes from, Palantir booked $828 million of revenue. In the most recent quarter our data holds, it booked $1,633 million — 1.97 times as much. The 99 is an accurate measurement of a business roughly half the current size, displayed as though it were current.
What the score is missing
Every figure below comes from the data behind the Palantir ticker page.
| 2024 Q4 — where the score comes from | 2026 Q1 — latest data we hold | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $828M | $1,633M |
| Revenue growth, YoY | +36.2% | +84.7% |
| Gross margin | 78.91% | 86.78% |
Revenue growth has more than doubled, and that matters disproportionately because of how the score is built. The Rule of 40 is revenue growth plus free-cash-flow margin, so the growth half alone is now 84.7 — nearly the entire 99 the page advertises as the total, before any margin contribution is counted at all.
The gross-margin line is the quieter number and the more telling one. It has risen in every quarter since the score froze:
78.91% → 80.43% → 80.78% → 82.45% → 84.65% → 86.78%
Six consecutive quarters of expansion, none of it reaching the headline figure a reader actually sees.
Why the score is stuck
The mechanism is mundane. Our Rule of 40 is revenue growth plus free-cash-flow margin, where free cash flow means operating cash flow minus capital expenditure, computed the same way for every company — the definition is in our Rule of 40 explainer. A score therefore needs a quarter in which both inputs exist.
For Palantir, they do not. In our Palantir data, the revenue and gross-margin series both run through 2026 Q1. The free-cash-flow series stops at 2024 Q4, and so do the EPS and P/E series. The score is not stale because the business stopped moving. It is stale because our cash-flow series stops, and the calculation falls back to the newest quarter where it can still find both halves.
That quarter is Q4 2024, where revenue growth of 36.2% and a free-cash-flow margin of 62.4% sum to 98.6 — the 99 on the page.
Palantir is the worst case, not a special case
It would be easy to write this as one bad ticker. It is not. Across the 64 tickers that carry both series, nine have a free-cash-flow series ending before their revenue series, so their displayed score is computed from an older quarter than their latest data:
| Ticker | Revenue runs to | FCF runs to | Score is behind by |
|---|---|---|---|
| PLTR | 2026 Q1 | 2024 Q4 | 5 quarters |
| AMZN | 2026 Q2 | 2025 Q3 | 3 |
| GS | 2026 Q2 | 2025 Q4 | 2 |
| JPM | 2026 Q2 | 2025 Q4 | 2 |
| BAC | 2026 Q2 | 2026 Q1 | 1 |
| QCOM | 2026 Q2 | 2026 Q1 | 1 |
| SCHW | 2026 Q2 | 2026 Q1 | 1 |
| SOFI | 2026 Q2 | 2026 Q1 | 1 |
| XOM | 2025 Q4 | 2025 Q3 | 1 |
Palantir is the extreme at five quarters; the rest run from one to three.
This table was re-derived on August 3, 2026, and the population has moved in both directions since publication: Amazon widened from two quarters to three, Lilly closed to zero and drops out, and Qualcomm entered at one quarter. Qualcomm's two series were aligned when this piece was published; its June revenue quarter was ingested afterwards, ahead of a matching cash-flow quarter — the same drift described here, not a gap the original sweep missed. The count is still nine, and the denominator is now 64 tickers, down from 65 after one mislabelled free-cash-flow series was removed.
One ticker mismatches in the opposite direction and is deliberately not in that table. Coinbase's cash-flow series runs a quarter ahead of its revenue series, so for COIN the binding constraint is revenue, not cash flow. Its score is not stale in the sense above, but it is the same defect seen from the other side: two series of unequal length, and a score that can only be computed where they overlap.
The consequence reaches past any single page. A reader sorting our table by R40 is ranking Palantir's Q4 2024 against Schwab's 2026 Q1 and against tickers whose scores are current, with nothing on screen indicating the rows come from different dates. Computing free cash flow one way for every company is the entire argument for comparing these scores at all; a table that quietly mixes quarters undercuts that from a direction we had not been watching. We are fixing the display so that every score carries the quarter it was computed from.
What we are not going to do
We are not publishing an updated Rule of 40 for Palantir. The growth half is available — it is 84.7 — but the margin half needs a 2026 Q1 free-cash-flow figure our data does not contain. Estimating one, or substituting Palantir's own adjusted margin for the definition we apply to every other company, would destroy the only property that makes these scores worth comparing.
So the honest statement is narrower than a new number, and more useful: Palantir's revenue growth has accelerated from 36.2% to 84.7%, its gross margin has expanded for six straight quarters, and the score we display reflects none of it. Whatever Palantir's current Rule of 40 is, the growth component by itself very nearly reaches the figure we have been showing as the total.
What to watch
- Whether the cash-flow series catches up. This is a data-coverage gap on our side, not a disclosure gap at Palantir. When the free-cash-flow series extends past 2024 Q4 the score will move, and on the trajectory above it will move up.
- Gross margin's seventh quarter. Six consecutive rises is a trend; the quarter that breaks it is the one worth noticing.
- How dated the analyst picture is. The most recent rating we hold is a Daiwa Securities upgrade to Buy with a $180 target, dated February 10, 2026, and the ratings block's average target is $183.90 — against a price of $119.50 as of August 1. Those targets are February marks; read them as of that date rather than as of today.
The bottom line
Nothing here was miscalculated. The 99 was correct for the quarter it was computed from, and it has stayed correct for that quarter while the quarter receded. But a score with no date attached stops being a measurement and becomes a claim, and ours has been making a claim about Palantir that its last five quarters do not support. The fix on the page is a label. The lesson underneath is that a composite indicator is only as current as its least current input — and here, for nine tickers, that input is free cash flow.
Palantir figures are from our stored Palantir data: revenue and gross-margin series through 2026 Q1; free-cash-flow, EPS and P/E series ending 2024 Q4; a price of $119.50 as of August 1; ratings block dated February 2026. The nine-ticker count is a sweep of every company we track carrying both a revenue and a free-cash-flow series, counting only those whose free-cash-flow series ends strictly before their revenue series; Coinbase, whose mismatch runs the other way, is excluded from it. The Rule of 40 definition used here is the one in our explainer.