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The S&P 500 dropped nearly 2% last week, but some stocks were big winners. The Trade Desk (TTD) jumped 22.9% following CEO Jeff Green’s massive $148 million stock buy. That made the Trade Desk the number one performer in the entire S&P 500 index last week. Palantir (PLTR) and CrowdStrike (CRWD) also saw big jumps last week.
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CrowdStrike’s first GAAP profit and Palantir’s defense-tech positioning amid Middle East strikes drove the two stocks higher despite a general market sell-off.
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The S&P 500 (SPY) fell nearly 2% on the week, while the Nasdaq 100 dropped about 1.2% and the Russell 2000 small-cap index tumbled over 4%.
The VIX fear gauge climbed to 29.49, and is now up 70% in the past month, reflecting genuine investor unease.
Geopolitical tension in the Middle East, tariff uncertainty, and a choppy macro backdrop kept broad indexes under pressure. Yet a handful of S&P 500 names surged double digits, driven by earnings catalysts, insider conviction, and defense-sector tailwinds.
READ: The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks
|
Stock |
Ticker |
Weekly Change |
|---|---|---|
|
The Trade Desk |
TTD |
+22.9% |
|
Intuit |
INTU |
+17.6% |
|
LyondellBasell Industries |
LYB |
+16.7% |
|
CF Industries |
CF |
+16.3% |
|
Expedia Group |
EXPE |
+15.7% |
|
AppLovin |
APP |
+15.5% |
|
CrowdStrike |
CRWD |
+15.3% |
|
ServiceNow |
NOW |
+15.1% |
|
Palantir Technologies |
PLTR |
+14.6% |
|
Workday |
WDAY |
+12.9% |
Let’s dive into why The Trade Desk, CrowdStrike, and Palantir saw such strong gains in the past five days.
CrowdStrike reported Q4 FY2026 earnings on March 3, and the headline that mattered most wasn’t revenue growth — it was the bottom line: CrowdStrike recorded its first-ever positive GAAP net income of $38.69 million, flipping from a $86.29 million loss in the same quarter a year ago.
Revenue grew 23% year-over-year to $1.305 billion, edging past estimates. Ending ARR hit $5.25 billion, up 24%, while net new ARR of $330.7 million surged 47% year-over-year, a record. Free cash flow margin came in at 29%.
CEO George Kurtz set the tone on the call:
“FY26 will go down in our history books as CrowdStrike’s best year yet. As enterprises rapidly adopt AI, CrowdStrike is mission-critical infrastructure — securing AI across every layer from GPU to agent to prompt.”
— George Kurtz, CEO, CrowdStrike
Morningstar raised its fair value estimate from $410 to $460, while Barclays maintained a Buy with a $550 price target. The stock jumped over 4% the day after earnings and finished the week up 15.3% on the week. A geopolitical tailwind helped too: 149 hacktivist DDoS attacks hit 110 organizations across 16 countries following Middle East conflict escalation, putting cybersecurity names in focus.
We were live-blogging CrowdStrike’s earnings, and I walked away generally impressed. Net new ARR hit 47%, and the company’s guidance for fiscal 2027 slightly exceeded Wall Street expectations on the revenue side.
Palantir gained 14.6% this week, driven more by geopolitics than earnings. U.S. military strikes against Iran sent defense stocks surging, with Palantir joining Lockheed Martin and RTX near all-time highs.
Palantir sits at the intersection of AI and national security. Its AI Platform is deeply embedded in Pentagon intelligence operations, making it a direct beneficiary when defense spending sentiment spikes. The company’s Q4 2025 results showed U.S. government revenue of $570 million, up 66% year-over-year, and management guided for full-year 2026 revenue of over $7.18 billion.
Prediction markets confirmed the bullish conviction: the Polymarket contract for PLTR closing above $144 for the week resolved “Yes” with near-certainty, with that market drawing the highest trading volume of any price bracket.
Trade Desk was the week’s biggest gainer at +22.9%, fueled by a stunning show of insider conviction. CEO Jeff Green purchased approximately $148 million worth of shares, acquiring nearly 6.4 million Class A common shares near the stock’s multi-year lows — the largest insider purchase in company history.
TTD is down nearly 55% over the past year, battered by a disappointing Q3 2025 earnings miss and competition concerns from vertically integrated platforms like Google and Amazon. Green buying at these levels signals he believes the selloff is overdone.
The market agreed, at least for now. Reddit’s r/stocks lit up with a post titled “The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green bought $148 million worth of shares in the last 2 days” accumulating over 550 upvotes and 100 comments. A thread in r/wallstreetbets drew over 838 upvotes, with retail investors broadly reading the purchase as a confidence signal.
Reports of early-stage talks between OpenAI and Trade Desk on a potential advertising partnership circulated mid-week, giving bulls another reason to pile in. Analyst consensus sits at a target price of $31.89, with 19 buy or strong-buy ratings against 15 holds. The stock closed the week at $29.28, still well below its 52-week high of $91.45.
Against a week where the broad market struggled and the VIX climbed, these three stories showed that individual catalysts still move stocks.
Earnings milestones, geopolitical tailwinds, and management conviction can each cut through macro noise.
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