The Friday Consensus: Everyone Wants $PLTR, One Just Left

Disclosure: I hold positions in $META, $MSFT, and $BE as of August 7, 2026, all of which appear below. This is not personalized investment advice. See full disclaimer below.

This is a new Friday series where I track all of the YouTube finance influencers' stock picks. I track them the same way I track hedge funds during 13F season. This past week I went through all of the videos from 10 different channels, 60 videos total, and logged what they bought and sold. That came out to 119 different stocks, but only 7 of them got mentioned by 3 or more channels.

The Crowd

$META was the most covered stock of the week, with 5 channels bullish. Parkev Tatevosian alone covered it 4 times, including "Should You Buy the Dip in Meta Stock?" on July 31. Chris Sain, Akshat Shrivastava, Ticker Symbol: YOU, and Joseph Carlson After Hours all said the same thing.

Palantir also got 5 channels, and it has something no other stock had this week. I sort these channels by size the same way I sort hedge funds: big is over 500K subscribers, mid-sized is 100K to 500K, small is under 100K. The signal I care about is when different sizes agree, and $PLTR is the only stock where that happened. 4 big channels were bullish, Tom Nash twice, and Invest with Henry, the one mid-sized channel that posted this week, added "The PLTR Wheel Strategy Mistake That Costs Investors Thousands" on August 5.

The rest of the list is basically the AI supply chain. $MSFT and $NVDA got 4 channels each, $MU and $TSM got 3, and Ticker Symbol: YOU covered NVDA, MU, and TSM in one single video on July 31. $SOFI is the last one at 3 channels.

Let's be honest about one thing before you read into any of this. 9 of the 10 channels that posted are big ones, so most of this "consensus" is just the biggest channels agreeing with each other. That's still worth knowing. $PLTR is one of those stocks people love to pile into after a sharp move, and when every big audience is hearing the same handful of AI names, the piling in is the story. The only stock they actually fought over was $AAPL: Chris Sain was bullish, Akshat Shrivastava and Joseph Carlson were bearish.

All stances in this series are reported from each creator's public videos, not endorsed. Position Note tracks the crowd; it does not offer personalized investment advice.

The Rotations

Forget the buy calls for a second. The real story is who left. 3 creators walked out of a stock this week, and all 3 left names the rest of the crowd was piling into. That's the stuff this scan exists to catch.

Akshat Shrivastava sold out of $NVDA on August 3, the same week 4 other channels were bullish on it. Joseph Carlson After Hours exited $PLTR on August 3, in the same video where the channel stayed bullish on META, MSFT, Alphabet, and Uber. So the most agreed-on stock of the week also just lost one of its biggest cheerleaders.

The third one turned into a head-to-head. Parkev Tatevosian exited $TSLA on August 4, and Chris Sain posted bullish Tesla videos on August 4 and again on August 5. Two channels, one stock, opposite directions, inside 48 hours.

Off the Radar

This section is for stocks only 1 or 2 channels mentioned, so we can take a closer look at names we might not be aware of yet. The funniest miss of the week is Alphabet: 3 channels covered it, but Google trades under two tickers, and they split between $GOOG and $GOOGL. I count tickers, not companies, so it missed the consensus list on a technicality.

$RDDT was the cleanest quiet pick of the week. Joseph Hogue covered Reddit twice, on August 3 and August 6, and Parkev Tatevosian reviewed it on August 2. $ELF got the rarer kind of overlap, 2 channels on the exact same day, with Jeremy Lefebvre and ZipTrader both covering it on August 6.

Past that it thins out fast. Tom Nash packed $CEG, $CRWD, $VRT, and $BE into one July 31 video, and Ticker Symbol: YOU is the only channel touching quantum computing, with $IONQ and $RGTI. Normally this section is where the small channels earn their keep. None of them posted this week, so off the radar mostly means thinly covered.

What I'm watching next Friday: does the Palantir agreement hold once the mid-sized and small channels report in, and was Carlson's exit a one-off or the start of a trend.

Related Reading: Why I Own $PLTR After the 2026 AI Software Pullback and Why I Own $META After the AI Capex Reset

Howard is a full-time trader based in New Jersey with 13 years of experience across Forex, crypto, equities, and futures. He started Position Note to document his trades and analysis in public. All positions are disclosed. Nothing here is personalized investment advice.