5 Beloved Stocks on Wall Street I'd Sell Right Now | The Motley Fool

One week from today, we'll be ringing in a new year -- and investors are likely to be smiling from ear to ear. As of the closing bell on Dec. 19, the ageless Dow Jones Industrial Average , benchmark S&P 500 , and growth-focused Nasdaq Composite had, respectively, climbed by 14%, 16%, and 20% year-to-date. Although the stock market's major indexes have an unblemished track record of rising over multidecade periods, history has shown that equities rarely, if ever, climb at a parabolic rate or advance in a straight line. In other words, when things seem too good to be true on Wall Street, they often are. We're about to enter 2026 with the second priciest stock market dating back to January 1871 -- and stock valuations aren't the only headwinds investors will have to contend with in the new year . If I were holding any of the following five beloved stocks (which I'm not), I'd ring the register and sell right now. Image source: Getty Images. Palantir Technologies I've been an investor for 27 years, and I've never witnessed a megacap stock whose valuation makes less sense than that of artificial intelligence (AI) titan Palantir Technologies ( PLTR +0.02%). I'll give Palantir and its CEO, Alex Karp, credit where credit is due. The company's AI and machine learning-driven platforms, Gotham and Foundry, aren't duplicable at scale . This ensures that the company's double-digit growth rate and operating cash flow are both predictable and sustainable. But even though investors are more than willing to pay a premium for sustainable moats on Wall Street, Palantir's premium is otherworldly. Dating back to the proliferation of the internet in the mid-1990s, large public companies with price-to-sales (P/S) ratios above 30 have historically signaled the presence of a bubble. While the P/S ratio isn't a useful timing tool, it does have a flawless track record of alerting investors to historically unsustainable valuations. As of the closing bell on Dec. 19, Palantir was sporting a P/S ratio of almost 127 . There isn't a sales guide or earnings beat in 2026 that would be sufficient to support such an aggressive premium. NASDAQ: BYND Key Data Points Beyond Meat A second beloved stock that I'd send to the chopping block right now is plant-based meat company Beyond Meat ( BYND 2.33%). Wall Street's newest meme stock made waves when its shares skyrocketed approximately 1,600% in less than four days in October. Investors were excited about the prospects of the company's debt-for-equity exchange, which eliminated the bulk of its debt obligations. There was also a high level of short interest in Beyond Meat stock at the time, leading to the belief that a short squeeze would occur. This is where short-sellers (investors who wager on a stock's share price to decline) all rush for the exit at once, leading to a brief but parabolic move higher in a company's share price. However, Beyond Meat's debt-for-equity exchange, coupled with an at-the-market share offering announced with its third-quarter...

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