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Editorial Advisory Board

  • Professor Andrea M. Armani, University of Southern California
  • Ruti Ben-Shlomi, Ph.D., LightSolver
  • James Butler, Ph.D., Hamamatsu
  • Natalie Fardian-Melamed, Ph.D., Columbia University
  • Justin Sigley, Ph.D., AmeriCOM
  • Professor Birgit Stiller, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, and Leibniz University of Hannover
  • Professor Stephen Sweeney, University of Glasgow
  • Mohan Wang, Ph.D., University of Oxford
  • Professor Xuchen Wang, Harbin Engineering University
  • Professor Stefan Witte, Delft University of Technology

ePlus, Getty Images, Xerox, Coherent, and Planet Labs Shares Are Falling, What You Need To Know

PLUS Cover Image

What Happened?

A number of stocks fell in the morning session after a surprisingly weak U.S. jobs report was released, fueling concerns about a slowing economy. 

The U.S. economy added only 73,000 jobs, falling significantly short of economists' expectations, while figures for May and June were revised down, erasing 258,000 previously reported jobs. The professional and business services industry itself shed 14,000 jobs. This data points to a cooling labor market, fueling concerns of a slowing economy. A weaker economic outlook often leads to reduced corporate spending on key services like IT consulting and professional staffing, which directly impacts the sector's revenue and growth prospects. The report immediately increased investor expectations of an interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve.

The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks.

Among others, the following stocks were impacted:

Zooming In On Planet Labs (PL)

Planet Labs’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 65 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.

The previous big move we wrote about was 11 days ago when the stock gained 4.9% on continued positive momentum following a series of major contract wins in the defense and intelligence sector announced earlier in the month. 

Investors are still reacting favorably to news from early July, when the company announced four significant awards for its AI-enabled solutions. The most substantial of these was a multi-year, €240 million satellite services agreement funded by the German government to enhance European peace and security. Under the deal, Planet will provide dedicated satellite capacity, data, and AI-powered solutions for situational awareness. Additionally, the company secured a seven-figure contract expansion with the U.S. Navy for Maritime Domain Awareness and an expanded agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. This string of high-value contracts underscores the growing demand for Planet's satellite imagery and data analytics capabilities within the global security landscape, boosting investor confidence in the company's growth trajectory.

Planet Labs is up 55.2% since the beginning of the year, but at $6.16 per share, it is still trading 12.4% below its 52-week high of $7.03 from July 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Planet Labs’s shares at the IPO in April 2021 would now be looking at an investment worth $622.22.

Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.

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