The Portfolio Armor Substack

Trade Alert: Offshore Infrastructure, Optics, Advanced Manufacturing, And Energy Storage

Portfolio Armor — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:23:43 GMT

Offshore Infrastructure, Optics, Advanced Manufacturing, And Energy Storage

Today’s alert has one Top Names trade and three Market Watchers trades.

The Top Names trade is in offshore energy infrastructure. This name has already been a big winner for us once—744% on premium outlay—and we have another open trade in it now. We’re adding a new one because it’s now in Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, its fundamental scores remain strong, and the offshore / Gulf postwar infrastructure repair theme still fits the current macro backdrop.

Two Repeat Names

One of the Market Watchers names is an optical systems company where we already have an open trade that’s currently in the black. The current setup is strong enough that we’re looking at a new, later-dated position rather than just letting the old one ride.

Another Market Watchers name is a solid-state battery company. We tried a trade on it yesterday, but it didn’t fill. The stock still passes our screens, so we’re giving it one more shot. The broader thesis is that battery technology is no longer just an EV story; grid storage, AI data centers, drones, aerospace, defense, and other high-power applications are all becoming part of the opportunity set.

Space Launch Supply Chain

The third Market Watchers trade is in advanced manufacturing for the space launch supply chain.

SpaceX reportedly tried to acquire this company in 2021. The acquisition didn’t happen, but SpaceX remained a major customer and close partner, using its machines to make parts for Raptor engines. That’s the sort of relationship that can matter if public space and launch-supply-chain names keep drawing more attention ahead of SpaceX’s predicted world record IPO.

As usual, we’ve priced these trades so we’re not overpaying for them, and we’ve included pre-set exit instructions, so we don’t have to babysit the trades after they fill.

A Chance To Lock In Current Prices

A brief reminder: subscription prices for the Portfolio Armor Substack are going up from $40 per month or $400 per year to $50 per month or $500 per year on Thursday, but current subscribers will be grandfathered into the price they’re currently paying. So consider joining now, if you’re a free subscriber. If you join and change your mind, I’ll be happy to give you a prorated refund at any time.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Offshore infrastructure / Gulf energy bottleneck theme

Trade Alert: Freight, Photonics, And Energy Storage

Portfolio Armor — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:07:59 GMT

Freight, Photonics, And Energy Storage

Today we’ve got one trade from our Top Names and two from our Market Watchers X list. Our Top Names trade gives us exposure to a freight / logistics name. That theme looks increasingly relevant as the freight cycle improves and capacity tightens, giving strong operators more room to show operating leverage.

Two Repeat Market Watchers Names

The two Market Watchers trades are both repeat names for us.

One is tied to photonics and optical infrastructure, one of the strongest themes in the market now as AI data centers keep pushing demand for faster, more power-efficient ways to move data. We’ve already had two successful exits in this name, ranging from 141% to more than 600% on premium outlay.

The other is a solid-state battery name. It was a loser for us the first time around, but its technical setup looks stronger here, and the broader thesis has improved.

Battery Tech Beyond EVs

The battery name is interesting because solid-state battery technology is no longer just an EV story. Grid-scale storage, AI data centers, drones, aerospace, defense, and other high-power applications are all becoming part of the energy-storage opportunity set.

The Market Watchers thesis here is that the company’s management has been unusually conservative rather than promotional. That’s important in a sector where too many battery and energy-storage companies have sold best-case narratives far ahead of engineering reality.

The point is that when a beaten-down name has a stronger technical setup, a broader addressable market, and management that has avoided hype, it’s worth taking another look.

Letting The Market Come To Us

As usual, we’ve priced these strategies using Black-Scholes, and entered limit prices for them with those fair values in mind: we take the trades when we can get attractive prices on them, but we don’t chase them.

A Chance To Lock In Current Prices

Today’s Top Names Trade

Freight / logistics recovery theme

If You're Not In Space Stocks, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:08:47 GMT

If You’re Not In Space Stocks, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

The tag line of the original Alien movie was, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

In today’s market, if you weren’t in space stocks, everyone could hear you scream.

Rocket Lab () lit the candle today after reporting a strong quarter Thursday night. The company posted record quarterly revenue of $200.3 million, up 63.5% year-over-year, record GAAP gross margin of 38.2%, and a record backlog of $2.2 billion, up 20.2% sequentially. It also ended the quarter with access to more than $2 billion in total liquidity, giving it plenty of runway for organic growth and acquisitions. (Rocket Lab Corporation)

The stock’s reaction wasn’t subtle. RKLB closed up 34.22% today, and the rally spilled over into other publicly traded space names:

Firefly Aerospace (): +22.62%
Redwire (): +20.33%
Intuitive Machines (): +20.16%

The SpaceX IPO Tailwind

Part of this move is company-specific. Rocket Lab’s quarter showed real growth, real backlog, and real demand.

But part of it is broader. Investors are looking ahead to the anticipated SpaceX IPO, which has been reported as potentially coming as soon as this summer, with some reports suggesting a valuation north of $1.75 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO in history. If that IPO happens on anything like those terms, it could pull a lot more attention—and capital—toward the publicly traded space ecosystem.

That doesn’t mean every space stock is suddenly a buy at any price. This is still a volatile, speculative corner of the market. But when a sector starts moving together ahead of a likely mega-IPO, and one of its leaders just gave investors a fresh fundamental excuse to buy, you don’t have to squint to see the setup.

Already In Orbit

This move didn’t come out of nowhere for us.

One of today’s four big space movers, Firefly Aerospace, was our Top Names trade today:

We already had open positions in the other three names too:

Rocket Lab:

Redwire:

Intuitive Machines (we reused the same image here because we liked it so much):

That doesn’t mean every trade will work, or that every space stock will keep flying. It means we had exposure to the theme before today’s move, and we structured that exposure in a way that fit the volatility.

How We Structured The LUNR Trade

Intuitive Machines is a good example.

When we opened that trade, the stock had already been moving sharply, and the options were reflecting that volatility. So instead of simply buying common stock or buying a naked call, we used a hybrid combo:

Today’s Top Names Trade
Lunar infrastructure / space services theme
The stock is Intuitive Machines (LUNR 14.97%↑), and our trade is a hybrid combo consisting of these four legs:
Buying the September 18th, 2026 $26 call,
Selling the March 27th, 2026 $26 call,
Selling the March 27th, 2026 $18 put, and
Buying the March 27th, 2026 $13 put,
For a max net debit of $1.75. The max gain on 1 contract is $606 (and the upside will be uncapped if the short March $26 call expires out of the money), and the max loss is $675. This trade filled at $1.75.

The point of that structure was to get longer-dated upside exposure while harvesting some of the near-term volatility and defining the downside.

As I wrote at the time:

This structure gives us:
A longer-dated upside call to benefit if LUNR catches another speculative leg higher into or after the next few quarters,
A short near-term call around the upcoming earnings date to harvest some of that volatility, and
A defined put spread “floor” to limit damage if the next momentum washout hits the space names again.
If we get another risk-off squall in speculative names like we did last week, we may be able to buy-to-close the short call here cheaply, locking in a partial profit while eliminating our upside cap.

A couple of weeks into Operation Epic Fury, we bought-to-close the short LUNR call at $0.20. Later in March, we exited the put spread at $0.20 too. Now the remaining position is the long September call, with uncapped upside.

That’s the advantage of structuring trades opportunistically in volatile names. At one contract, the original max loss was less than $700, so it was accessible for smaller accounts. Larger accounts could have entered the same structure with more contracts. Either way, the structure gave us multiple ways to improve the position before today’s space-stock rally.

Speculation, But Structured

Space stocks are speculative. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

They’re volatile, capital-intensive, and often dependent on government contracts, launch cadence, execution milestones, and investor appetite for long-duration growth stories. But that’s also why the options can be useful. When volatility is high, you can often sell some of it to help finance the exposure you actually want.

That was the idea with LUNR. It was the idea again today with FLY. And it’s why we’re willing to keep looking for defined-risk ways to get exposure to themes that can move before most investors are ready.

The SpaceX IPO may or may not come on the currently reported timeline. Rocket Lab may or may not keep levitating after today’s surge. The smaller space names will almost certainly remain jumpy.

But if this is the beginning of a broader rerating of public space stocks, we’d rather have structured exposure before the scream than chase afterward.

A Chance To Lock In Current Prices

Subscription prices for the Portfolio Armor Substack are going up from $40 per month/$400 per year to $50 per month/$500 per year next Thursday, but current subscribers will be grandfathered into the price they’re currently paying. So consider joining now, if you’re a free subscriber. If you join and change your mind, I’ll be happy to give you a prorated refund at any time.

Exits, 5/8/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:54:12 GMT

This Week’s Trade Exits

As soon as I exit a trade, I note that in the comments of the post where I first mentioned the trade; at the end of the week, I try to track them all in one post. Starting in July, 2024, I have also been tracking them in this spreadsheet. These are the trades I exited this week.

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

None.

Options

Comments

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

No exits this week, as I haven’t been doing our basic strategy, which involves buying stocks and ETFs, and have been focusing on options instead. Nevertheless, the performance of our system’s top names have nearly doubled that of the SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY 1.32%↑) since I launched this Substack in December of 2022.

Options

14 Profitable Exits Out Of 15

This was another strong week for our options trades: 15 exits, 14 of them profitable, with the one losing exit limited to 9% of max risk.

The losing trade here, Wolfspeed, was a 4-leg combo where the put spread went against us, but the call spread later recovered enough to offset most of that damage.

The other 14 exits were profitable, and several of them were large wins. Micron Technology closed as a 504% winner on premium outlay. Cognex closed as a 349% winner. Western Digital closed as a 336% winner. Seagate Technology closed as a 259% winner. Intel closed as a 250% winner. Lumentum Holdings closed as a 141% winner, and Opera gave us a 143% gain on the first half of the calls.

The AI Stack Kept Paying

That cluster of winners wasn’t coincidental. This was another week where the market rewarded parts of the AI stack: memory, storage, semiconductors, optical connectivity, and data-center infrastructure. Chip stocks were strong again, AI-related names helped drive the major indexes higher, and earnings/guidance from key names kept reinforcing the idea that this buildout is broader than just GPUs.

Earlier in the week, AMD’s strong forecast sparked a broad AI stock rally, and the Nvidia / Corning partnership underscored something we’ve been emphasizing for a while: the AI buildout isn’t just about GPUs. It’s also about the physical infrastructure needed to connect them. Corning’s optical-connectivity expansion fits right into that theme.

That’s the backdrop behind several of this week’s exits. We didn’t need to predict every individual move perfectly. We needed to be in the right parts of the stack, with defined-risk structures, and then take the money when the options market gave us the chance.

Harvesting Premium While The Bullish Side Works

Several of this week’s exits were the less glamorous but important kind: put spreads and short calls coming off after doing their job.

The put-spread exits on Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Novo Nordisk, GlobalFoundries, iShares MSCI South Korea ETF, and Frequency Electronics generated profits from 77% to 86% on premium collected. Those exits reduced risk while leaving the bullish side of the related trades alive.

The Ouster short call exit did something similar from the other side of the hybrid structure. We sold that short call for $3.23 and bought it back for $0.20, locking in a 94% gain on the short call while leaving the January 2027 long call in place.

Taking Big Wins Before The Tape Changes

This week also showed why I like to have standing exit targets.

Seagate Technology, Western Digital, Micron Technology, Cognex, Intel, and Lumentum Holdings all gave us strong exits, but they didn’t all get there the same way. Some were call spreads hitting their targets. Some were calendars or hybrids where the short leg had already been managed. Some were full packages where the financing legs had been handled earlier and the bullish side was left to work.

That matters in a tape like this one. The AI rally was strong, but it wasn’t smooth. Chip stocks cooled at times as investors digested earnings and renewed U.S.-Iran uncertainty, then firmed again as AI-related names regained their footing.

When trades are up triple digits, there’s always a temptation to wait for more. Sometimes that works. But the repeatable process is to take profits at pre-set targets, and let the next trade do the next trade’s job.

Defined Risk In A Messy Macro Tape

The macro backdrop still isn’t clean. The U.S. and Iran exchanged fire again in the Strait of Hormuz this week, but U.S. officials said they didn’t consider the shooting an end to the ceasefire. That’s the kind of situation where the market can rally one day on de-escalation hopes and wobble the next on renewed Gulf risk.

At the same time, earnings have been strong, the labor market has been resilient, and investors have been willing to look through high oil prices and geopolitical risk when the company-level numbers justify it. That’s a good environment for options structures, but only if we stay disciplined.

This week’s exits are a good example of that discipline paying off. We harvested premium on financing legs, bought back short calls when they collapsed, exited call spreads when they hit our targets, and let several bullish structures work long enough to turn into triple-digit winners.

The goal isn’t to avoid every losing trade. The goal is to keep the losses contained, let the winners get big, and keep using structures that give us more than one way to make money.

Subscription Prices Are Going Up

Trade Alert: Space, Optical Networking, And Retail

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:15:40 GMT

Three Different Sources Of Alpha

Today’s trades come from three different idea streams: Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, our Market Watchers X list, and my strictest Chartmill screen, “Really Time To Buy?”

The Top Names trade gives us exposure to the space / launch theme, which will likely get a tailwind from the pending SpaceX IPO. The Market Watchers trade gives us another shot at the AI optics / data-center interconnect theme. We tried to place a trade on this optical-networking name last month and didn’t get a fill, but yesterday’s AI stack shakeout has given us another opening.

The third trade comes from our “Really Time To Buy?”, a very tight Chartmill screen I created. The criteria are:

PEG (Price/Earnings/Growth rate) using next year’s estimates <=1
PEG using trailing 5-year data <=1
Technical rating >=6
Setup Rating >=7
Piotroski F-Score >=8
Has options

Only nine names made the cut on Thursday. Most were financial or real-estate names; today’s Chartmill trade is the exception, a quality retail name with strong fundamentals and a clean setup. As usual, I’ve included pre-set exit instructions, so we can place our exit orders as soon as these trades fill and not have to baby sit them.

A Brief Reminder

Before we get to today’s trades, a brief reminder: subscription prices for the Portfolio Armor Substack are going up from $40 per month/$400 per year to $50 per month/$500 per year next Thursday, but current subscribers will be grandfathered into the price they’re currently paying. So if you’re a free subscriber, consider joining now. This week’s exits (which you’ll see later today) could have paid for an annual subscription multiple times over. If you join and change your mind, I’ll be happy to give you a prorated refund at any time.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Space / launch theme

Top Names, 5/7/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:37:22 GMT

Brief Market Comment

The market spent the week trying to price two conflicting possibilities at once: a real de-escalation in the Persian Gulf, and the risk that the Strait of Hormuz remains a live flashpoint.

Project Freedom And The Strait

Early in the week, markets took some comfort from Project Freedom, the U.S. effort to guide commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Then President Trump paused the operation, saying the U.S. wanted to give a pending provisional deal with Iran time to be finalized. That was the official explanation. The reported backstory was less reassuring: Gulf allies, particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, had balked at giving the U.S. the base access and airspace it needed, apparently out of concern that the mission’s rules of engagement were too vague and could invite Iranian retaliation without a decisive enough U.S. response to end the threat.

By Thursday, Project Freedom appeared to be back on track, after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait reportedly lifted those restrictions. But the return of the operation immediately underscored the risk: three U.S. destroyers transiting the Strait came under Iranian missile, drone, and small-boat attack. The attacks didn’t hit U.S. assets, and the U.S. responded with strikes on Iranian launch sites and other military targets. For now, U.S. officials are still treating the exchange as self-defense rather than the end of the ceasefire.

That leaves markets in an awkward spot. Oil has backed off its panic highs, but the Strait is still not a settled issue. A provisional deal with Iran may still be possible, but the path from “possible deal” to “normal shipping” is not a straight line. And as long as the Gulf remains unstable, energy, defense, industrial capacity, and supply-chain resilience stay central to the market story.

AI, Earnings, And Defined-Risk Trades

The other side of the ledger remains AI and earnings. Strong results from key semiconductor and data-center names kept the AI infrastructure trade alive this week, even as the macro tape stayed messy. That fits the broader pattern we’ve been seeing in our own exits: the best trades haven’t required us to guess every headline correctly. They’ve come from using defined-risk structures on names with strong upside potential, then harvesting premium or taking gains when the options market gives us the chance.

That remains the approach here. Tonight’s list still has plenty of exposure to the real-world economy: energy, industrial capacity, defense-adjacent spending, materials, and infrastructure. That mix makes sense in a market where AI is still driving the tape, but the Persian Gulf, oil prices, supply chains, and reindustrialization remain part of the same story.

Subscription Prices Are Going Up

Our Basic Strategy

Our basic strategy to buy equal dollar amounts of the Portfolio Armor web app’s top ten names, put trailing stops of ~20% on them, and replace them with names from the current week’s top ten when we get stopped out of a position—there are no options involved in this strategy.

Another Use For Our Top Names

We also use our top names in options trades, such as this one we exited earlier this week:

4-leg combo on Micron Technology (). Entered at a net debit of $2.62 on 3/3/2026; exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/8/2026; exited the call spread at a net credit of $16.00 on 5/5/2026. Profit: 504% (return on max risk: 173%). Signal: PA Top Names.

A Top Names Performance Update

Before we get to this week’s top ten names, let’s look at the final, 6-month performance of our top ten names from November 6th, 2025.

Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from November 6th, 2025 returned -7.47%, versus +9.44% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).

So far, we have 6-month returns for 150 weekly top names cohorts since we started this Substack at the end of December, 2022.

[Skipping ahead so this post doesn’t exceed email length—you can see the top names returns for every week here]

And as you can see above, our top names have averaged returns of 16.84% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.68%. You can see an interactive version of the table above here, where you can click on each date and see a chart showing each of the holdings that week.

This Week’s Top Names

Below are Portfolio Armor’s current top ten names as of Thursday’s close.

Trade Alert: Replacing Copper With Light

Portfolio Armor — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:45:43 GMT

Replacing Copper With Light

Today’s alert is focused on the semiconductor-adjacent infrastructure stack: optical networking, semiconductor testing, and semiconductor equipment.

The first trade is tied to the bandwidth side of the AI buildout. AI data centers need to move enormous amounts of data quickly and efficiently, and that increasingly points toward optical communications, fiber, specialty materials, and the broader infrastructure required to move more data with less power and less latency.

That’s the “replacing copper with light” theme.

Testing, Tools, And The AI Buildout

The second trade is tied to semiconductor testing. As AI chips get more complex, and as memory and packaging bottlenecks become more important, testing and probe-card companies can benefit from the same capex cycle driving the better-known semiconductor names.

The third trade is a semiconductor-equipment name with a China-localization angle. That one comes with more geopolitical and headline risk, but it also has a more idiosyncratic valuation-gap thesis. So we’re keeping the risk defined and not chasing.

As usual, we’re pricing these trades using Black-Scholes and the current implied volatility of each leg. If we don’t get the prices we want, we won’t chase them.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

Optical networking / AI data-center bandwidth theme

AMD Just Crushed Earnings

Portfolio Armor — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:36:56 GMT

Looks Like The Hedge Funds Were Wrong

On Sunday, Zero Hedge shared a note from Goldman Sachs:

Hedge Funds Aren’t Buying This Meltup... Just A Matter Of Time Until We Get A Flush

In response, I wrote,

Hedge funds might have to start chasing after this week's AI stack earnings.

Judging by the price action in Advanced Micro Devices () in the premarket—up nearly 19% as I type this—the hedge funds may have started to chase. The stock is spiking because AMD crushed earnings after the close yesterday.

AMD Crushes Earnings

Revenue came in at $10.3 billion, up 38% year over year. Adjusted earnings were $1.37 per share. Data-center revenue rose 57%, and AMD guided for second-quarter revenue of about $11.2 billion—well ahead of expectations.

AMD Breaks $400 Per Share

After closing at $355.26 yesterday, AMD is trading at over $400 now. That matters because back on December 12th, when my subscribers and I placed our trade on AMD, the stock was trading around $210.

The idea that AMD could hit $400 within the next several months seemed like a stretch then. This was a mega-cap stock, after all. And yet we placed a trade that would max out if AMD nearly doubled by June.

The reason we used a $400 target, was because that the potential return Portfolio Armor’s Top Names system estimated for AMD at the time. So we structured a trade that gave us a shot at that kind of upside, while keeping our risk defined.

Actually, we did better than that.

We got paid to take the shot.

The Trade

This was the structure we used then:

The stock is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 17.65%↑), and our trade is a combo consisting of these four legs:
Buying the $380 strike call expiring on June 18, 2026,
Selling the $400 strike call expiring on June 18, 2026,
Selling the $200 strike put expiring on February 20, 2026, and
Buying the $195 strike put expiring on February 20, 2026,
For a minimum net credit of $0.40. The max gain on 1 contract is $2,040, the max loss is $460, and the break even is with AMD at $199.60. This trade filled at a net credit of $0.60.

In plain English, we were getting paid to make a defined-risk bet that AMD could make a huge AI-infrastructure catch-up move.

At the time, I described it this way:

Essentially, we are betting that AMD holds above $200 for two months in exchange for a free ticket to ride the stock to $400 over the next 6 months.

That’s exactly what we wanted from the structure.

If AMD stayed above $200 through February, the short put spread would expire or become cheap enough to close, and we’d still own the June $380/$400 call spread. The upside was capped at $20 wide, but since we entered the full package for a credit, that call spread was effectively a lottery ticket we were paid to buy.

In February, we exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20.

That left us in this situation: we got paid $40 per contract (our initial $0.60 - the $0.20 we paid to exit the put spread x 100) for a lottery ticket worth up to $2,000 (The $20 call spread width x 100).

It Looked Even Less Likely In March

If AMD hitting $400 by June seemed aggressive in December, it looked even less likely during Operation Epic Fury in late March.

The market was whipsawing. War risk was dominating headlines. Semiconductor and AI infrastructure names were under pressure along with everything else.

But we still liked the thesis enough to place another, more conservative AMD trade on March 24th in our Whipsaw Market alert.

That one wasn’t the same kind of lottery ticket. It was a more conservative structure designed for a rougher tape:

The stock is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 18.94%↑), and our trade is a combo consisting of these four legs:
Buying the September 18th, 2026 $220 call,
Selling the September 18th, 2026 $230 call,
Selling the May 8th, 2026 $180 put, and
Buying the May 8th, 2026 $175 put,
For a max net debit of $2.45. The max gain on 1 contract is $740, and the max loss is $745. This trade filled at $2.45.

We ended up exiting that second AMD trade for a profit less than a month later.

4-leg combo on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 19.60%↑). Entered at a net debit of $2.45 on 3/31/2026; exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/13/2026, and exited the call spread at $8.00 on 4/24/2026. Profit: 218% (return on max risk: 72%).

That’s an important point: the first AMD trade was the long-shot catch-up trade. The second was a more tactical structure placed during a volatile market. Same broad thesis, different structure for different conditions.

Then AMD Delivered

Tuesday’s earnings report was the catalyst the original trade needed.

AMD didn’t just beat. It reinforced the AI infrastructure thesis behind the trade.

The data-center business was the key. Revenue there rose 57% year over year, driven by demand for EPYC server processors and Instinct GPUs. CEO Lisa Su pointed to rising AI infrastructure demand, and AMD guided Q2 revenue well above consensus.

That was the thesis back in December: the market was still too focused on one dominant AI GPU name, and AMD had room to catch up.

AMD didn’t need to become Nvidia. It just needed to rerate enough for the trade to work.

Not Just A One-Off

We’ve already cashed in on a few other AI stack trades this week:

4-leg combo on Seagate Technology (). Entered at a net debit of $4.40 on 3/13/2026; exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/14/2026; exited the call spread at a net credit of $16.00 on 5/5/2026. Profit: 259% (return on max risk: 121%). Signal: PA Top Names.
4-leg combo on Western Digital (). Entered at a net credit of $3.30 on 2/13/2026; exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/14/2026; exited the call spread at a net credit of $8.00 on 5/5/2026. Profit: 336% (return on max risk: 166%). Signal: Market Watchers.
4-leg combo on Micron Technology (). Entered at a net debit of $2.62 on 3/3/2026; exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/8/2026; exited the call spread at a net credit of $16.00 on 5/5/2026. Profit: 504% (return on max risk: 173%). Signal: PA Top Names.

This Is A Repeatable Process

This is the kind of trade we’re trying to find over and over:

A strong theme.

A stock our system likes.

A structure where the risk is defined.

A financing leg that helps us get paid, or nearly paid, to take the shot.

And an exit plan that keeps us from turning a win into a regret.

AMD’s earnings may have looked like a sudden breakout, but the trade itself wasn’t improvised. It was a rules-based bet on AI infrastructure catch-up, structured so that if AMD merely avoided disaster in the short run, we’d still have a shot at a much bigger move later.

Now, that lottery ticket is about to pay off.

And we’re planning to buy a few more lottery tickets later today.

Trade Alert: Physical AI, Power, Semiconductors, And Biotech

Portfolio Armor — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:40:04 GMT

Adding To What’s Working

Today’s alert has a slightly different shape from some of our recent ones.

Two of today’s trades are add-ons to names where we already have or recently had profitable exposure. That’s deliberate. When a name keeps showing up in our system, remains in a strong theme, and gives us a structure with defined risk, there’s no reason we have to ignore it simply because we’ve traded it before.

One of those names is tied to power-efficient semiconductors for AI. We already have an open trade there, with the put spread closed and half the calls sold for a strong gain. The second is tied to power, emissions control, and AI power-capacity. We already have open exposure there too, but the theme remains strong and the new structure gives us another defined-risk shot.

Lidar, Perception, And Physical AI

We also have a Market Watchers name tied to lidar and the perception stack.

We already have an open trade on Ouster (), which is tied to lidar for autonomy, robotics, industrial automation, and physical AI.

Ouster’s technical breakthrough is its new REV8 OS lidar family, which adds native color to laser-based 3D sensing — a “fused by physics” approach that could reduce the software sensor-fusion problem between cameras and lidar. Today’s Market Watchers trade gives us exposure to another name positioned to benefit if investors keep paying attention to that same trend.

A Clinical Data Shot

We also have a speculative oncology biotech trade.

This one is not about near-term earnings. It’s about a clinical-data timeline later this year. The available options don’t go as far out as we’d ideally like, so we’re using the furthest available expiration and keeping the risk defined. If the trade works before longer-dated options become available, we can always consider rolling profits into a longer-term structure later.

A Tight Value-And-Momentum Screen

Finally, one of today’s trades comes from our “Really Time To Buy” Chartmill screen. That screen is tight: Price/Earning/Growth (PEG) ratio of 1 or lower, options available, technical rating of at least 6, setup rating of at least 7, Piotroski F-score of at least 8, and U.S.-listed. Only six stocks passed all of those criteria on Monday.

As usual, we’re pricing these trades using Black-Scholes and the current implied volatility of each leg. Some of these chains are wide or stale, so we’re not going to chase. If we don’t get the prices we want, the trades don’t fill.

Today’s First Top Names Trade

Power-efficient semiconductors / AI power theme

Replacing Copper With Light

Portfolio Armor — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:26:25 GMT

Optical Interconnects, Photonics, And Data Center Bandwidth

The video below was brought to my attention by Anders Storm, the former CEO of Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF), which supplies lasers for optical interconnects.

Portfolio Armor Substack subscribers own shares of Sivers at $2.24 per share,

As well as positions in two of the companies mentioned in the video, Coherent (),

And Lumentum (),

This video is worth 17 minutes of your time, if you’re interested in learning more about the equipment AI is being built on.

Trade Alert: Power, Aluminum, And The AI Stack

Portfolio Armor — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:09:45 GMT

Power, Aluminum, And The Physical AI Stack

After last week’s profitable exits,

Friday night’s Top Names list had a very clear message: the physical side of the AI buildout is still where our system is finding a lot of opportunity.

At the top of the list was a power and electrification name. That makes sense. AI doesn’t just need chips and software; it needs electricity, grid equipment, turbines, transformers, and the whole physical infrastructure needed to power the data centers everyone is building.

Two Aluminum Trades

We’re also looking at two aluminum names today. That’s deliberate rather than accidental.

One is the cleaner, larger-cap version of the aluminum / reindustrialization theme; the other is the higher-beta version. If aluminum continues to benefit from power constraints, reshoring, tariffs, and the broader rebuild of Western industrial capacity, both can work, but they don’t offer exactly the same exposure. The larger-cap name gives us the steadier version of the trade, while the smaller, higher-beta name gives us more torque if the theme accelerates.

Semiconductor-Adjacent Infrastructure

Finally, we have a Market Watchers / Chartmill name tied to photomasks and semiconductor manufacturing inputs.

I wouldn’t describe this one as a direct AI hardware name, but it does fit the semiconductor-adjacent infrastructure stack. The AI buildout has been pulling capital toward the whole physical chain: chips, optical networking, power, cooling, test equipment, and the manufacturing inputs that sit behind semiconductor production.

As usual, we’re pricing these trades using Black-Scholes and the current implied volatility of each leg. Some of these option chains are wider than others, so we’ll put in our bids below fair value and walk away if we don’t get the prices we want.

Full details below.

Today’s First Top Names Trade

Power / electrification / AI power-capacity theme

Trading The Bottlenecks

Portfolio Armor — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:48:18 GMT

Trading The Blockade

Peace didn’t break out this week, but stocks did.

So this week, we kept trading the bottlenecks—by looking for companies tied to the physical bottlenecks intensified by the blockade, as well as by the AI buildout.

That included trades on advanced materials and electrical infrastructure,

American liquid natural gas and optical networking,

Western hemisphere fertilizer, oil, specialty chemicals, and semiconductor testing,

And more North American oil, specialty energy, AI-related optical packaging, and a biotech moonshot.

The common thread is that this market is rewarding companies connected to real-world constraints: energy flows, fertilizer inputs, refining capacity, optical networking, and the broader semiconductor supply chain.

This is the kind of market where options structures can be useful. We can get bullish exposure to the themes we like while defining our downside, harvesting premium where implied volatility is high, and walking away when the price isn’t right.

The Physical World Still Matters

One of the themes we’ve been leaning into is that the market is rediscovering the physical world. That point got reinforced again this week, as the hyperscalers continued to signal massive AI infrastructure spending.

That matters because the AI trade is also an electricity trade, a cooling trade, an optical-networking trade, a semiconductor-equipment trade, a construction trade, and, increasingly, a materials trade. The blockade theme and the AI-infrastructure theme may look unrelated at first glance, but both point in the same direction: real-world bottlenecks are back.

The Week’s Exits

This week’s exits were a good illustration of that process working.

We had 13 options exits, all profitable. Some were routine financing-leg exits: put spreads on Bunge Global, Camtek, Enova International, and dLocal came off for high-double-digit gains on premium collected. Those aren’t flashy exits, but they’re important. Taking those put spreads off reduces risk and lets the bullish side of the trade keep working.

We also had several short calls in hybrid combos collapse enough for us to buy them back cheaply. That happened with Babcock & Wilcox, Freeport-McMoRan, Robinhood Markets, and Frequency Electronics. Those exits locked in 86% to 96% gains on the short calls and, just as importantly, restored uncapped upside on the remaining long calls.

Then there were the bigger exits. Applied Materials gave us a 102% gain on a diagonal calendar spread. SLB gave us a 174% gain on a hybrid combo tied to the oilfield-services / Gulf reconstruction theme. USA Rare Earth turned into a 280% winner. Vistance Networks—formerly CommScope Holding—turned into a 604% winner. And Dycom Industries closed as a 735% winner.

You can see the full list in our weekly Exits post:

Don’t Squeeze Every Last Dollar

The Dycom Industries exit is worth dwelling on for a moment.

We exited its call spread at $24 on a $30-wide spread. That’s the same basic idea as our usual target of around 80% of max width. Could we have tried to squeeze out a few more dollars? Sure. But that’s not the point. The point is to harvest the bulk of the gain before time, volatility, or a reversal can take too much of it back.

That rule helped us dodge one bullet this week.

Last week, we exited our Rambus call spread at $16 on a $20-wide spread. That gave us a 953% gain on the trade, and it got us out before Rambus tanked after earnings this week. We didn’t need to predict the post-earnings drop. We just needed to follow the rule: when a call spread has given us most of what it can reasonably give us, take the win.

That sounds obvious after the fact. It’s harder to do in real time, because greed always has an argument. But rules are there to save us from our own best-sounding rationalizations.

Dodging Bullets

The second bullet we dodged this week was POET Technologies.

We’d looked at it as a potential trade idea because it fit the broader AI / optical / photonics theme we like. But it failed our Relative Strength Index + Chartmill Setup rating discipline. Its setup rating was around 1, when we generally look for one of 5 or higher, indicating some recent price consolidation.

So we passed.

Then the stock got cut roughly in half after the company lost a major contract because of a confidentiality-agreement violation. Again, we didn’t need to predict the news. We just needed to respect the rule that kept us out.

That’s the point of screens such as RSI + Setup. They’re not magic. They don’t tell us every future headline. But they help keep us from forcing trades in names where the chart is already warning us that something is wrong.

Process Beats Prediction

That was the real lesson this week.

We didn’t know Rambus would fall after earnings. We didn’t know POET would lose a major contract. We didn’t know exactly how the latest Iran proposal would hit oil and volatility on Friday.

But we did have rules:

Exit call spreads around 80% of max width instead of getting greedy.
Don’t force trades that fail our RSI + Setup discipline.
Use options structures with defined risk.
Harvest financing legs when the risk/reward has shifted.
Buy back short calls in hybrids when they collapse, restoring uncapped upside on the remaining long calls.

Those rules won’t make every trade a winner. Nothing will. But this week they gave us 13 profitable exits out of 13, including several triple-digit gains and two exits above 600%.

The market is still trading through war headlines, blockade headlines, AI capex headlines, earnings reactions, and violent single-stock moves. That’s exactly the kind of environment where process matters most.

Exits, 5/1/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:10:35 GMT

This Week’s Trade Exits

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

None.

Options

Comments

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

Options

Another Strong Week

This was another strong week for our options trades: 13 exits, all profitable.

What stands out to me this week is how many different parts of our trade-management process contributed to those gains. Some of these were routine financing-leg exits, with put spreads on names such as Bunge Global, Camtek, Enova International, and dLocal coming off for gains in the high double digits. Those are not the most exciting exits, but they matter: harvesting those credits reduces risk and lets the bullish side of the trade keep working.

We also had several short calls in hybrid combos collapse enough for us to buy them back cheaply. That happened with Babcock & Wilcox, Freeport-McMoRan, Robinhood Markets, and Frequency Electronics. Those exits did two things at once: they locked in 86% to 96% gains on the short calls, and they restored uncapped upside on the remaining long calls.

Letting The Structures Work

Then there were the bigger full-combo exits. Applied Materials gave us a 102% gain on a diagonal calendar spread. SLB gave us a 174% gain on a hybrid combo tied to the oilfield-services / Gulf reconstruction theme. USA Rare Earth turned into a 280% winner, Vistance Networks—formerly CommScope Holding—turned into a 604% winner, and Dycom Industries closed as a 735% winner.

The Dycom Industries exit is a good example of another rule that has served us well: not trying to squeeze every last dollar out of a call spread. We exited that call spread at $24 on a $30-wide spread, which is the same basic idea as our usual target of around 80% of max width. That leaves something on the table, but it also gets us out before time, volatility, or a reversal can take back too much of the gain.

The broader point is that these trades do not all need to work the same way. Sometimes the put spread does its job and comes off for most of the credit. Sometimes the short call in a hybrid collapses and gives us an uncapped runner. Sometimes the call spread hits our exit target. And sometimes, as with Vistance Networks and USA Rare Earth, we scale out of calls over time and let the second half work.

This week’s exits are a good reminder that disciplined structures matter, but disciplined exits matter too. The goal is not just to find good ideas. It is to structure them so we can survive volatility, harvest premium when it makes sense, and take profits before greed turns a win into something less than a win.

Trade Alert: Oil, Specialty Energy, Cell Therapy, And Optical Packaging.

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:27:38 GMT

Pricing Discipline In A Wide-Spreads Market

Yesterday’s trades gave us exposure to Western Hemisphere oil, fertilizer, reindustrialization, and niche AI infrastructure.

For today, we’re looking at another group of names that fit the same broad environment: AI infrastructure, New World oil, specialty energy, and a speculative cell-therapy name.

One reminder before we get to the trades: as usual, we’re pricing these using Black-Scholes, with the current implied volatility for each leg, and we’re trying to enter below fair value.

Not Chasing Is Part Of The Strategy

That matters more than usual today because a couple of these names have wide option spreads. In those cases, displayed midpoints can be misleading, and the quoted bid/ask can be absurdly wide. So we’re using model value as a sanity check and entering only if we can get the price we want.

If we don’t get those prices, we won’t chase. The point is not to force trades; it’s to use options structures when the price, risk, and theme line up.

Taking Another Swing At A Winner

One of today’s trades is in a name where we already have an open trade from January that’s well in-the-money. Normally that would make us more cautious about adding exposure, but in this case, the stock was our #1 Top Name as of Thursday’s close, and the thesis has been reinforced since our previous trade.

The AI buildout continues to be one of the dominant capital-spending stories in the market, and some of the most interesting opportunities remain in the niche suppliers and infrastructure-adjacent companies like this one, that benefit from that spending without being household names.

Oil, Specialty Energy, And Cell Therapy

We also have a large-cap oil trade that fits the New World energy / Persian Gulf disruption theme, and a specialty energy trade that gives us exposure to refining and related hard-asset dynamics.

There was a modest de-escalation signal this morning, with Iran reportedly sending a new proposal for talks with the U.S. through Pakistani mediators. That helped take some pressure off oil and volatility, but it isn’t peace breaking out. The Strait of Hormuz standoff remains unresolved, which is why we’re still comfortable looking at trades tied to New World oil, specialty energy, and the physical infrastructure behind AI.

Finally, we have a more speculative cell-therapy trade from our Market Watchers / Chartmill workflow. In that case, the timeline is clinical rather than earnings-driven, so we’re using a longer-dated structure and keeping the defined risk explicit.

Today’s First Top Names Trade

AI infrastructure / optical packaging theme

Top Names, 4/30/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 01 May 2026 01:47:38 GMT

A Brief Market Comment

The market ended April by doing something that would have looked unlikely a month ago: it rallied through war, oil volatility, and another round of inflation worries. On Thursday, the S&P 500 rose 1.0%, the Nasdaq gained 0.9%, and the Dow jumped 790 points, capping the market’s strongest month since 2020. The lesson, for now, is that earnings strength is still enough to offset a lot of bad macro news.

That does not mean the macro backdrop is clean. Oil is still trading far above prewar levels, with the Strait of Hormuz disruption and U.S. blockade continuing to feed an energy-risk premium into the market. That matters because higher oil prices can show up everywhere: in transport costs, fertilizer inputs, industrial margins, consumer spending, and inflation expectations. The market can rally through that for a while, but it can’t ignore it indefinitely.

The more encouraging side of the tape is that this has not been a narrow defensive rally. Earnings have been strong enough to support risk assets, and the AI buildout remains one of the market’s dominant investment themes. Even when investors punish individual companies for spending aggressively, the broader message from the hyperscalers is still clear: they plan to keep pouring capital into data centers, power, chips, networking, and the physical infrastructure needed to support AI.

That combination—oil shock risk on one side, AI and reindustrialization capex on the other—helps explain why our Top Names have recently been tilted toward energy, fertilizer, materials, and infrastructure-adjacent companies. The market is not just rewarding software stories here; it is also rewarding the companies tied to the physical world: molecules, metals, power, pipes, plants, and machines.

Our system’s Top Names seem to have anticipated that shift. As we’ll see below, this week’s list again leans toward companies that can benefit from supply shocks, energy dislocations, and the ongoing rebuild of America’s industrial base.

Our Basic Strategy

Another Use For Our Top Names

We also use our top names in options trades, such as this one we exited earlier this week:

Diagonal calendar spread on Applied Materials (). Entered at a net debit of $8.50 on 3/24/2026; exited at a net credit of $17.15 on 4/30/2026. Profit: 102%. Signal: PA Top Names.

A Top Names Performance Update

Before we get to this week’s top ten names, let’s look at the final, 6-month performance of our top ten names from October 30th, 2025.

Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from October 30th, 2025 returned -2.06%, versus +5.45% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).

So far, we have 6-month returns for 149 weekly top names cohorts since we started this Substack at the end of December, 2022.

[Skipping ahead so this post doesn’t exceed email length—you can see the top names returns for every week here]

And as you can see above, our top names have averaged returns of 17% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.69%. You can see an interactive version of the table above here, where you can click on each date and see a chart showing each of the holdings that week.

This Week’s Top Names

Below are Portfolio Armor’s current top ten names as of Thursday’s close.

Trade Alert: Hormuz Blockade And AI Buildout

Portfolio Armor — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:09:55 GMT

Trading The Blockade

The Strait of Hormuz continues to loom over markets, and one way to think about that risk is to look for Western Hemisphere beneficiaries if Persian Gulf flows continue to be throttled.

Two of today’s trades fit that frame. One is a Western Hemisphere fertilizer name, and the other is a Western Hemisphere oil name. If Gulf energy flows, fertilizer inputs, or related shipping routes continue to be disrupted, those sorts of assets should become more strategically valuable.

Reindustrialization And AI’s Physical Footprint

We also have a Top Names trade today in a U.S. materials company tied to reindustrialization, infrastructure, packaging, coatings, and industrial supply chains. It’s not a flashy AI stock, but those kinds of basic-materials producers can benefit from the same reshoring and infrastructure trends that have been showing up across our trades lately.

The fourth trade is a Market Watchers name that’s a niche play on the AI buildout.

The Hyperscalers Are Still Spending

That theme got another boost this week from the hyperscalers. Alphabet () , Microsoft () , Meta (), and Amazon () all reported recently, and the common thread was that they’re still leaning hard into AI infrastructure spending. Alphabet said Google Cloud revenue grew 63%, Microsoft pointed to continued AI investment behind its cloud growth, Meta raised its 2026 capital-expenditure outlook to $125 billion to $145 billion, and Amazon said AWS revenue rose 28% amid strong AI demand.

That matters for us because the AI buildout isn’t just about the obvious mega-cap names. Some of the best opportunities can be in the niche suppliers, test-equipment companies, photonics names, and other picks-and-shovels businesses that benefit when data centers, chips, optics, and power systems keep scaling. We’ve already had some success trading niche AI-infrastructure names such as Viavi Solutions (), and today’s Market Watchers name fits that broader pattern.

A Tight Value-And-Momentum Screen

Finally, one of today’s trades comes from our “Really Time To Buy” Chartmill screen. That’s a tight screen: PEG of 1 or lower, options available, technical rating of at least 6, setup rating of at least 7, Piotroski F-score of at least 8, and U.S.-listed. As of Wednesday’s close, only five stocks passed all of those criteria.

So today’s alert gives us exposure to four different but related ideas: Western Hemisphere fertilizer, Western Hemisphere oil, reindustrialization / materials, and a niche AI-buildout supplier.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Reindustrialization / materials theme

Trade Alert: LNG And Optical Networking

Portfolio Armor — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:16:29 GMT

The Logic Behind These Odd-Sounding Pairings

The title of today’s trade alert may remind you of one from a couple of weeks ago,

And you may be wondering why these strange-seeming pairs of stocks. Let me explain.

At the end of every day the stock market is open, Portfolio Armor estimates potential returns over the next six months for every stock and exchange traded product with options traded on it in the U.S., and ranks them accordingly. The Top Names from that ranking tend to significantly outperform the market over the next six months, so those are the names I start with when looking for trade ideas. I run them through a couple of additional screens—RSI (Relative Strength Index) and Chartmill’s Setup rating—to weed out names that look like they may be over extended to the upside, breaking down to the downside.

The next step is bit more subjective: I consider the relevant macro trends, and how they might affect each name.

Four Stocks, Two Macro Trends

Four of Tuesday night’s top ten names passed our additional two screens: one optical networking company, one U.S.-based Liquid Natural Gas infrastructure company, and two chemical companies. The two macro trends represented here are the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, constraining the supply of petroleum products and the AI buildout, and the two more obvious beneficiaries of those were, respectively, the LNG company and the optical networking company. So those are our two trades today.

Full details below.

Today’s First Top Names Trade

AI optics / data-center interconnect theme

Trade Alert: Advanced Materials And Electrical Infrastructure

Portfolio Armor — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:12:50 GMT

Looking Past Monday’s Top Names

None of Monday night’s new Top Names passed our additional Chartmill RSI + Setup screens. The two stocks we’re trading today came instead from our Market Watchers workflow, and both cleared those extra filters. One gives us exposure to specialty materials tied to semiconductor manufacturing, data-center cooling, and nuclear power. The other gives us exposure to electrical equipment and utility infrastructure. Those aren’t the most crowded corners of the market, but they’re directly tied to themes we’ve been focused on.

Two Different Ways To Express The Same Bigger Theme

The macro tailwind behind both names is the same broad one: the U.S. needs more power and more supporting infrastructure as the AI buildout accelerates. As Reuters reported, President Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” calls on hyper scalers and AI companies to build, bring, or buy the power they need for new data centers and pay the full cost of the related energy and infrastructure. One of the names we’re trading today gives us exposure to materials tied to semiconductor manufacturing, data-center cooling, and nuclear power. The other gives us exposure to the electrical equipment side of the story. That gives us two different ways to express the same larger theme.

Full details on both trades below, including (as usual) our preset exit orders, so we won’t have to babysit them.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

Specialty materials / AI cooling / power-buildout theme

Trade Alert: Space And Biotech

Portfolio Armor — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:21:17 GMT

Three Different Names, One Basic Idea

We’re starting this week with three names from two different parts of our workflow: one from Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, and two from our Market Watchers X list pipeline. They’re very different businesses—a space and earth-observation company, an oncology biotech, and a rare-disease biotech—but they all give us something we care about: a catalyst path we can trade around, plus structures that give us defined risk.

One of these three is already an open position for us. We first traded it earlier this month when it showed up on our Market Watchers list. Now that it has also appeared in Portfolio Armor’s Top Ten, we’re taking that as additional confirmation and adding a second trade on it.

Why Space Names Are Exciting Again

Space names are especially interesting now because of the pending SpaceX IPO. As Reuters has reported, SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO and has targeted an early-June roadshow ahead of what could become the largest public offering in history. That has helped put the sector back on investors’ radar.

The other two names we’re trading today come from biotech, but not the sort of early-stage stories that depend on one all-or-nothing event. One is an oncology name, the other a rare-disease name, and in both cases we have structures that give us time beyond the next obvious catalyst.

Full details below.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Space / earth observation theme

Buying When There's Blood In The Street

Portfolio Armor — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:10:47 GMT

Hedge First, Then Plant

Back on February 18th, we hedged against the risk of a war with Iran.

Ten days later, the war started. That hedge mattered for two reasons. First, it helped protect us as the market slid into a six-month low on March 20 and then took another hit on March 26 as oil surged and investors worried the conflict would drag on. Second, it gave us some extra dry powder to put to work while fear was still in control of the tape.

That’s the main lesson from this week’s exits. A number of the gains we harvested were seeds planted right in the middle of that late-March fear. On March 20th, we put on a bullish trade in Viavi Solutions (VIAV 0.93%↑). On March 27th, we bought Synaptics (SYNA 10.02%↑) and a memory-related name after what we described at the time as an overdone war-plus-TurboQuant panic. On March 30th and March 31st, we added Coherent (COHR -1.12%↓), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 3.49%↑), and other AI-infrastructure names while the market was still trading on de-escalation headlines after a brutal quarter. This week, those positions started to pay off: we exited profitable put spreads in Viavi, Amkor Technology (AMKR 0.94%↑), Synaptics, Coherent, and several others, with gains ranging from 76% to 91% on the premium collected.

Buying Fear, But Not Blindly

That’s what people mean when they talk about buying when there’s blood in the streets. It doesn’t mean buying indiscriminately. It means using a process to identify names where fear has created an opening rather than a permanent impairment. That was the logic behind our late-March entries. In our March 27 memory-stock alert, for example, we explicitly framed the selloff as a buying opportunity created by a fresh “DeepSeek panic” landing on top of broader war panic.

In our March 30 AI-optics alert, we made the same point more broadly: fear can create an opening rather than a reason to run.

Intel Lit A Fire Under The Chip Trade

Thursday night’s Intel post drove home another theme: this hasn’t just been one good call on one stock.

We noted there that we’ve been finding opportunities across the broader AI buildout and reindustrialization themes, not just in Intel. Friday’s market action reinforced that point. Intel’s blockbuster report helped drive a chip rally that lifted AMD and other semiconductor names, and that gave us a good backdrop for cashing in a couple of other chip trades as well, including AMD and Rambus (RMBS 5.73%↑).

The broader point is simple. When the macro backdrop gets ugly, the instinct is to freeze. But if you’ve already hedged, and if you trust your process, those are often the moments when the best seeds get planted. Some of the gains we harvested this week came from exactly that kind of setup: positions entered when the headlines were still bad, the market was still scared, and plenty of people were talking themselves out of buying anything at all.

We’ve posted our full list of this week’s exits in the post below, starting with the worst first, as usual, in the interest of full transparency.