The Portfolio Armor Substack

Trade Alert: Analog, Optics, And Machine Vision

Portfolio Armor — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:33:39 GMT

The AI Buildout Expands

Friday’s trade alert focused on names sitting at the intersection of AI infrastructure, semiconductor bottlenecks, and disciplined technical setups.

Today’s alert stays in that lane, but with a slightly different mix: analog semiconductors, data-center power and connectivity, optical networking, optical interconnect, and machine vision.

That is the kind of dispersion we want. We’re not making one giant “AI” bet. We’re looking for specific names where the themes, the screens, and the option structure line up.

Five Trades For Today

All five of today’s trades came from our Market Watchers X List → Chartmill workflow, where we bookmark names from savvy investors we follow, where we agree with the thesis, and then set alerts to let us know when those names pass our technical screens and fall within our Goldilocks zone: not overextended and not breaking down.

The first two are higher-quality analog semiconductor names. The next two are optical-networking / optical-data-center names with more torque. The fifth gives us exposure to machine vision and industrial automation—one of the cleaner “embodied AI” (robotics) angles.

As usual, we priced each structure using Black-Scholes. We’re setting our entries at limit prices that are either near or better than our calculated fair values.

If they fill, great. If they don’t, we’ll wait for the next pitch. We’re taking what the market is offering; we’re not chasing.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

Analog semiconductor / AI data-center infrastructure theme

While Bears Were Waiting For A Crash

Portfolio Armor — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:42:46 GMT

While You Were Waiting For A Crash

On Sunday, one of our fellow Zero Hedge contributors ran a post titled, “It Feels Like We’re Days Away From The Crash”.

That was hardly the only bearish take floating around this week. The bond market was supposedly about to break Washington. The AI bubble was supposedly entering its final test. The hyperscaler capex numbers were supposedly getting ugly. The crash was coming. Any day now.

But while a lot of smart people were waiting for a crash, the market did something else: it kept making new highs.

What Actually Happened

By Friday’s close, all three major U.S. indexes had hit record closing highs. The S&P 500 gained 1.43% for the week, the Nasdaq rose 2.39%, and the Dow added 0.9%. The S&P 500 also notched its ninth consecutive weekly gain, its longest streak since December 2023.

The rally wasn’t just some vague animal-spirit melt-up either. It had a very specific driver: earnings and AI infrastructure.

Dell () surged 32.8% Friday after raising its full-year profit and revenue forecasts. The broader tech sector climbed 1.87%, chip-related names rallied, and even the software-services index jumped more than 6%, wiping out its losses since late January, when AI-disruption fears had weighed on the group.

That’s been the recurring pattern in this tape. The bearish macro concerns are not imaginary. Oil, inflation, rates, war risk, and market breadth all still matter. But the companies tied to AI infrastructure, defense, power, data centers, semiconductors, optics, software platforms, drones, and space keep giving investors reasons to pay attention.

That was the point of our Thursday night post, “Still Comparing This To The Dot-Com Bubble?”.

The clever 1999 analogy keeps running into actual orders, revenue, earnings, contracts, and infrastructure buildout.

The scoreboard keeps moving.

What We Were Doing Instead

While others were trying to call the top, we were placing defined-risk bullish options trades.

On Tuesday, in “Trade Alert: Stop Trying To Call The Top”, we added exposure to three names tied to the physical AI buildout, including the South Korea / AI memory theme.

The point there was that the thesis was still intact, and we had structures that let us participate with defined risk.

On Wednesday, in “Trade Alert: North Sea Energy And Biotech”, we used two different idea sources: one of Portfolio Armor’s Top Names and one name from our Multibaggers list.

Different buckets, same process: screen the name, check the theme, price the structure, and only swing when the risk/reward lines up.

On Thursday, in “Trade Alert: Drones, Venues, And Software Survivors”, we leaned into three different themes: drones, experiential entertainment / venue technology, and a software name that looked more like an AI beneficiary than an AI casualty.

As we wrote there, leadership keeps rotating through different parts of the AI-adjacent economy: power, photonics, memory, space, defense, drones, data centers, and selectively, software.

Then on Friday, in “Trade Alert: Still Not 1999”, we placed five bullish options bets on names sitting at the intersection of AI infrastructure, semiconductor bottlenecks, and disciplined technical setups.

Disciplined technical setups are how we try to separate tradeable AI-adjacent strength from simple momentum chasing.

Our Market Watchers → Chartmill workflow starts with names highlighted by savvy traders, then waits for Chartmill to tell us when those names pass our RSI and Setup screens. We’re looking for names that are not overextended and also not breaking down—the “just right” zone.

Then we price the options structures using Black-Scholes so we know whether we’re getting in at a good price relative to fair value.

If the trade fills, great. If it doesn’t, we move on.

Plenty of fish in the sea.

The Exits Tell The Story

The other side of the process showed up in our weekly “Exits” post.

This week, we had one stock trim and twelve options exits. All twelve options exits were winners.

Our losing options exits tend to collect on OpEx days, because our pre-set exit orders get us out of most of our winners before expiration. That’s an important part of the process. We’re not waiting around hoping to pick the perfect top. We place the exit orders ahead of time, and when the trades work, the profits hit automatically.

We sold another tranche of Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF) for a 240% gain, while keeping some exposure.

BlackBerry () and Velo3D () were partial call exits: 202% and 239% gains, respectively. In both cases, we sold half after a large move, locked in a win, and left the rest open.

Redwire () was the next step in that same process. After selling half last week for a 208% gain, we sold the second half this week for a 515% gain.

Applied Digital () and Riot Platforms () were full combo exits, with gains of 476% and 547%, respectively.

Short-call buybacks and put-spread exits harvested premium, reduced risk, and in the hybrid trades left the higher-upside long-call side alive for the next move.

Abivax was a good example. When we entered that hybrid combo, the max gain was capped at $2,035 if the short call finished in-the-money, and the max loss was $1,115. After buying back the short call and exiting the put spread, the remaining long call is now uncapped, and our max loss has dropped to $655.

That’s the machinery of the strategy doing its job.

The Point Isn’t To Be Perma-Bullish

We know markets can correct. They always do eventually.

That’s why Portfolio Armor exists in the first place: our core business was helping investors hedge. If you’re worried about a crash, we have tools for that.

But there is a difference between managing crash risk and spending your time waiting for the market to validate your bearish thesis.

This week, while some traders waited for the top to arrive, we kept doing what has worked: scanning for names where the story, the screens, and the setup line up; structuring trades to define risk; pricing them against fair value; and letting pre-set exit orders harvest profits when the trades move our way.

The market can always crash later.

This week, it didn’t.

So we got back to work.

Exits, 5/29/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:12:14 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

Sivers Semiconductors AB (SIVEF). Bought for $2.24 on 4/15/2026; sold half for $6.75 on 5/15/2026; sold a third of the remaining shares for $7.61 on 5/28/2026. Profit: 240% on this latest tranche.

Options

Comments

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

Unlike last week, we did have a stock exit this week.

That was Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF), where we sold another tranche after a sharp move higher. This latest sale was a 240% gain. We still kept some exposure, but this was the right kind of trim: take another piece off after a big rerating, while leaving room for the remaining shares to benefit if the story keeps improving.

Options

Another Clean Options Week

On the options side, this was another strong week: 12 options exits, 12 winners (our losing options exits tend to collect on OpEx days, because our winners tend to trigger our preset exit orders before expiration; you can see examples of those in May's OpEx day Exits post).

A number of those exits were short call buybacks or put spread exits. Those harvest premium, reduce risk, and in the hybrid trades, they can leave the higher-upside long-call side alive for the next move. Abivax is a good example. When we entered that hybrid combo, the max gain was capped at $2,035 if the short call finished in-the-money, and the max loss was $1,115. After buying back the short call and exiting the put spread, the remaining long call is now uncapped, and our max loss has dropped to $655.

That’s the machinery of the strategy doing its job.

The Call Side Did The Heavy Lifting

The bigger gains came from the call side again.

BlackBerry and Velo3D were both partial call exits: 202% and 239% gains, respectively. In both cases, we sold half after a large move, locked in a win, and left the rest open.

Redwire was the next step in that same process. After selling half last week for a 208% gain, we sold the second half this week for a 515% gain.

That’s the tradeoff we’re looking for: defined downside at entry, but enough call exposure to let a real move show up in the exit list.

A Couple Of Full Exits

We also had full combo exits in Applied Digital and Riot Platforms, for gains of 476% and 547%, respectively.

Those are the cleaner end-state versions of the same process: the downside hedge gets resolved, the call side does the work, and the original risk budget stays defined the whole way.

A Note On Personalis

Personalis is a little different, because we have not exited the put spread yet.

On the surface, the long-call exit doesn’t look that exciting: a 32% gain. That’s fine, but it undersells what the structure is likely to do.

We didn’t simply buy that call. We bought it as part of a 4-leg hybrid combo that filled at a $0.45 net debit. We already bought back the short call for $0.20. If the remaining put spread exits at our $0.20 target, our total effective cost for the long-call side will have been $0.85.

Against that effective cost, selling the long call for $5.00 looks very different. You should see that when we log the full exit, after the put spread is resolved.

The Structures Continue To Work

The common thread this week was structure again.

We had a stock trim, a set of premium-harvesting exits, partial call exits, second-half call exits, and full combo exits. Different sectors, different signals, same basic goal: define the downside, use premium where it’s available, and keep enough upside exposure for the winners to matter.

This was another week where that process showed up clearly in the results.

Trade Alert: Still Not 1999

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:59:44 GMT

Still Not 1999

Our previous free post made the broader point: the clever AI-bubble take keeps running into actual orders, revenue, earnings, contracts, and infrastructure buildout.

The 1999 analogy sounds smart until you look at where the money is actually flowing: servers, power, grid equipment, optics, networking, semiconductors, data-center infrastructure, defense, automation, and the suppliers sitting in the middle of those bottlenecks.

So today we’re doing what we said we’d do there: getting back to work.

We’re not buying “AI” as a slogan. We’re looking for names where the story, the screens, and the setup line up. Today’s trades came from our Market Watchers X list → Chartmill workflow, which is one of the ways we turn promising themes into actual trade candidates.

From Watchlist To Setup

Market Watchers starts with the human side of the process. We put alerts on names that savvy traders have highlighted, but only when we agree with the underlying thesis. That gives us a curated list of stocks with a reason to be on our radar, rather than a random list of tickers chasing momentum.

Chartmill gives us the discipline layer. It lets us know when those names pass our RSI and Setup screens. RSI—Relative Strength Index—helps us avoid names that are already too extended or breaking down, while the Chartmill Setup score helps us avoid names that are still too sloppy technically.

The goal is to find names in our “just right” zone: not stretched so far that we’re simply chasing, but not falling apart either. We want stocks with a live theme, constructive technicals, and enough room for the options structure to make sense.

Structuring The Trades

Once a name passes that process, the next question is structure. We’re not just buying calls and hoping. We’re trying to minimize cost and maximize our potential upside while staying within our risk budget.

The structure depends on the stock. If a name has the potential to move sharply, we try not to sell away too much upside. If the options market gives us attractive financing, we use that.

Pricing The Edge

The last step is pricing. Before placing these trades, we use Black-Scholes to price the full structure leg by leg, using the current stock price, expiration, dividend yield (when there is one), and each option’s implied volatility.

That gives us an IV-based fair value for the package. Then we set the alert price so we’re getting in at a good price relative to fair value. If the trade fills at or better than our price, great. If it doesn’t, we move on. Plenty of fish in the sea.

One of today’s trades is a follow-on trade in a name where our current trade is already deep in-the-money. That’s the kind of existing exposure we don’t mind revisiting: the earlier trade is working, the current setup still passes our screens, and the new trade lets us capture higher potential upside, with a longer runway.

Another of today’s trades is on a name that has been a winner for us before, and it’s back in the zone now. That doesn’t mean we force it; it means we’re willing to revisit a strong theme when the setup and pricing line up again.

Back To Work

That’s the process: find strong themes, wait for names to enter the “just right” zone, structure the trades to define risk, and price them against fair value before we place them. Then once the trades fill, we immediately place our exit orders. That way, if the trades work, the profits start hitting our accounts automatically, giving us fresh cash to repeat the process.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

AI infrastructure / high-short-interest theme

Still Comparing This To The Dot-Com Bubble?

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:01:55 GMT

Being Clever

In Fight Club (1999), the narrator—Jack in the screenplay—has a clever name for the fellow frequent flyers he meets, “single-serving friends”:

JACK (V.O.)
                 Everywhere I travel -- tiny life.
                 Single-serving sugar, single-serving
                 cream, single pat of butter.


                             JACK (V.O.)
                 The people I meet on each flight --
                 they’re single-serving friends.
                 Between take-off and landing, we have
                 our time together, but that’s all we
                 get.

Then he meets Tyler Durden.

  JACK
                 Tyler, you are by far the most
                 interesting “single-serving” friend
                 I’ve ever met.

     Tyler stares back.  Jack, enjoying his own chance to be
     witty, leans closer to Tyler.

                             JACK
                 You see, when you travel, everything
                 is small, self-contained--

And Tyler cuts straight through it:


                             TYLER
                 The spork.  I get it.  You’re very
                 clever.

                             JACK
                 Thank you.

                             TYLER
                 How’s that working out for you?

                             JACK
                 What?

                             TYLER
                 Being clever.

Here’s that scene:

I thought of that Thursday night watching Dell () rip higher after earnings.

For months, the clever take has been that AI is 1999 all over again: spectacular technology, ugly economics, reckless capex, and hyperscalers spending huge sums on a future that may not arrive.

Fine.

How’s that working out for you?

Dell Just Answered

Dell reported a blowout quarter Thursday. Revenue rose 88% year-over-year to $43.84 billion, adjusted EPS came in at $4.86, and the company raised its full-year revenue outlook to $165 billion–$169 billion from $138 billion–$142 billion. More importantly for the broader AI debate, Dell lifted its fiscal 2027 AI-server revenue forecast to $60 billion from $50 billion.

That’s the part of the AI story the dot-com-bubble crowd keeps missing.

The revenue is real. The earnings are real. The orders are real. The customers are still building.

Dell’s infrastructure-solutions business revenue jumped 181%, and AI-optimized server demand kept accelerating. One report put AI-optimized server orders at $16.1 billion, up 757% year-over-year.

That is not a sock puppet with a Super Bowl ad.

That is hardware being ordered, shipped, installed, and paid for.

The scoreboard keeps moving in one direction: the physical AI buildout is showing up in the numbers.

The Clever Bear Case

A post making the rounds on X this week argued that the “AI numbers are starting to look very ugly,” citing the FT’s negative estimated AI ROI for Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle, with only Amazon barely positive.

The conclusion was familiar: the technology may be real, but the economics are suspect; the internet survived, but most internet companies did not; hyperscalers are spending massively today on the hope that future demand eventually justifies current capex.

That framework has two big problems.

It treats AI capex as if the only valid scoreboard is a near-term ROI calculation inside the hyperscalers themselves.

There’s another scoreboard already lighting up: the suppliers.

Servers. Memory. Networking. Cooling. Power. Data-center infrastructure. Grid equipment. Photonics. Semiconductors. Defense. Automation.

The physical AI buildout isn’t waiting for a 2030 spreadsheet to become real. It is already showing up in the companies selling the picks, shovels, racks, chips, power systems, and infrastructure.

That was the point of our previous post, “Partying Like It’s Not 1999.”

In 2000, the internet was real, but many internet stocks were priced as if the future had already arrived. Today, the AI buildout is real, and many companies enabling it are still being valued like cyclicals.

That’s a very different setup.

The Hyperscalers Don’t Look Like 1999 Either

The other big problem with the dot-com bubble framework is the hyperscalers don’t look expensive either on a PEG basis. Using a simple PEG-like measure—current P/E divided by latest reported diluted EPS growth—most of them look a lot cheaper than the 1999 analogy would suggest.

Even if you want to parrot the FT’s ROI math, the valuation side of the 1999 comparison is a lot shakier than the clever take makes it sound.

The Trump Effect

There’s another piece of this tape that the top-callers keep underestimating: policy.

Dell had just landed a five-year, $9.7 billion Pentagon contract before it reported earnings. That wasn’t the whole story—the earnings were the main event—but it mattered.

In this market, companies sitting at the intersection of AI infrastructure, defense demand, and government spending can rerate quickly when investors see both revenue growth and Washington’s checkbook pointing in the same direction.

A number of accounts on our Market Watchers X list pointed out the Trump connection too: earlier this month, President Trump publicly praised Dell and told Americans to “go out and buy a Dell.”

Nineteen days later, Dell had the Pentagon contract. Then came Thursday’s earnings.

We weren’t in Dell, but we got a taste of the same phenomenon Thursday with Aevex Aerospace (AVEX), a drone name we placed a trade on Thursday morning after reports that the Trump administration was considering funding selected U.S. drone companies.

AVEX closed at $40.48, up 31.39% on the day.

That’s how this market has been working.

Policy support matters. AI infrastructure matters. Defense and autonomy matter. When those themes line up with contracts, revenue growth, or capital flows, stocks can move fast.

Back To Work

Plenty of smart people have spent the last few months predicting crashes, fading the AI trade, and waiting for a better entry point.

Meanwhile, the market keeps rewarding those in the right themes, from AI, to drones, to space. We’ve been in all of them.

While others stay on the sidelines polishing their 1999 analogies, we’ll keep doing what has worked: scanning for names where the story, the screens, and the setup line up.

If you want a heads up when we place our next trade, check your inbox later.

If you’re still expecting the market to crash, we’ve got you covered there too

Top Names, 5/28/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:39:21 GMT

A Market That Wants The Ceasefire To Hold

The headlines around the Strait of Hormuz remain mixed.

On the bullish side, the U.S. and Iran have reportedly reached a preliminary agreement to extend the current ceasefire and move toward reopening shipping through the Strait, though final approval was still pending. On the bearish side, this is still an active kinetic environment: U.S. forces reportedly shot down Iranian drones near the Strait and struck a drone-control station near Bandar Abbas, while Iran fired a ballistic missile toward Kuwait that was intercepted.

The market’s verdict, at least for now, is that diplomacy has the edge. The VIX at a 15-handle today suggests traders are leaning toward an extension of the ceasefire, or at least enough containment that equities can keep looking through the headlines.

Our Top Names have already been sending us in a useful direction here. In recent weeks, they’ve had us adding exposure to energy, defense-adjacent names, and companies based in Europe and the Western Hemisphere—areas that can benefit if the Strait remains throttled longer than expected, without depending on a full-blown crisis.

he AI Buildout Is Still Showing Up In The Numbers

Then there was Dell ().

Dell reported a blowout quarter after the close, raised its annual revenue and profit forecasts, and pointed to surging demand for AI-optimized servers as data-center buildout continues to accelerate. Reuters reported that Dell now expects $60 billion of AI server revenue for fiscal 2027, up from a prior forecast of $50 billion, while annual revenue guidance moved up to $165 billion–$169 billion from $138 billion–$142 billion.

That is the part of the AI story that keeps getting missed by people waiting for the “bubble” to pop: the revenue is real. The earnings are real. The capex is real. The customers are ordering the hardware.

There’s a policy angle too. Dell had just been awarded a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract, and a number of accounts on our Market Watchers X list noted the Trump connection after the stock ripped higher.

We weren’t in Dell, but we got a taste of the same phenomenon earlier today with Aevex Aerospace (), a drone name we added in thos morning’s trade alert after reports that the Trump administration was considering funding selected U.S. drone companies.

AVEX closed up more than 31% on the day.

That’s the kind of market this is. Policy support matters. AI infrastructure matters. Defense and autonomy matter. And when those themes line up with actual contracts, revenue growth, or capital flows, stocks can move fast.

Still Bullish, Still Selective

Plenty of putatively smart people have spent the last few months warning about crashes, fading momentum, and waiting for a better entry point.

We’re taking the other side of that approach—not by ignoring risk, but by continuing to look for new places to add bullish exposure selectively.

That starts with Portfolio Armor’s Top Names. They’re not a news-chasing list. They’re a systematic ranking of securities by their estimated potential returns over the next six months. But lately, they’ve kept pointing us toward many of the same areas where the market is rewarding real earnings power and real strategic importance: AI infrastructure, energy, defense-adjacent companies, industrial suppliers, and companies positioned around bottlenecks in the physical-world buildout.

So our posture remains the same: keep scanning, keep pricing trades carefully, and keep adding exposure where the story, the screens, and the structure line 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 yesterday:

3-leg combo on Riot Platforms (). Entered at a net debit of $1.36 on 12/9/2025; exited the April 17th, 2026 $13/$9 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/8/2026; sold the June 18th, 2026 $18 call for $9.00 on 5/27/2026. Profit: 547% (return on max risk: 139%). 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 26th of last year.

Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from November 26th, 2025 returned +20.75%, versus +10.35% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).

So far, we have 6-month returns for 153 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 17.23% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.72%. 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: Drones, Venues, And Software Survivors

Portfolio Armor — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:26:25 GMT

Drones, Venues, And Software Survivors

One advantage of having several idea sources is that different themes can come to the fore at different times.

Portfolio Armor’s Top Names gave us one of today’s ideas. Our Market Watchers → Chartmill workflow gave us the others.

That matters in a market like this, where leadership keeps rotating through different parts of the AI-adjacent economy: power, photonics, memory, space, defense, drones, data centers, and, selectively, software.

The Drone Tailwind

We’ve been following the drone theme for a while.

We currently have open trades in Ondas (), one of which we discussed in a trade alert last December:

Yesterday’s news added another tailwind to the sector, with reports that the Trump administration is in talks to fund select U.S. drone companies as part of a push to strengthen domestic drone production and defense supply chains.

That’s big, because government capital can change how investors value a sector. We saw that with Intel (): last August, the U.S. government agreed to invest $8.9 billion in Intel common stock, buying 433.3 million shares at $20.47 per share for a 9.9% stake. Intel now trades around $121, so investors have already seen what can happen when Washington turns a strategic-industry thesis into direct capital support.

The drone report is not the same as the Intel deal, but the market logic rhymes. If the administration starts putting capital behind domestic drone manufacturers, the story shifts from “interesting technology” to “policy-backed production ramp.”

Not Just Drones

Today’s Top Names trade comes from a different corner of the market: experiential entertainment and live-venue technology.

We already have a profitable trade on this stock from last February, one that’s deep-in-the-money now. The new trade gives us a fresh upside band farther out, with defined risk and an attractive payoff if the stock keeps moving.

There’s also over 20% short interest here, which can add fuel if the stock continues in the right direction. That’s not the whole thesis, but it’s a useful kicker.

Software Isn’t All Going Away

We’ve been cautious on software for a while because AI is a real threat to many software businesses. Some will get compressed. Some will get bypassed. Some will go bust.

But Snowflake () reminded the market Wednesday night that AI can also create software winners.

That’s the difference between a data-infrastructure platform and a seat-based SaaS app. A seat-based app can be vulnerable if AI agents start doing the work directly; a data platform can benefit because those same agents need clean, governed, permissioned enterprise data to work with.

Snowflake rerated because the company didn’t just talk about AI—it showed it in the numbers: product revenue grew 34% year-over-year, total revenue grew 33%, the company raised full-year product-revenue guidance, and it announced a five-year AWS deal tied to AI infrastructure and workloads.

The lesson is that the market is willing to reward software companies when AI expands the use case, deepens the platform, or pulls more demand through the product.

That’s why today’s software trade is on the list. The name we’re trading is tied to interactive 3D creation—a market where AI can lower production costs, expand the creator base, and increase the amount of content being built, rather than simply replacing the product.

Different themes. Same process: screen the names, check the story, price the structure, and don’t overpay. Then, enter our exit orders right after our trade entries fill, so we can profit automatically if the trades go our way, without having to babysit anything.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Experiential entertainment / live-venue tech theme

Trade Alert: North Sea Energy And Biotech

Portfolio Armor — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:57:55 GMT

Biotech And North Sea Energy

One of the advantages of having multiple idea sources is that we don’t have to force a trade from any single list.

Portfolio Armor’s Top Names are still the first place we look. Each trading day, our system uses price history and options market sentiment to estimate returns over the next six months for thousands of stocks and exchange traded products with options traded on them in the U.S. Since late 2022, we’ve been posting weekly Top Names cohorts on Substack and tracking how they did over the next six months versus SPY. You can see the running performance record here:

https://portfolioarmor.com/performance-top-names

That track record matters because it gives us a disciplined starting point.

Beyond Top Names

We also use our Market Watchers X list, Chartmill screens, technical filters, earnings/catalyst checks, and a smaller Multibaggers list.

For newer readers, Multibaggers are a handful of accounts from our Market Watchers X list with documented, recent 100%+ winners. They don’t replace Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, but they often surface less obvious names before they show up on more conventional screens.

Today’s alert has one trade from each bucket.

The Top Names trade is in a European energy major with North Sea exposure. The Multibaggers trade is an add-on biotech trade for us.

Different idea sources, same discipline: screen the name, check the theme, price the structure, and only swing when the risk/reward lines up.

North Sea Energy

The energy trade is straightforward.

If flows through the Strait of Hormuz take a while to return to prewar levels, oil and gas production outside the Gulf should remain attractive. North Sea production is not a perfect substitute for Gulf flows, but it is outside the choke point, politically stable, and strategically important to Europe.

That makes a North Sea-linked energy producer a useful place to look.

It’s not a moonshot trade. It’s a Top Names trade with a solid technical setup, a plausible macro tailwind, and an options chain that lets us build a defined-risk hybrid.

That’s enough.

Biotech Optionality

The biotech trade is more speculative.

We already have exposure to this name from an earlier trade, so today’s trade is an add-on, not a brand-new thesis. The reason it’s still interesting is that the setup has improved, the stock has elevated short interest, and one of our Multibaggers accounts remains excited about the underlying platform.

The near-term market angle is regulatory. The company has been through a difficult FDA process, but there may finally be some light at the end of that tunnel, thanks to significant turnover at the agency, replacing a coven of officials who deprioritized rare disease treatments. If sentiment shifts, there’s enough short interest here for the stock to move quickly.

The bigger idea is more interesting: the company’s platform may be part of the delivery infrastructure for future central nervous system therapeutics.

That’s the sort of bottleneck our Multibaggers source is focused on.

In biotech, the bottleneck is not always discovery. As AI accelerates target discovery and drug design, the harder question may become: how do you deliver the therapy safely, precisely, and in a regulated way?

That’s why platform companies can be interesting.

Owning The Bottlenecks

We’ve used a similar lens with Twist Bioscience () , another biotech platform name we have an open trade in. Twist isn’t doing the same thing as today’s biotech name, but the platform logic is comparable: the appeal is not just one product, but the possibility that the platform becomes part of the enabling infrastructure for a broader wave of biotech development.

That’s the upside case here. It’s also why we don’t want to sell away all the upside too cheaply. The structure in today’s biotech trade lets us stay exposed to that possibility while keeping downside defined.

Two Trades, Same Process

So today’s alert has two trades:

One Top Names trade tied to North Sea energy and the possibility that Gulf energy flows take time to normalize.

One Multibaggers add-on trade in a biotech platform name with regulatory optionality, elevated short interest, and a potentially important role in CNS therapeutic delivery.

Different themes. Different sources. Same process.

Today’s Top Names Trade

European energy security / North Sea oil & gas theme

Trade Alert: Stop Trying To Call The Top

Portfolio Armor — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:00:47 GMT

Stop Trying To Call The Top

In a post last week, we pushed back against Goldman’s warning that euphoria about AI and momentum stocks was cracking.

Our point was that the AI buildout still looked rooted in real demand, real revenues, and real physical bottlenecks—not just narrative demand.

The Thesis Was Intact

Then last week happened. Space X filed its S-1, Nvidia ( ) reported record earnings, and some of our less-obvious names in space…

And less-obvious AI names soared.

Navitas Semiconductor () wasn’t the only less-obvious AI name moving last week. The broader point was that the AI trade is still spreading through the physical supply chain: memory, power, photonics, cooling, sensing, storage, logistics, and semiconductor equipment.

Bubble Calls Are Easy

Over the weekend, Zero Hedge highlighted a note by Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett calling the AI buildout “the biggest bubble since the railroads”. That calls to mind a point we made in our Trading Spaces post on Saturday.

From our post:

There are two main ways to make money while writing about finance. The first is to preach doom. Say America’s debt is unsustainable, the “petrodollar” is about to collapse, Iran is about to replace the U.S. as a superpower, etc. There seems to be an insatiable demand for that sort of content, and maybe you can sell ads for precious metals if you get enough traffic.
The other way is to generate alpha. That’s what you see above. You can see more examples of it in this weeks Exits post.

Hartnett surely gets a generous salary from BofA, but the general point holds: you can get a lot of attention by calling tops and predicting doom. Back to our post:

One prerequisite for this is to have an open mind. The second prerequisite is to react to what is actually happening, not to your own hobbyhorses. Space and the AI buildout have been obvious themes for a while. We were writing about space names a year and a half ago, and we have objective sources of alpha, including Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, that keep us in these themes.
It’s been more profitable than waiting for the sky to fall.

What’s Actually Happening

What’s actually happening now is an enormous infrastructure buildout driven by real demand and real revenues. That doesn’t mean buying every AI-related stock at any price. It means looking for places where the theme is still working, the technical setup is constructive, and the options market gives us a defined-risk way to participate.

That brings us to today’s trades.

Adding, Not Chasing

We’re making one exception to our usual rule of not mentioning current trade ideas in the free section, because it helps illustrate the point. We already have an open trade on iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (), tied to the AI memory theme. That trade is now deep-in-the-money and capped well below EWY’s current price.

So we’re not chasing EWY here. We’re adding another farther-out trade because the thesis is still intact, Korean memory stocks are still crushing it, and EWY now passes our technical screens again. As for the FUD about China flooding the market with memory chips, see the X post by one of our Market Watcher accounts below.

That’s the difference between trying to call the top and trying to make money.

Today’s alert includes that EWY trade, plus two more defined-risk trades tied to the physical AI buildout.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

South Korea / AI memory proxy theme

The security is iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (), and our trade is a hybrid combo consisting of these four legs:

Open The Markets!

Portfolio Armor — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:28:48 GMT

Market Appreciation On Memorial Day

The U.S. stock markets were closed today for Memorial Day, but the Swedish stock market—Nasdaq Stockholm—was open today. Shares of Sivers Semiconductor closed up 17.35%, to 85.55 Swedish kronor. That’s about $9.21 in U.S. currency.

We bought shares of it OTC at $2.24 last month, and sold half for $6.75 this month.

The other half is still running.

At today’s Stockholm close, the remaining shares are up about 311% from our entry price.

That’s not an options trade. Sivers doesn’t have U.S.-listed options yet. It’s a common-stock trade in a small Swedish semiconductor company we found through our broader Market Watchers process, with a theme tied to photonics, satellite communications, and the physical AI buildout.

But it captures how I feel about the market right now.

Feeling An Abundance Mindset

I’ve heard people talk about having an “abundance mindset” before, and it usually sounded like self-help b.s. to me.

I get it now.

Not in some vague motivational sense. I mean it specifically with respect to markets.

It’s Memorial Day, the U.S. market is closed, and I can’t wait for it to reopen tomorrow.

Not because I’m desperate to trade. Not because I’m trying to force something. The opposite, really.

I feel like we have an abundance of promising ideas in front of us.

Portfolio Armor’s Top Names give us one list of candidates every trading day. To give you a sense of why we start there, here’s how those Top Names from late November did over the next six months:

Then we have our Market Watchers X list, our Multibaggers subset, Chartmill screens, technical filters, earnings/catalyst checks, and the themes we’ve been tracking across AI infrastructure, power, photonics, space, defense, memory, and other corners of the physical economy.

That gives us a lot of swings.

The point is to keep taking repeatable, high-quality swings where the setup, theme, structure, and pricing line up.

That’s what feels different now.

We’re not just finding names. We’re finding names and fitting them into options structures that make sense. When only shares are available, we buy those, as in the case of Sivers. Where options are available, we can usually get more torque—more upside exposure per dollar at risk—while still defining our downside in advance.

Open The Markets

In the past, a closed market day might have felt like a pause from uncertainty.

Today, it feels like waiting at the gate with a full playbook. We’ve got three trades teed up for tomorrow, after researching dozens of potential trade ideas over the weekend.

And we have enough current winners on the board to remind us that the process is working.

The opportunity set feels rich, and it feels like we’re closer to the beginning of this boom than to the end.

Looking forward to the opening bell.

Trading Spaces

Portfolio Armor — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:37:24 GMT

The SpaceX Tailwind

Earlier this month, after Rocket Lab’s () earnings lit up the sector, we wrote about about the coming SpaceX ( ) tailwind.

The point was that when the SpaceX IPO finally launched, that could pull more attention and capital toward the publicly traded space ecosystem. We got a whiff of that this week, after SpaceX filed its public S-1 (IPO prospectus), lending weight to last week’s Reuters report that its IPO could come as soon as June 12th.

Some of our space-related rocketed higher in response this week.

Ironically, the biggest mover there was the least-obvious space stock, AmpliTech Group (). The company doesn’t launch rockets or operate satellites, but its ultra-low-noise RF amplifiers are the kind of components LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellite constellations need to transmit and receive clean, high-speed signals between orbit and the ground.

The space stock we took partial profits on this week was Redwire ():

Calls on Redwire RDW 10.38%↑). Bought the November 20th, 2026 $12 calls for $2.60 as part of a 3-leg combo on 4/14/2026; sold half of the calls for $8.00 on 5/22/2026. Profit: 208% on the calls sold. Signal: Market Watchers.

That’s one of the advantages of using options on these smaller, theme-adjacent names. When the market suddenly reprices the theme, we can take profits quickly while still keeping upside exposure.

AI Names Rocketed Higher Too

Space wasn’t the only theme working this week.

Last weekend, we argued that this isn’t the dot-com bubble.

Our point was that, unlike in the late 1990s, the current AI buildout is rooted in real earnings, real infrastructure demand, and real physical bottlenecks—compute, memory, power, photonics, cooling, sensing, storage, logistics, and semiconductor equipment.

This week, Nvidia’s () reinforced that point, reporting record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% year-over-year. As impressive as Nvidia’s earnings were, no doubt a lot of retail investors saw their weekly NVDA calls expire worthless yesterday, as the stock ended the week down 4.43%. Nvidia’s record earnings had been anticipated by the market for weeks, which bid up the stock ahead of time.

Nvidia is now a $5.3 trillion market cap company. For big, short term moves, you need to be in smaller, less-obvious AI names. Fortunately, we were.

A Less Obvious AI Name

Last December, we opened a trade on Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS 18.40%↑). Nvidia makes the chips that do the AI math. Navitas makes power semiconductors that help feed those chips and the surrounding infrastructure more efficiently—a less obvious, but still essential, layer of the AI buildout. This week, it was the less obvious semiconductor company’s time to shine.

Also this week, we exited our December Navitas trade for a healthy profit:

3-leg combo on Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS 18.40%↑). Entered at a net debit of $1.55 on 12/8/2025; exited the March $9/$7 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 3/11/2026; sold half of the June $12 calls for $7.50 on 4/22/2026 and sold the second half for $13.00 on 5/21/2026. Profit: 548% (return on max risk: 233%). Signal: PA Top Names.

We added a new trade on Navitas earlier this month, along with trades on Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises (BW -6.61%↓), Nuvectis Pharma (NVCT -6.51%↓), and Aeva Technologies (AEVA 13.64%↑) in the same alert. Babcock & Wilcox and Aeva Technologies are AI-adjacent in different ways: BW on the power side of the AI-factory buildout, and AEVA on the embodied-AI side, where lidar and perception hardware help autonomous systems navigate the physical world.

Here’s how those four stocks have done since.

This Is Logic, Not Luck

There are two main ways to make money while writing about finance. The first is to preach doom. Say America’s debt is unsustainable, the “petrodollar” is about to collapse, Iran is about to replace the U.S. as a superpower, etc. There seems to be an insatiable demand for that sort of content, and maybe you can sell ads for precious metals if you get enough traffic.

The other way is to generate alpha. That’s what you see above. You can see more examples of it in this weeks Exits post.

One prerequisite for this is to have an open mind. The second prerequisite is to react to what is actually happening, not to your own hobbyhorses. Space and the AI buildout have been obvious themes for a while. We were writing about space names a year and a half ago, and we have objective sources of alpha, including Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, that keep us in these themes.

It’s been more profitable than waiting for the sky to fall.

Exits, 5/22/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:17:39 GMT

This Week’s Trade Exits

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 over the next six months continues to be strong, as you can see below.

Options

A Clean Options Week

This was a strong week for the options side: 10 options exits, 10 winners (our losing exits tend to collect on OpEx days; you can see examples of those in last week’s Exits post).

Some of those were the “machinery” of the strategy working as intended: profitable exits on put spreads in Helmerich & Payne, Canadian Natural Resources, and Zoom Video Communications, plus profitable buy-to-close exits on short calls in Green Plains and Dow. Those aren’t the most exciting lines in the exit list, but they matter. They reduce risk, harvest premium, and leave the higher-upside side of the trade alive when appropriate.

That’s exactly what we want from hybrid and combo structures.

Small Names, Fast Reratings

The more exciting exits came from the call side.

T1 Energy was the cleanest example of how quickly smaller names in key themes can rerate. We entered that trade last week, buying December $8 calls as part of a 3-leg combo. After the stock jumped this week, we sold half of those calls for a 201% profit in less than a week, locking in a profitable trade while keeping the rest of the position open for more.

Redwire was another good example. The SpaceX tailwind helped lift the space/defense-adjacent names, and we sold half of our November $12 calls for a 208% profit. AmpliTech Group worked similarly: we sold half of our July $5 calls for a 225% profit, while still keeping upside exposure.

That is one of the advantages of buying multiple calls in these structures. We can take enough off the table to lock in a win, then let the remaining calls run.

Two Excellent Full Exits

We also had two full combo exits this week.

Navitas Semiconductor was a power-efficient semiconductor trade from December. We exited the put spread in March, sold half of the calls in April, and sold the second half this week. The full trade finished with a 548% profit on premium outlay and a 233% return on max risk.

Advanced Micro Devices was the standout.

That trade is a useful example of how to trade an expensive, high-quality stock aggressively without simply buying common shares or naked calls. We used a 4-leg combo: a bullish call spread, financed in part by a defined-risk put spread. The call-spread strikes capped our upside, but they were set using Portfolio Armor’s aggressive six-month potential return estimate for AMD. As it turned out, that estimate slightly undershot AMD’s actual move, and the call spread exited at $16.00.

At the same time, elevated implied volatility let us enter the whole trade for a net credit. We collected $0.60 at entry, bought back the put spread for $0.20, and later exited the call spread for $16.00. The final result was a 2,733% profit on premium collected and a 373% return on max risk.

That’s the structure doing what it was designed to do: define the downside, use volatility to finance the trade, and still leave enough upside to matter when the stock makes a big move.

The Common Thread

The common thread this week was not one sector or one signal. We had exits tied to AI infrastructure, power semiconductors, space, energy infrastructure, materials, biotech-adjacent AI exposure, and telecom infrastructure.

The common thread was structure.

Sometimes that meant collecting premium from put spreads or short calls. Sometimes it meant selling half of a call position after a fast rerating. Sometimes it meant holding a capped call spread long enough for a big stock move to do the work.

This was one of those weeks where all of those pieces showed up in the exit list.

Trade Alert: Useful Bottlenecks

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:04:29 GMT

Useful Bottlenecks

The AI buildout still matters, but we don’t need every trade to look like the same trade.

As we noted in yesterday’s trade alert, Nvidia’s report reinforced the idea that AI infrastructure is broadening beyond chips and data centers into physical AI, power, sensing, storage, logistics, and industrial capacity.

That broader buildout creates bottlenecks—and bottlenecks can create opportunities.

Today’s trades fit that idea, but from three different angles.

One is an offshore energy infrastructure name tied to subsea development and energy security—something we expect will be in even greater demand when the Iran conflict finally ends. Another is a freight and logistics name that could benefit if industrial activity and goods movement continue to recover. The third is a digital infrastructure / AI data-center name that has been increasingly viewed as more than just a crypto-mining story.

Screens First, Structure Second

Two of today’s names came from our Top Names list. The alpha from that list as been strong, as we saw again in the performance of our Top Names from six months ago.

The third came through our Market Watchers X list → Chartmill workflow. All three passed our technical screens, with reasonable Relative Strength Index (RSI) readings and constructive setup scores.

That’s important. We’re still bullish on the broader buildout, but we’re not abandoning discipline. We’re looking for names where the theme, the technical setup, and the options pricing line up.

As usual, we’re also using volatility to our advantage where we can. Two of today’s trades are hybrid combos, using shorter-dated short calls to help finance longer-dated upside. The third is a standard four-leg combo with a defined-risk put spread helping finance a bullish call spread.

That gives us a chance to profit from the themes while keeping the risk defined.

Today’s First Top Names Trade

Offshore energy infrastructure / subsea development theme

Top Names, 5/21/2026

Portfolio Armor — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:09:43 GMT

A Brief Market Comment

The Buildout Broadens

As we noted in today’s trade alert, Nvidia’s () latest report reinforced the idea that this is not just another dot-com-style stock-market mania.

Nvidia’s revenue hit a record $81.6 billion, up 85% year-over-year, and CEO Jensen Huang also described the buildout of AI factories as “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history,” while Nvidia’s new reporting framework now explicitly includes Edge Computing, covering physical AI applications such as robotics and automotive.

That last point is worth emphasizing. The AI buildout is no longer just about training clusters and data centers. It’s moving toward the physical world—robots, autonomous systems, industrial automation, sensing, power, storage, and the suppliers behind all of it.

Priced For Excellence, Still Delivering

Nvidia slipped after the report, but the stock was already up about 9% over the last month—a large move for a company now worth roughly $5.4 trillion. The market appears to have priced in another exceptional quarter, and Nvidia delivered one. For our purposes, the more important signal is that demand for AI infrastructure remains strong, and the opportunity set around it keeps broadening.

Our Top Names Have Been Capturing This Theme

Our Top Names list is not a news-chasing list. It’s a systematic ranking of securities by their estimated potential returns over the next six months. But it’s notable how many of the recurring themes in recent Top Names lists—semiconductors, semiconductor equipment, defense electronics, power infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and industrial suppliers—line up with the bottlenecks around the AI and robotics buildout. As you’ll see below, the Top Names list from six months ago included names such as Micron () and Advanced Micro Devices () , both of which fit squarely within that broader AI infrastructure theme.

So our posture remains the same: bullish, but selective. We’ll keep using the Top Names system as our primary source of alpha and we’ll keep looking for names there and elsewhere that pass our technical screens and provide attractive options structures.

Our Basic Strategy

Another Use For Our Top Names

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

3-leg combo on Navitas Semiconductor (). Entered at a net debit of $1.55 on 12/8/2025; exited the March $9/$7 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 3/11/2026; sold half of the June $12 calls for $7.50 on 4/22/2026 and sold the second half for $13.00 on 5/21/2026. Profit: 548% (return on max risk: 233%). 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 20th, 2025:

Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from November 20th, 2025 returned +53.4%, versus +13.66% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).

So far, we have 6-month returns for 152 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 17.21% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.71%. 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: Our Robotic Future

Portfolio Armor — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:29:56 GMT

Physical AI Gets Another Boost

Nvidia’s () earnings report and call strengthened the case we’ve been making about the AI buildout.

Revenue hit a record $81.6 billion, up 85% year-over-year. Data Center revenue hit a record $75.2 billion, up 92%. More important for today’s alert, CEO Jensen Huang described the buildout of AI factories as “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history,” and Nvidia’s new reporting framework now includes Edge Computing as a separate platform, explicitly covering physical AI applications including robotics and automotive

That also reinforces the point we made in “Partying Like It’s Not 1999”.

Cisco Systems () was roughly the Nvidia of the dot-com boom: the critical networking supplier behind the internet buildout. At its peak in March 2000, using Peter Lynch’s favorite valuation metric, the PEG ratio (Price/Earnings divided by Growth rate), Cisco was trading at a PEG ratio of >4. Prior to this week’s report, Chartmill had a next-year PEG ratio of 0.64 for Nvidia. That will probably be a bit lower once this report is taken into account.

Nvidia is producing staggering current revenue and earnings while the AI buildout is still accelerating.

Back To Ouster

Earlier this month, in our “Physical AI, Power, Semiconductors, And Biotech” alert,

We mentioned Ouster () as part of that trend. We noted that we already had an open trade on it, and that its lidar and perception stack tied directly into autonomy, robotics, industrial automation, and physical AI, particularly with its latest, REV8 version.

Since then, Nvidia’s report has reinforced the same broad thesis, and Ouster’s own news has made the tie-in more concrete: the company recently announced support for its REV8 digital lidar across the Nvidia Jetson platform, describing it as a way to bring native color lidar sensing to Nvidia’s robotics ecosystem and power the next wave of Physical AI.

The stock has also passed our technical screens now, with a reasonable RSI, a constructive Chartmill Setup rating, and bullish directional pressure. So we’re adding another trade on it here.

Letting Volatility Work For Us

The other two trades today are different: one is a semiconductor equipment name, and the other is a speculative biotech platform name. Both came through our Market Watchers X List → Chartmill workflow, where we get alerts when names we’ve highlighted from our Market Watchers in the past hit our technical buy zones, and both have enough option premium for us to structure defined-risk bullish trades.

As usual, that structure matters.

We saw another example of that yesterday with T1 Energy (), a name we highlighted in this week’s “Momentum Pullback, Thesis Intact” alert. We entered that trade last week, and after the stock jumped yesterday, we were able to take a ~200% profit on half of our calls.

Calls on T1 Energy (). Bought the December 18th, 2026 $8 calls for $1.33 as part of a 3-leg combo on 5/13/2026; sold half for $4.00 on 5/20/2026. Profit: 201%. Signal: Market Watchers.

That’s the goal here too: find names tied to durable themes, wait for them to pass our screens, and use option structures that give us a chance to profit from volatility in the near term.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

Lidar / robotics / physical AI theme

The stock is Ouster (), and our trade is a hybrid combo consisting of these four legs:

Trade Alert: Still Bullish, Still Selective

Portfolio Armor — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:16:36 GMT

Still Selective, Still Bullish

As we noted yesterday, crowded doesn’t mean wrong.

Tuesday’s pullback in some of the AI/momentum names didn’t refute the broader infrastructure thesis—it just made selectivity more important.

That’s an important distinction. We don’t need to chase every chart that’s gone vertical, and we don’t need to force trades on the obvious mega-cap names when they don’t give us a clean setup. We can still stay bullish on the AI buildout while looking for better entry points, better structures, and less crowded ways to express the theme.

Process Over Chasing

All of today’s trades come from our Market Watchers X list—accounts we follow because they have surfaced timely, market-moving ideas before. From there, the names still have to pass our technical screens.

We’re looking for names with constructive Chartmill setup ratings, reasonable Relative Strength Index (RSI) readings, and bullish directional pressure—signals that suggest these stocks aren’t simply overextended momentum names.

That doesn’t guarantee they’ll work, of course. But it does help us avoid the worst version of this market: buying crowded names after vertical moves with no structure and no margin for error.

Letting Volatility Help Us

The other piece is structure. We’re not just buying common shares or naked calls and hoping the timing is perfect.

Where the options market gives us enough premium, we’re using combo and hybrid structures that let us harvest volatility on the way in. That’s the goal here: stay bullish, stay selective, and use volatility as something that can help us—not just something we have to stomach.

Today’s trades are built around that idea.

The themes are varied—AI compute architecture, embedded software for embodied AI, AI storage infrastructure, travel identity, and semiconductor process technology—but the common thread is the same: names surfaced by our Market Watchers workflow, confirmed by our technical screens, and structured with options so volatility can work for us.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

AI compute architecture theme

Trade Alert: Momentum Pullback, Thesis Intact

Portfolio Armor — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:33:04 GMT

Momentum Pullback, Thesis Intact

Zero Hedge highlighted a Goldman note yesterday warning that the AI/momentum trade has become “one big trade” (“‘It’s All One Big Trade’: Momentum Euphoria Is Cracking, Here’s How Goldman Is Hedging The Coming Hangover”) The concern is fair enough: TMT (Technology, Media, and Telecommunications) has accounted for most of the S&P 500’s gains this year, semiconductor and AI infrastructure names have carried the tape, and Goldman’s Momentum factor has surged sharply over the last three months. Narrow leadership can make pullbacks violent when positioning gets crowded.

But crowded doesn’t mean wrong.

The AI Buildout Still Looks Intact

Suppliers are still pointing to real demand, not just narrative demand. Micron () , for example, has projected the high-bandwidth memory market growing from about $35 billion in 2025 to around $100 billion in 2028.

Nvidia () reports this week, so we’ll get more clarity soon on current AI infrastructure demand. But for all the market nerves, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn’t look too worried last week while slurping noodles with his fans in Beijing last week.

Goldman may be right that the momentum trade needs to cool off. The last couple of sessions may be part of that process.

AI-Adjacent Trades Are Still Working

There was another useful datapoint on Monday. In a Zero Hedge post last week (“You Are Not Bullish Enough”), we mentioned Leopold Aschenbrenner’s prediction about the scope of AI:

@daniel_eth Markets pricing in \"AI as big of a deal as the internet\" but not yet \"AI as big of a deal as the Industrial Revolution\"?","username":"leopoldasch","name":"Leopold Aschenbrenner","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/2056235691961614336/HhB3CouO_normal.jpg","date":"2023-05-24T23:03:43.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":2,"retweet_count":11,"like_count":81,"impression_count":36439,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

As we noted there, Aschenbrenner is a former OpenAI researcher, author of the widely read Situational Awareness AI essay, and now a successful fund manager, who has been ahead of the curve on AI.

On Monday, a 13F filing showed that his firm, Situational Awareness, held 10 million shares of T1 Energy () at the end of Q1. TE shares soared more than 23% after that filing, as investors tailed the position.

That matters for two reasons.

First, even during the momentum pullback, some AI-related infrastructure trades are still working. T1 isn’t a GPU company; it’s an energy infrastructure / power-buildout name. That fits the point we’ve been making: the AI trade is broader than semiconductors, and the power layer may be one of the most important parts of it.

Second, we were already there. We added a T1 trade last week, before Monday’s 13F-driven move:

This was our T1 trade from that alert:

Today’s Third Market Watchers Trade
Energy infrastructure / power buildout theme
The stock is T1 Energy (TE 11.82%↑), and our trade is a combo consisting of these three legs:
Buying four of the December 18th, 2026 $8 calls,
Selling two of the December 18th, 2026 $5 puts,
Buying two of the December 18th, 2026 $3 puts,
For a max net debit of $1.95. The max gain on one combo (4 long calls, 2 short puts, and 2 long puts) is uncapped, and the max loss is $790.
This trade filled at $1.70.

How We’re Trading This

We’re not looking to buy the highest-flying AI names after vertical moves in either direction. We’re looking for stocks whose charts appear to have stabilized—names with reasonable Relative Strength Index (RSI) levels, constructive Chartmill Setup ratings, and bullish directional pressure..

We’re also using options tenors several months out, so a near-term momentum pullback doesn’t kill the trade. And where the options market gives us enough premium, we’re harvesting elevated implied volatility on the way in through put-spread and short-call financing legs.

If a pullback continues for a bit, short call legs can decay quickly and sometimes be bought-to-close for a fraction of what we collected when selling-to-open them. That can leave us with longer-dated bullish exposure still intact, and already partially paid for.

Back To A Repeat Winner

We’re also not new to this part of the supply chain. One of today’s names has already given us two successful exits this year: a 3-leg combo that produced a 1,069% profit on premium outlay (372% return on max risk), and a later hybrid combo that produced a 275% profit (72% return on max risk).

That doesn’t guarantee a third win, but it does explain why we’re willing to go back to the name when the setup lines up again.

Today’s trades are built around that idea: don’t chase blindly, don’t abandon the AI infrastructure thesis because momentum cracked for a couple of sessions, and use defined-risk structures that can survive some volatility and use it to offset the cost of our bullish bets.

As usual, this trade alert includes pre-set exit order instructions, so in a volatile tape, we can automatically cash in gains.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

Optical / network-test / AI infrastructure theme

Trade Alert: Semiconductor Infrastructure

Portfolio Armor — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:45:20 GMT

Semiconductor Infrastructure Still Looks Strong

In this weekend’s free post, I argued that the AI buildout isn’t the dot-com bubble. One of the main reasons is valuation: key AI infrastructure suppliers today aren’t trading like Cisco in 2000.

The other reason is more practical: the buildout is still real.

AI needs more compute, more memory, more photonics, more power, more cooling, more semiconductor equipment, more power management, and more factory automation. Some of those themes are obvious. Others are buried deeper in the supply chain.

Less Obvious Semi Infrastructure Names

That’s where today’s trades come from.

For this alert, we used our Market Watchers → Chartmill workflow, looking for names that fit the broader AI / semiconductor infrastructure theme. These are all names highlighted by accounts on our Market Watchers X list that pass our technical screens.

For new readers, that means we’re looking at Relative Strength Index (RSI), Chartmill Setup rating, and Average Directional Index (ADX) indicators. RSI helps us avoid chasing names that are too extended or broken-down. The Chartmill Setup rating helps identify stocks with constructive consolidation patterns. And ADX highlights names were bullish pressure predominates.

The four trades below all fit that framework.

They’re not all the same kind of semiconductor exposure. One is semiconductor metrology / process-control equipment. One is broader embedded control and analog / mixed-signal exposure. One is RF / mixed-signal. One is power semiconductors.

That’s fine. The point isn’t to make four identical bets. It’s to get defined-risk exposure to several parts of the semiconductor supply chain that should benefit if the AI infrastructure buildout continues, as we expect it will.

Today’s First Market Watchers Trade

Semiconductor metrology / AI infrastructure supply-chain theme

Partying Like It's Not 1999.

Portfolio Armor — Sun, 17 May 2026 09:24:30 GMT

“The Door To Doom”

On Saturday, Zero Hedge highlighted a note by Bank of America () CIO Michael Hartnett (“‘Door To Doom Has Opened’ As Hartnett Spots ‘Obvious Echo’ To 1999 And 2009”). Hartnett’s argument, in short, is that the “door to doom” has opened because long-end Treasury yields have broken above key levels, inflation is still running hot, and stocks—especially tech and semiconductors—are behaving like late-stage bubble assets.

Hartnett sees echoes of 1999 and 2009 in the way stocks and bond yields are rising together, but his “Door To Doom” phrasing is reminiscent of an ‘80s horror movie.

Hartnett also points to semiconductor stocks trading far above their 200-day moving averages, market concentration, collapsing volatility, and political pressure from inflation as warning signs that the current boom loop may be close to exhaustion.

Our view: the AI buildout may produce pullbacks and crowded trades, but the valuation picture, earnings base, and deflationary potential of the technology make this setup very different from 1999.

The AI Boom Isn’t The Dot-Com Bubble

The comparison breaks down where it matters most: valuation, earnings, and the real-world consequences of the technology being built.

Start With Valuation

The cleanest rebuttal to the “this is 1999” argument is Micron () .

Micron is one of the key memory suppliers behind the AI buildout. High-bandwidth memory is essential for AI accelerators, and memory demand has tightened as AI infrastructure spending has grown.

And yet Micron’s valuation looks nothing like dot-com-era Cisco Systems ().

Micron recently traded at a single-digit forward P/E, with some current estimates putting it around 7x–8x forward earnings.

Now compare that with Cisco near the top of the dot-com bubble. In January 2000, Forbes noted that Wall Street expected Cisco to earn $0.99 per share for the fiscal year ending July 2000. At $108 per share, that put Cisco at about 109 times forward earnings.

Cisco 2000 was a triple-digit forward-P/E stock priced as if the future had already arrived. Micron today is a key AI-infrastructure supplier trading at a fraction of that valuation.

If you use the PEG ratio (Price/Earnings divided by Growth rate), famously popularized by Peter Lynch, Micron looks even cheaper. Lynch considered stocks with PEG ratios of 1 to be fairly valued.

At a PEG of 0.4, Micron is actually cheap.

Even Cisco Isn’t Cisco 2000

It’s also worth comparing Cisco then to Cisco now.

Today’s Cisco is actually participating in the AI infrastructure buildout. It just reported record quarterly revenue of $15.84 billion, raised its full-year revenue forecast to $62.8 billion–$63 billion, and lifted its expected AI infrastructure orders for fiscal 2026 to $9 billion. After that move, Cisco trades around 19x–23x forward earnings, depending on the source—not 109x.

So even the actual Cisco, after an AI-driven re-rating, is not priced like Cisco in 2000.

The valuation setup for key AI suppliers today is nothing like the dot-com era.

AI Is Not Just Inflationary Capex

The bearish AI argument usually stops at the buildout.

Data centers need power. Power needs turbines, transformers, substations, grid upgrades, cooling, and land. That part is inflationary, at least during the buildout phase.

But that’s only half the story. The fruits of the AI boom should be deflationary in many cases.

AI agents will perform digital work at lower cost. Robots will perform physical tasks at lower cost. Automated factories will produce goods with less labor, less waste, and less downtime. AI-assisted engineering, coding, drug discovery, logistics, customer service, finance, compliance, manufacturing, and design should all push in the same direction: more output per unit of labor and capital.

That’s what productivity does.

The market is not paying for GPUs because investors like acronyms. It is paying for the possibility that intelligence, labor, design, testing, logistics, and production all get cheaper.

That’s a productivity shock, not 1999-style vaporware.

Inflation Can Moderate

The inflation scare is real, but the bearish case depends on the latest impulse becoming durable.

There are reasons to doubt that.

A large part of the recent inflation pressure has come from energy. Energy shocks can be brutal, but they are not the same as an entrenched wage-price spiral. If Gulf risk eases, if oil flows normalize, or if gasoline simply stops rising at the recent pace, headline inflation can cool quickly.

Tariff pass-through may also be running out of runway. Goldman Sachs () has estimated that 72% of tariff costs had already passed through to consumer prices after 12 months, and expects core goods inflation to decelerate sharply by December 2026 as that passthrough cycle fades. Goldman’s base case also has core PCE at 2.5% by December 2026 and 1.9% by December 2027.

Productivity Is Part Of The Inflation Story

Labor-market pressure is not what it was in 2021 or 2022. Supply chains are no longer in the same pandemic-era chaos. AI and automation are beginning to attack cost structures directly. And if energy is the main problem, more energy supply, more grid investment, and more efficiency are part of the solution.

The better question is whether the latest inflation impulse is the start of a new regime, or another shock that gets absorbed as supply adjusts and productivity improves.

We think the second outcome is more likely.

Bubbles Don’t Trade At 8x Forward Earnings

The world needs more compute. More memory (hence Micron’s low price relative to its forward earnings). More photonics. More electricity. More cooling. More grid capacity. More semiconductor equipment. More automated factories. More robotics. More data-center infrastructure.

That is where we have been focusing our trades, on the physical bottlenecks.

How We’re Trading It

We are bullish on the AI buildout, but we are not building trades that require a straight line higher. We’ve been structuring trades with defined risk and enough time for the thesis to work.

In many cases, we’re using options tenors several months out. That gives the trade time to survive a correction, an earnings wobble, or a temporary macro scare.

In some structures, we include short call financing legs. When the stock pulls back, those short calls can often be bought-to-close for a fraction of what we collected when selling-to-open them. That reduces risk, uncaps our potential upside, and leaves us with longer-dated bullish exposure still intact.

Structure Matters When Timing Is Imperfect

If you’re bullish but wrong on timing, structure matters. If you’re bullish but get a near-term correction first, structure matters. If the AI buildout continues but the market has a risk-off month, structure matters.

The goal is not to predict every squiggle.

The goal is to keep bullish exposure alive when the thesis is intact, while defining the downside in advance.

The Better Analogy

The dot-com bubble gave us plenty of real companies. Amazon () was real. Cisco was real. The internet was real.

The problem was price.

Investors paid so much for some of those companies that even strong business performance couldn’t save the stocks for years. The dot-com bubble wasn’t a bubble because share prices went up; it was a bubble because they became untethered from any reasonable multiple of future earnings.

That’s not the case now.

When a critical AI supplier trades at a single-digit forward P/E, it is not Cisco at 109 times forward earnings. When AI can lower the cost of labor, services, manufacturing, logistics, and design, it is not just an inflationary capex boom. And when trades are structured with defined risk and enough time, a pullback is not necessarily the end of the thesis.

Bullish Or Bearish, Have A Plan

If you’re bullish on the AI buildout, you can join us in our next bullish trade here on the Portfolio Armor Substack.

If you’re bearish, or just worried about downside risk, you can use the Portfolio Armor website or iPhone app to scan for the optimal hedges to protect your portfolio:

This market will pull back. It may shake out late buyers. But the AI buildout is real. The real “Door To Doom” is staying on the sidelines and missing out on it.

Trading The Bottlenecks

Portfolio Armor — Sat, 16 May 2026 21:12:16 GMT

Trading The Bottlenecks

On Monday, we wrote about “Trading The Blockade”.

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The point was simple: this market keeps rewarding investors who focus on bottlenecks.

Some are geopolitical bottlenecks: the Strait of Hormuz, oil flows, shipping, LNG, energy infrastructure, and the second-order inflation pressure from higher energy costs.

Some are AI bottlenecks: electricity, grid capacity, semiconductors, optics, photonics, cooling, space infrastructure, and the physical supply chains.

By Friday, both themes were still driving the tape.

Oil and rates pressured risk assets into the close. AI winners wobbled after a huge run. But the broader lesson from the week didn’t change: the market is still being pulled toward scarce capacity, hard infrastructure, and companies that sit near the chokepoints.

That’s where we kept trading.

Monday:

These trades were tied to freight/logistics, photonics, and energy storage.

That mix may look scattered at first. It isn’t. Freight is where geopolitics, supply chains, and capacity discipline show up in the real economy. Photonics is one of the cleanest ways to trade the AI data-center bottleneck, because moving data with light instead of copper becomes more important as AI clusters get larger. Energy storage is no longer just an EV story; it’s increasingly tied to grid resilience, data centers, drones, aerospace, defense, and other high-power applications.

The common thread was physical capacity.

Not vibes. Not chatbots. Capacity.

Tuesday:

On Tuesday, we added trades tied to offshore infrastructure, optics, advanced manufacturing, and energy storage:

The offshore infrastructure angle fit the Gulf / postwar repair theme we’ve been tracking for weeks. If energy flows remain disrupted, and if the region eventually moves from war risk to repair and rerouting, offshore infrastructure sits in the middle of that transition.

We also added a space-launch supply-chain name. That theme keeps getting stronger as investors begin to look past the obvious public space tickers and toward the companies supplying the machines, materials, systems, and components that make the launch economy possible.

SpaceX’s hotley anticipated IPO keeps that theme in front of investors. The point isn’t that every space-adjacent name is automatically attractive. The point is that when a supplier name also passes our screens, the macro backdrop can help.

Wednesday:

Wednesday’s alert was more directly tied to the next AI supply chain:

The themes were silicon photonics, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, energy infrastructure, and automotive sensing / photonic chips.

This is where we think a lot of investors are still behind the curve. AI isn’t just model weights and GPU headlines. It’s testing equipment. It’s power. It’s interconnect. It’s optical networking. It’s semicap. It’s components. It’s sensing. It’s the physical industrial stack needed to turn compute demand into working systems.

That’s why we’ve kept coming back to photonics and power. They are not side stories anymore. They are part of the main story.

Thursday:

Thursday’s trades were here:

The first was tied to power generation and AI electricity demand. That was one of the clearest themes of the week.

Data centers need power now. Not in some abstract future. Now. Utilities, generators, backup power, grid equipment, interconnection, and related infrastructure are being repriced because the demand curve has changed.

That’s also why the broader power-utility consolidation chatter matters. If AI electricity demand is reshaping the power market, it makes sense that the industry starts reorganizing around scale, capital access, and the ability to serve hyperscale loads.

The other trades were in biotech and semiconductor test equipment tied to silicon photonics and AI infrastructure. Again, the link is capacity. Commercial biotech launches, clinical-stage catalysts, and AI infrastructure testing may seem unrelated, but the trades shared the same structure: defined-risk upside where the setup, theme, and pricing lined up.

Friday: Higher-Torque Names

Friday’s alert was different:

These were Multibaggers trades: higher-torque names from accounts on our Market Watchers X list with documented recent 100%+ winners.

The themes were neuro delivery, space, quantum technology, and genomics tools.

That isn’t a conservative basket. It wasn’t meant to be. The point was to use defined-risk structures to get uncapped upside exposure in names where the upside can be discontinuous.

The neuro-delivery name was tied to intracerebral / intraventricular delivery programs the market may not fully appreciate yet. The space name gave us another shot at public-space upside ahead of the SpaceX IPO window. The quantum name had the right theme and technical setup. The genomics-tools name gave us a biotech tools swing with defined downside.

That’s the kind of risk we prefer: asymmetric, structured, and sized.

The Exits

The other side of trading bottlenecks is taking exits when the options market gives them to us.

This week’s full Exits post is here:

There were 40 exits in total.

That was a lot because it was a big OpEx week. Options Expiration weeks are usually where our losing trades collect, because many of our winners are taken off before expiration when our preset exit orders trigger. On Friday, we had losing trades cash out from as far back as last September.

We had 22 winners and 18 losers overall. Of those 18 losses, 13 were partial losses rather than full losses. That matters. Cloudflare lost 30% of max risk. Enova lost 40%. Vnet lost 44%. Delcath lost only 4%. Robinhood’s May put spread from the March hybrid trade lost 9% of max risk.

The point of defined-risk structures is not to avoid losses. It’s to keep them bounded.

The Big Winner: Nebius

The standout exit was Nebius ( ).

That trade showed why structure matters. The put spread went fully wrong back in November, costing $5.00. But the call spread later exited at $16.28, turning the overall trade into a 4,412% winner on premium outlay and a 210% return on max risk.

That is the kind of trade that justifies taking repeated, defined-risk swings.

Not every trade will look like that. But when the upside side of a structure has enough convexity, it can more than offset damage on the financing side.

Other Ways The Structures Worked

Western Digital () was a cleaner win: the call spread exited profitably, and the put spread was later bought back cheaply.

Freeport-McMoRan () and Viavi Solutions () showed the value of hybrid structures, where the put spread and short call/calendar components helped finance the trade while the long call side ultimately delivered the profit.

Improving The Process

Credo Technology Group () is a useful process marker. That trade predated our current practice of applying RSI and Chartmill Setup screens not just avoid potential falling knives, but also to avoid potentially overextended names.

The point is to keep taking repeatable, high-quality swings while avoiding technically lower-quality setups.

A Constructive Week

This wasn’t an all-winners kind of week. OpEx weeks rarely are.

But it was a constructive week. We had more winners than losers. Most of the losing exits were only partial losses. The premium-harvesting legs continued doing their job. And the biggest winner of the week, Nebius, showed why it’s worth using structures that preserve enough upside for a trade to recover from early damage.

That’s the broader goal here: not to avoid every losing trade, but to keep losses contained, take profits when our preset exits trigger, and let the occasional big winner do enough work to more than justify the swings.

The Market Is Still Telling The Same Story

This week ended with a risk-off Friday. That happens.

But the market’s larger message is still intact: the world is short of capacity in the places that matter.

Short power. Short grid capacity. Short high-speed optical connectivity. Short energy routing flexibility. Short launch capacity. Short specialized manufacturing capacity. Short the infrastructure needed to connect the AI boom to the physical world.

That’s what we’re trading.

Not headlines in isolation. Bottlenecks.