The Problems In Front Of Us

Will AI kill us all? We don’t think so, but we addressed that hysteria, and the money and politics behind it, in a free post earlier today.

Today’s trades focus on real problems in front of us. Cancer continues to demand better treatments. Cardiometabolic disease remains a vast medical burden. Companies still struggle to identify, locate and authenticate billions of physical items as they move through stores and supply chains.

Today’s three trades target businesses working on those problems. They came from three independent sources of alpha: Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, Our Multibaggers—the group of outside analysts we follow who’ve identified multiple stocks that gained 100% or more—and the Portfolio Armor subscriber community. Each trade passed our technical screens, which look for stocks in an uptrend where prices have consolidated a bit and the shares aren’t overextended.

New to our alerts? “Start Here” explains how we select trades, set entry prices and exits, and track every completed result.

Matching The Structure To The Opportunity

The Top Names trade is designed to capture Portfolio Armor’s estimated upside if the ranking proves right. The Multibaggers trade preserves uncapped exposure around a cluster of clinical readouts. The Portfolio Armor Community Trade uses a tighter payoff range suited to a steadier stock.

The ideas came from three independent sources, but each reached the same starting point: a strong technical setup. From there, we matched the structure to the stock’s behavior and catalyst path while keeping the downside defined.

Together, they offer three distinct ways to pursue upside: a growth name with a model-based target, a biotech with near-term catalysts and a pharmaceutical company with developmental exposure to a major therapeutic market.

Paid subscribers will find the company names, exact structures, maximum entry prices and pre-set exit orders below.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Theme: Item-level visibility across the physical economy.

RSI: 49 · Technical: 6/10 · Setup: 8/10 · Fundamental: 4/10

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The Warning And The Machinery Behind It

In a Zero Hedge post yesterday, the pseudonymous contributor “Quoth the Raven” shared a warning about stopping AI. His article centered on Jacob Coxon, a researcher who resigned from Anthropic after working on pretraining at Anthropic and OpenAI.

Coxon said the labs were racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.”

Coxon’s warning went viral, then spread through the Associated Press, Axios, and other outlets.

Axios reported that Coxon said he left before any Anthropic equity vested and still holds equity in OpenAI. Axios’s four-month tenure claim conflicts with reporting of his July move from OpenAI to Anthropic, making the “two months before vesting” detail unreliable.

Given typical vesting schedules (with time frames measured in years, not months), the implied selflessness of Coxon’s resignation warrants skepticism—particularly when a viral public stance can become a career asset, opening paths to books, paid speaking, consulting, media work, or positions in the well-funded advocacy ecosystem documented below.

Will AI Kill Us All?

We don’t expect AI to kill us all, and neither, apparently, do the employees at the big AI labs.

Their retirement plans offer a useful check on the most apocalyptic rhetoric. Anthropic’s 2024 Form 5500 data show $10.7 million in employee contributions and $34.3 million in year-end assets. OpenAI’s plan data show $37.6 million in participant contributions and $112.8 million in year-end assets for 2024. Anthropic and OpenAI continue to advertise retirement plans to prospective employees.

The filings show long-horizon behavior inside the labs building frontier models. That’s revealed preference: people who work close to the technology are saving for futures measured in decades.

The Bill Predates The Blowup

A Senate Legislative Counsel draft dated March 24 carries Senator Bernie Sanders’s name and the title “Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act.” Its operative language would stop construction or upgrading of covered AI data centers until Congress enacted a much broader regulatory framework.

The draft defines covered facilities expansively. It reaches sites used for AI at scale, along with certain facilities above 20 megawatts or using high-density racks or liquid cooling. Ending the moratorium would require federal premarket approval of AI products, protections against job displacement, a mechanism for sharing AI-generated wealth, local approval of data centers, limits on subsidies, and labor and environmental conditions.

The moratorium would directly affect the physical AI stack: chips, memory, networking, power equipment, cooling, construction, and the data centers that buy them.

This week’s media moment coincided with a fresh political push. Maria Curi reported on X that Sanders plans a bipartisan Senate briefing on AI’s “extraordinary dangers” featuring Geoffrey Hinton, Future of Life Institute co-founder Max Tegmark, and researcher Ajeya Cotra. Brian Chau highlighted the timing. Curi’s post is the current public source for those briefing details.

The sequence matters. A bill written months earlier now has a viral messenger and a reported Senate forum. That’s how an issue moves from technical debate to a political campaign.

Follow The Funding

Parker Thayer argued that Coxon’s launch looked like a sophisticated public-relations operation. He traced the earliest amplification to people associated with Encode, the AI Policy Network, and the AI Futures Project.

Brian Chau’s later thread surfaced a direct political-technology link. Newspeak House’s own residency page lists Jacob Coxon among its residents and describes his work as “applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets.” Newspeak calls itself the London College of Political Technology. Its current calendar advertises Campaign Lab sessions aimed at helping the progressive left “campaign more effectively.” The residency places Coxon inside that political-technology network.

Some of the underlying funding links are public. The Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2025 grant table lists $2.035 million for the AI Futures Project, $516,000 for Encode AI, and $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute. The fund attributes those grants to Jaan Tallinn. Anthropic says Tallinn led its Series A financing in 2021.

Encode identifies the Survival and Flourishing Fund as one of several foundations supporting its work. It also says it refuses funding from corporations, foreign governments, and executives at frontier AI companies. Its general counsel, Nathan Calvin, is one of the early amplifiers named in Thayer’s thread.

Those disclosures establish a funded, interconnected AI-policy ecosystem.

Two AI Policies, Two Clocks

The Sanders draft and the Trump administration’s policy point in different directions. The White House’s March 2026 AI legislative framework calls for streamlined permitting, removal of barriers to deployment, and a uniform national framework. A June executive order says the administration will promote AI innovation and security while deploying advanced systems rapidly.

This is a contest between two concentrations of power. Continued AI development reinforces the companies building the systems. A moratorium transfers more authority to the politicians, regulators, and advocacy groups deciding which models and data centers may operate. Lukas (“computer”) put that tradeoff plainly.

That makes the political calendar part of the AI trade. The White House’s published policy points toward continued federal support for the buildout, and President Trump’s current term runs through January 2029. Our base case is that federal policy remains broadly supportive through then.

Moratorium supporters can still affect permitting fights, state policy, utility regulation, and the valuations assigned to long-duration projects. Those risks matter on a multi-year horizon.

Time Horizon Matters

Our options trades on AI-stack names go out months, not years. Our Micron trade from earlier this year offers a good example.

As you can see below, the average duration of all of our completed trades year-to-date has been 139 days, or less than five months. At that pace, we’ll be out of our AI trades long before a president who shares Jacob Coxon’s views could take office in January 2029.

PI

• Call Spread: Enter a GTC order to exit the April 16, 2027 $180/$200 call spread at a $16.00 net credit, lowering the price if necessary as we approach expiration.

• Put Spread: Enter a GTC order to exit the April 16, 2027 $130/$125 put spread at a $0.20 net debit, raising the price if necessary as we approach expiration.

GMAB

• Calls/Calendar + Extra…

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Enter these legs together as one complex order:

1. Buy to open 1 MRK March 19, 2027 $155 call,

2. Sell to open 1 MRK March 19, 2027 $165 call,

3. Sell to open 1 MRK March 19, 2027 $125 put,

4. Buy to open 1 MRK March 19, 2027 $120 put,

Maximum net debit: $2.00

Order: Day

Maximum gain: $800

Maximum loss: $700

Payoff figures assume one contract per leg and exclude …

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Enter these legs together as one complex order:

1. Buy to open 2 GMAB February 19, 2027 $40 calls,

2. Sell to open 1 GMAB January 15, 2027 $40 call,

3. Sell to open 1 GMAB February 19, 2027 $30 put,

4. Buy to open 1 GMAB February 19, 2027 $25 put,

Maximum net debit: $1.60

Order: Day

Maximum gain: Uncapped

Maximum loss: $660

The complete position contains two lo…

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Enter these legs together as one complex order:

1. Buy to open 1 PI April 16, 2027 $180 call,

2. Sell to open 1 PI April 16, 2027 $200 call,

3. Sell to open 1 PI April 16, 2027 $130 put,

4. Buy to open 1 PI April 16, 2027 $125 put,

Maximum net debit: $4.10

Order: Day

Maximum gain: $1,590

Maximum loss: $910

Payoff figures assume one contract per leg and exclude fe…

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Growth In Two Different Markets

Today we’re looking at two businesses turning growing demand into higher revenue. One is bringing an approved cancer treatment to more patients. The other protects businesses as they expand their use of AI and cloud computing.

Both companies raised their latest full-year outlooks, while their shares pulled back in Tuesday’s session. Their current technical setups put them on our trading list, giving us an opportunity to seek bullish exposure after those declines.

Our first idea comes from Multibaggers, the group of outside analysts we follow who’ve identified multiple stocks that gained 100% or more. The second comes from Portfolio Armor’s Top Names. We checked both stocks’ technical setups using Chartmill.

The Appeal Of Asymmetric Upside

Options let us aim for a much larger percentage gain than the underlying stock’s gain. Our first trade leaves the potential upside uncapped, with $800 at risk at our maximum entry price before fees. Selling shorter-dated calls helps pay for longer-dated calls, while retaining exposure to a substantial rally.

Our second trade pays us $175 to open it. A stock gain of roughly one-third by expiration would produce a maximum profit of $1,175—about 142% of the $825 at risk, before fees. If the stock finishes flat or down 10% from Tuesday’s close, we keep the initial $175 credit.

Below, we explain why each company made the cut and show the exact options to buy and sell, the entry prices we’re willing to accept, and our plan for taking profits. You’ll have the entry and exit instructions up front, with follow-up guidance as the positions develop.

New to our alerts? “Start Here” explains how we select trades, set entry prices and exits, and track every completed result.

Today’s Multibaggers Trade

Theme: Expanding access to cancer treatment.

RSI: 53 · Technical: 9/10 · Setup: 6/10 · Fundamental: 5/10

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The Machines Need Bandwidth

An AI agent that works while you sleep needs a network that works while you sleep. Multiply that across consumers and businesses, and the investment opportunity extends through the cables, optical components, and services carrying the traffic.

Two announcements on September 8 put money and engineering behind that thesis: Verizon’s multibillion-dollar fiber agreement with Corning, and Qualcomm’s AI infrastructure collaboration with Amazon.

We turn themes like this into options trades, with entry prices and exit plans. If you’d like to follow along, our Start Here page explains how it works.

Follow The Fiber

Verizon and Corning announced a multibillion-dollar supply agreement covering more than 80 million miles of optical fiber and connectivity solutions from 2027 through 2032. The network will serve homes and businesses while expanding the long-haul backbone connecting AI data centers. Corning’s high-density cables also let Verizon pack more fiber into existing conduit.

Qualcomm’s collaboration with Amazon covers multiple generations of custom silicon for AI inference, plus optical connectivity up to 1.6 terabits per second and future generations. Inference is the work of running trained models to produce answers and perform tasks. As AI becomes a service people use throughout the day, the connections feeding that work become part of the investment case.

These announcements span the network: links inside data centers, connections between them, and the broadband infrastructure reaching customers.

Your Agent Is Another Customer

Akram’s Razor raised the next step on Tuesday: consumer AI agents could create opportunities in traffic delivery, security, and observability. He singled out Fastly, Cloudflare, and Akamai.

Consider an agent comparing products, checking availability, retrieving documents, and monitoring changes on your behalf. One instruction can generate repeated interactions with other services. Businesses handling those requests need to identify the agent, control its access, deliver the response, and diagnose failures.

That makes agent adoption a plausible growth driver for the companies operating and securing those connections. The commercial test is how much of that activity becomes paid usage, and at what margin. Efficient agents could also use fewer page loads or retrieve cached information. Request growth, bandwidth growth, and revenue growth will depend on how these services are designed and priced.

The fiber commitments are here. The next question is who gets paid as the traffic arrives.

Where We Already Have Exposure

We opened bullish options trades on Corning () and Coherent ( ) on May 29, and both positions remain open. Corning supplies the fiber and connectivity; Coherent supplies optical components and transceivers used in data centers and communications networks.

We also have an open bullish options trade on Credo Technology (CRDO) from July 7. Its electrical and optical connections help move data between servers and accelerator clusters.

All three positions use call spreads combined with put spreads, with defined maximum risk and capped upside. Their expirations run from November through January, so our investment horizon is much shorter than Verizon’s supply agreement. Stock performance and the timing of that performance determine the outcome of our trades.

Previous Winners

We’ve also booked gains on earlier trades in all three names. These were fully closed positions, separate from the trades we hold today. The cards below show each completed trade’s return on maximum risk and on premium outlay, with links to our final exit updates.

Corning: +55.7% on maximum risk; +138.8% on premium outlay

Coherent: +69.2% on maximum risk; +1,800% on premium outlay.

Credo: +161.6% on maximum risk; +433.7% on premium outlay

For the next round of opportunities, we’ll be watching suppliers turning network demand into orders and earnings, alongside service providers turning agent activity into paying customers. AI needs a bigger internet. We want exposure to the businesses collecting the checks for building and running it.

New Signals In Familiar Names

Demand for AI infrastructure is creating opportunities across cybersecurity and optical networking. Today’s first and third trades target companies supplying those parts of the buildout. Our middle trade takes us to precious metals, where a producer has strengthened its balance sheet and is returning cash to shareholders.

We’ve traded all three names before. Two are former winners for us, and the third was a previous loser. Today’s selections come from three sources: Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, our proprietary screens with Chartmill, and our Market Watchers X list.

The technology companies have reported strong revenue growth, with higher spending by their customers supporting their outlooks. For the miner, the opportunity depends on turning favorable metals prices into cash after operating costs. Those different business drivers give us three distinct bullish setups.

The Benefit Of Using Options Here

The appeal of our options trades is asymmetric upside potential: a gain in the underlying stock can translate into a much larger percentage gain on the money at risk. One of today’s trades offers a maximum potential profit of more than two and a half times its maximum loss at our proposed entry price.

Two of today’s structures also pay us to open them. If the stocks go sideways or even down by 10% or 15% between now and expiration, we keep that initial payment; a strong rally adds a larger payoff.

Below, we explain why each company made the cut and show the exact options to buy and sell, the entry price we’re willing to accept, and our plan for taking profits. You’ll have the trade entry and exit details up front and our follow-up guidance as the positions develop.

New to our alerts? “Start Here” explains how we select trades, set entry prices and exits, and track every completed result. You can also try one complete paid alert with your free unlock.

Today’s Top Names Trade

RSI: 48 · Technical: 8/10 · Setup: 7/10 · Fundamental: 7/10

Theme: Cybersecurity for enterprise networks and AI.

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Our Weekly Runner Review

This is our second weekly Runner Review. I reviewed each active runner using Friday’s close, current option-market data, time to expiration and any approaching company-specific catalyst.

For each position, I used stock and option prices and IVs from CBOE or Fidelity, including the at-the-money straddle and the long call’s IV (esti…

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The Indexes Hid The Action

Stocks spent last week repricing war, inflation, rates, and AI, then finished almost exactly where they started.

The S&P 500 gained 0.1%. The Nasdaq added 0.4%, the Russell 2000 rose 0.1%, and the Dow slipped 0.3%. Those quiet finishes concealed a violent sequence: renewed U.S.-Iran fighting pushed oil and bond yields higher early last week, Fed Governor Christopher Waller sparked a Thursday rally, and Friday’s payroll report pulled rate expectations back in the other direction.

The rotation underneath the indexes told the real story. Semiconductors gained about 2% last week while software fell roughly 4%. Energy led the market; consumer discretionary brought up the rear.

Oil And Payrolls Put The Fed On The Spot

Brent finished near $95 after gaining more than 6% last week. WTI rose nearly 9%, and U.S. diesel prices reached a record as the United States and Iran resumed heavy exchanges and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remained depressed.

The inflation pressure reached well beyond oil. Japan’s 10-year yield touched 3% for the first time since 1996. The U.S. 10-year reached about 4.8%, while German and French yields hit their highest levels in years.

Waller offered markets some relief Thursday. He said another favorable inflation report would incline him to hold rates at the September meeting. He also left the door open to a hike if inflation heats up.

Friday strengthened the hawkish side of that argument. August payrolls rose by 162,000, far above the recent pace. Unemployment held at 4.1%, labor-force participation rose, and revisions added 55,000 jobs to June and July. Wage growth was 3.1% year over year. The report showed a labor market strong enough to give the Fed room to lean against inflation.

AI Held Up. Lululemon Tore At The Seams.

AI earnings supplied the market’s counterweight. Broadcom reported $29.6 billion of quarterly revenue, up 86% year over year. Its AI semiconductor revenue jumped 221% to $16.7 billion. Results like that kept the infrastructure trade alive even as higher yields raised the bar for expensive stocks.

Lululemon supplied the other side of the tape. Revenue fell 4%, the company cut its full-year outlook, and the shares collapsed about 20% Friday morning.

That split lined up with two open trades we wrote about Friday. We were long memory and short yoga pants while Michael Burry was positioned the other way. Micron traded above $1,000 intraday Friday.

LULU moved sharply toward the maximum-gain range of our bearish trade.

Our Market Watchers feed echoed the same split. MU drew 37 mentions in Friday’s ticker-post scan, more than any other name, while tankers were the strongest non-technology cluster. The market was paying for AI bottlenecks and geopolitical scarcity at the same time.

How We Traded It

Monday’s medical alert produced two fills from four proposed structures: an operating healthcare company from our Top Names and a precision-oncology name from our Market Watchers process. Two long-dated biotech retries expired unfilled.

All three of Tuesday’s trades filled. They gave us three different sources of alpha: a contrarian recovery from our Top Names, a profitable marketplace from one of our strict quality screens, and a fast-growing digital-health company from our Multibaggers list.

Stocks sold off Tuesday as oil and yields rose, so Wednesday’s alert focused on company-specific biotech catalysts. Two of three trades filled: one tied to commercial gene editing and another to cell-engineering tools. A rare-disease gene-therapy order expired unfilled.

Thursday put last week’s biggest themes directly into the portfolio. Our AI-compute, oil-and-gas, and copper trades all filled. Each company carried a 10 out of 10 technical rating and a fundamental rating of at least 7.

Both of Friday’s trades filled: a current Top Name tied to expanding government-services contracts and a commercial-stage biotech from our Multibaggers list.

Twelve of last week’s fifteen proposed structures filled, each within its published limit. The other three expired unfilled.

Ten Partial Exits, Two Full Winners

Last week’s Exits post recorded ten partial exits—seven profitable and three losing—plus two full exits, both winners. We’ll highlight three that illustrate our revised exit process.

First, TE: we closed the T1 Energy put spread for a 66% loss on maximum risk. The underlying stock was also held by Situational Awareness, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund that suffered huge losses in July.

Our new weekly options reviews prompt us to act sooner when a position has no meaningful catalyst left. That may produce more losing partial exits between OpEx weeks, but taking those losses earlier should reduce their size and improve returns over time.

Then the full winners: HP and CF began as four-leg hybrid combos. After we closed their short calls and put spreads, their longer-dated calls ran uncapped. HP returned 91% on maximum risk and CF returned 98%; their returns on premium were 344% and 488%, respectively.

The year-to-date scorecard remains strong. Through September 4, our 206 fully exited 2026 trades had a 56.8% win rate and averaged 33.8% on maximum risk. The average winner returned 110%; the average loser fell 66%.

CPI Gets The Next Word

The Fed enters the next two weeks with a strong labor report, oil near $95, and inflation still above target. PPI arrives Thursday and CPI Friday, followed by the September 15–16 FOMC meeting.

The Market Ear highlighted the tension Friday: the September decision looks unusually uncertain, yet equity and tech volatility remain subdued. That gives us favorable raw material on both sides of the book—reasonably priced options for defined-risk trades and relatively inexpensive protection for investors who want to hedge.

We’ll keep looking for companies with strong operating evidence, supportive technicals, and option prices that preserve the asymmetry. Portfolio Armor Substack paid subscribers receive our exact trades, entry limits, and exit plans before the market opens. Investors who want to protect individual stocks and ETFs can calculate optimal hedges with the Portfolio Armor website or Portfolio Armor iPhone app.

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 a spreadsheet. These are the trades I exited this week.

Clicking on one of the exit cards should take you to the original alert where we mentioned the trade; exits will be documented in the comments on the dates they occurred.

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

None.

Options

Comments

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

No exits this week, as I’ve focused on options instead of our basic strategy, which involves buying stocks and ETFs. Nevertheless, the performance of our Top Names remains strong, as you can see below.

Options

Our Revised Exit Process At Work

Three of this week’s partial exits were losses: the INTT and TE put spreads and the SLB long call. We may see more losing trades appear in non-OpEx weeks as a consequence of the weekly options reviews we introduced recently.

Those reviews prompt us to exit positions earlier when no meaningful catalyst remains. The goal is to retain more of the gains on winning trades and reduce the losses on trades that aren’t working.

Most of the week’s other partial exits were profitable. We bought back the short calls on FHN, SKM, and ZM after retaining most of their premiums, reopening the upside on their longer-dated calls. We also closed profitable put spreads on PBR, IPSC, FTI, and EQNR, reducing the risk in those positions while their call-side upside remained open.

The strongest results came from our two full exits. HP and CF began as 4-leg hybrid combos. After their short calls and put spreads were closed, their longer-dated calls continued as uncapped runners. Those completed trades returned 91% and 98% on maximum risk, respectively; their returns on premium were 344% and 488%. Recognizing losses earlier while giving our strongest winners room to run is exactly what these recent process improvements are intended to accomplish.

Short AI, Long Yoga Pants

Michael Burry’s largest position just fell through the floor.

Lululemon Athletica ( ) plummeted about 20% in the premarket in the wake of its second-quarter report yesterday. Burry had called LULU “the trickster in my portfolio” and confirmed that it was his largest position.

Burry’s housing short made him the central character in The Big Short. He now publishes one of finance’s largest paid newsletters: Cassandra Unchained has tens of thousands of paid subscribers versus our mere hundreds. At least our subscribers are making money, though, doing the opposite of what his are.

New to Portfolio Armor? See how we combine multiple sources of alpha, tailor each trade structure, price entries carefully, manage exits, and track every completed result publicly.

Long Memory, Short Yoga Pants

Burry has spent much of 2026 attacking the AI boom. He disclosed shorts across the AI capital-spending complex, including Nvidia, Applied Materials, the SOXX semiconductor ETF, and Micron Technology. On July 2, he disclosed a direct MU short at about $1,052 per share.

That same day, we published “Time To Get Back Into Micron” and entered bullish options trades on MU and SanDisk. We saw memory as a central AI data-center bottleneck.

On July 27, our technical and fundamental assessment led us to a bearish LULU trade.

Why We Shorted LULU

Lululemon had a strong balance sheet when we opened the trade. Its business was weakening: earnings had fallen, management was guiding to lower revenue, and the stock was trading below its 20-, 50-, and 200-day moving averages, including its 50-day EMA.

Thursday’s report made the deterioration harder to miss. Revenue fell 4%, comparable sales fell 9%, comparable sales in the Americas fell 12%, and operating income dropped to $453.7 million from $523.8 million despite $134.5 million in tariff refunds.

MU was the mirror image: spectacular current fundamentals in an industry Burry had shorted as a cyclical.

Memory is cyclical. The trade turns on how far away the peak is.

Why We Went Long Memory

Timing mattered. Memory shares tend to turn before reported earnings. MU peaked about three months before EPS in 2018 and about five months before EPS in 2022. The question was whether this cycle was close to its peak.

Our July 20 analysis put peak earnings at least 18 months away. Estimates were rising, supply looked tight beyond 2027, new capacity was delayed, and customers were signing multiyear take-or-pay agreements.

Our July 2 entry was early. AI-stack shares kept sliding for roughly two weeks, and we acknowledged that in the July 20 post. The trade is now in the black.

The structure helped. Our MU combo filled for a $3.25 net credit and included a short $790 put paired with a long $780 put. MU closed Thursday around $958, well above that short-put strike. As long as MU stays above $790, we’ll keep that $3.25 net credit.

The Score So Far

Our bearish LULU combo filled at a $2.75 net debit. It earns its maximum $1,225 profit if LULU is at or below $85 at expiration on December 18. Maximum risk is $775 if LULU finishes at or above $140.

By Friday morning, LULU had covered about 60% of the distance from where it closed when we opened the trade to the $85 max-gain line.

Lululemon has yet to announce its third-quarter reporting date. Its recent calendar points to another report in early or mid-December, before our options expire. That gives LULU another chance to disappoint.

Subscribers seeking Burry-sized exposure could scale the number of contracts while keeping the same $775 maximum risk per combo, subject to liquidity and fill prices.

While Burry was long LULU and short MU, we were short LULU and long MU. Both of our trades are open and moving our way.

Two Completed MU Winners

We have profitably traded MU before. Both trades below were full exits from PA Top Names signals.

One MU combo returned 504% on premium, or 173% on maximum risk, between March 3 and May 5, 2026.

Another returned 359% on premium, or 88% on maximum risk, between December 16 and December 19, 2025.

Burry’s positions are open. So are ours. For now, the scoreboard favors long memory and short yoga pants.

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Why Our Top Names Still Come First

Portfolio Armor’s Top Names remain our strongest source of alpha, and the performance of our March 3rd cohort illustrates why. Those top ten names averaged 30.09% over the next six months, versus 13.86% for the leading market-tracking ETF, the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ().

The individual returns ranged from a 175% gain to a 46% loss. That dispersion is one reason we use more than one edge on every trade: the source gets a stock onto our radar, our technical screens help time the entry, the company and catalyst work define the holding period, and our pricing models keep us from overpaying for the structure.

Today’s first trade is on a current Top Name we’ve traded before. The company has added two large, multiyear contracts that should be fully activated by year-end, while its shares have consolidated near their 50-day trend.

Our alert from our earlier entry in this stock:

Our second trade is a biotech reentry from our Multibaggers list, the subset of our Market Watchers X list comprised of analysts with multiple, recent, 100%+ winners. It combines an established commercial business with a year-end clinical catalyst, and its April expiration leaves time for the catalyst and two expected quarterly reports.

Our alert from our earlier entry in this stock:

Paid subscribers will find the names, trade structures, the maximum prices we’re willing to pay for them, and our pre-set exit orders below.

Today’s Top Names Trade

RSI: 48; Technical Rating: 8; Setup Rating: 8; Fundamental Rating: 5.

Government-services expansion / new contract awards theme.

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Calls / calendar: Enter a GTC limit order to buy-to-close the short January 15th, 2027 $40 call for $0.20.

If it remains in-the-money as we approach expiration, cancel that order and exit the call diagonal at a net credit slightly above its midpoint, lowering the price as necessary as we approach expiration. If the short call expires out-of-the-money …

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1. Buy-to-open 1 GEO March 19th, 2027 $35 call,

2. Sell-to-open 1 GEO January 15th, 2027 $40 call,

3. Sell-to-open 1 GEO March 19th, 2027 $25 put,

4. Buy-to-open 1 GEO March 19th, 2027 $20 put.

Enter the four legs as a single complex order at a maximum net debit of $0.95.

This is a day order an…

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1. Buy-to-open 4 BCRX April 16th, 2027 $10 calls,

2. Sell-to-open 2 BCRX March 19th, 2027 $12 calls.

Enter the two legs as a single complex order. On Fidelity’s reduced 2:1 ticket, enter a maximum net debit of $3.45.

This is a day order and will be canceled at the end of the day if it doesn’t f…

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Moving Our Weekly Market Commentary

It feels weird to post a weekly market commentary on Thursday nights. Unless most of my subscribers object (poll question below the paywall), I’m going to stop doing that in our weekly Top Names posts and move it to the weekend, where we'll have market commentary combined with a summary of how we traded the week.

Our Basic Strategy

Our basic strategy is to buy equal dollar amounts of the Portfolio Armor web app’s top ten names, put trailing stops of ~20% or more 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 last month:

A Top Names Performance Update

Last week, we looked at the performance of our top ten names from our February 26th Top Names post. Our next weekly Top Names post was on March 5th, so we don’t have the 6-month return for that cohort yet. So, instead, here is the 6-month return for our September 3rd cohort:

This Week’s Top Names

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

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Three Themes, Three Different Payoffs

The AI infrastructure buildout extends far beyond processors. It requires reliable energy and enormous quantities of conductive metal in data centers, power grids and industrial equipment. Today’s alert approaches that chain from three directions: the leading supplier of AI compute, a high-quality oil and gas producer, and a copper producer positioned for both the data-center buildout and reindustrialization.

All three stocks have 10 out of 10 Chartmill Technical Ratings and Fundamental Ratings of at least 7 out of 10. Their RSIs range from 54 to 57, giving us strong trends below technically overbought territory.

New to our alerts? Start here to see how we combine multiple sources of alpha, a structure tailored to the stock, and precise pricing designed to keep us from overpaying. We begin with the exit in mind and track every completed trade publicly, win or lose.

Subscribers don’t need to enter every trade:

• The first trade uses a diagonal call calendar. We buy a call expiring in March, covering the company’s next two expected earnings reports, and offset part of the cost by selling a slightly higher-strike call expiring in February. The maximum risk is $485. If the February call expires in-the-money, the maximum gain is about $2,500; if it expires out-of-the-money or we buy it back first, the upside on the March call is uncapped.

• The second trade also uses a diagonal call calendar. The maximum risk is $820. If the short January calls expire in-the-money, the maximum gain is about $1,400; if they expire out-of-the-money or we buy them back first, the upside on the March calls is uncapped.

• The third trade opens for a net credit and can earn up to $1,150. It can still be profitable at expiration after a decline of about 10% from Wednesday’s close.

We place orders with our own money on every trade in every alert—we eat our own cooking. The same published price ceilings and floors govern our entries.

Paid subscribers will find the names, exact entries and pre-set exit plans below.

Today’s AI Compute Trade

AI compute / accelerating data-center demand theme.

RSI: 57; Chartmill Technical Rating: 10; Setup Rating: 8; Fundamental Rating: 8.

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