Top Names, 10/10/2024

Continuing our core strategy and updating our performance.

Our Core Strategy

Our core strategy is to buy equal dollar amounts of the Portfolio Armor web app’s top ten names, put trailing stops of 10%-20% on them, and replace them with names from the current week’s top ten when we get stopped out of a position.

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 April 4th, 2024.

Our top names from April 4th were down, on average, 6.54%, over the next six months, versus up 12.38% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY 0.00%↑).

As you can see above the two worst-performing names there were the bitcoin miner CleanSpark (CLSK 0.00%↑) and Super Micro Computer (SMCI 0.00%↑). SMCI, in particular, was a huge winner for us in the past (and likely will be again), but if you were following our core strategy, you wouldn’t have been down ~57% on it, because you would have exited after a trailing stop of 10% to 20%.

So far, we have 6-month returns for 66 weekly top names cohorts since we started this Substack at the end of December, 2022.

And as you can see above, our top names have averaged returns of 18.86% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 12.54%. 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.

If You Are Concerned About Downside Risk

As a reminder, you can download our iPhone hedging app by clicking on the QR code below or aiming your iPhone camera at it.

This Week’s Top Names

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

Screen capture via Portfolio Armor on 10/10/2024.

If you’re starting our core strategy now, you’ll want to buy equal dollar amounts of each at or near these prices, if possible, on Friday, and then enter trailing stops of 10% to 20% on each of them. As you get stopped out of positions, you’ll add new ones from the then-current top ten names.

In my case, I am already running this strategy, and didn’t get stopped out of any top names this week, so I won’t be adding a new one tomorrow.