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.
Across 173 completed weekly cohorts, our top ten names have averaged a six-month return of 18.00%, versus 9.91% for SPY over the same periods.
Another Use For Our Top Names
We also use our top names in options trades, such as this one we exited last week:
Equinor, the Norwegian oil and gas company, was a Top Names trade on May 27th. Here are its historical entry terms:
This trade filled at a $0.75 net debit.
We finished exiting it on October 16th:
Each trade’s entry and exit is documented in our public exits record.
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 16th.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from April 16th, 2026 returned 0.17%, versus 8.78% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 173 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]
The most recent cohorts and the average across all 173 completed cohorts:
And as you can see above, our top names have averaged returns of 18.00% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.91%. 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.
