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 174 completed weekly cohorts, our top ten names have averaged a six-month return of 17.93%, versus 9.90% 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 finished exiting earlier this month:
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 23rd.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from April 23rd, 2026 returned 4.88%, versus 7.27% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 174 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 174 completed cohorts:
And as you can see above, our top names have averaged returns of 17.93% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.90%. 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.
