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. One example was our March 27th trade on Western Digital (WDC), a member of our March 26th Top Names cohort. Here’s the historical entry card:
This trade filled at a $0.97 net debit.
We closed the put spread for $0.20 on April 14th and sold the call spread for $8.00 on June 3rd, completing the trade. That produced a 114% return on original maximum risk in 68 days, as shown below:
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 2nd. Here’s the original post:
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from April 2nd, 2026 returned 25.08%, versus 17.35% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY).
So far, we’ve recorded 6-month returns for 171 weekly Top Names cohorts since we started this Substack at the end of December, 2022. The tables below show the beginning and most recent part of that record:
The most recent cohorts and the average across all 171 completed cohorts:
You can see the returns for every week in our interactive performance table, where clicking a date opens a chart of that week’s holdings.
Across those 171 cohorts, our top ten names averaged 17.98% over the next six months, versus 9.89% for SPY over the same periods.
This Week’s Top Names
Below are Portfolio Armor’s current top ten names as of Thursday’s close.
