Top Names, 2/19/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Names.
Iran War Risk
In case you missed it, we wrote about hedging against the possibility of a U.S. or U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran yesterday.
That’s this week’s new market comment. Otherwise, we’re still sticking with our tighter entry requirements for new trades, in light of the current tape.
If You Want To Add Downside Protection Here
As a reminder, our website and iPhone app enable you to can for optimal hedges.
Our Basic Strategy
Our basic strategy to buy equal dollar amounts of the Portfolio Armor web app’s top ten names, put trailing stops of ~20% 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 this week:
4-leg hybrid combo on Corning (GLW 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $3.35 on 11/17/2025; exited the $70–$75 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 1/23/2026; exited the call calendar (long Jun 18th, 2026 $90 calls / short Feb 20th, 2026 $95 calls) at a net credit of $8.20 on 2/19/2026. Profit: 139% (return on max risk: 56%). Signal: PA Top Names.
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 8/14/2025.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from August 14th, 2025 returned +29.45%, versus +5.77% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 138 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]
And as you can see above, our top names have averaged returns of 20.39% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 10.18%. 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.
