Top Names, 2/5/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Names.
A Brief Market Comment
As I noted in today’s trade alert, in light of current market conditions, I have tightened our entry rules to try to avoid falling knives.
Of tonight’s top ten names, only one passes our tighter entry rules. After I send this post out, I’m going to get back to work on tomorrow’s trade alert, which will include that top name, along with a names from other sources that also meet our tighter entry rules.
For those of you who are considering adding downside protection here, you may want to look at the Portfolio Armor iPhone app.
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 combo on Littlefuse (LFUS 0.00%↑). Entered at a net credit of $0.50 on 10/13/2025; the November 21st, 2025 $250/$240 put spread was assigned and exercised at a max loss of $10.00 per spread on 11/21/2025, and we exited March 20th, 2026 $300/$320 call spread at a net credit of $16.00 on 2/4/2026, for a net value of $6.50 per contract. Profit: 1,300% of premium collected (68% of max risk).
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 7/31/2025.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from July 31st returned 37.31%, versus +9.39% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 136 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 20.27% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 10.22%. 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.
