Top Names, 3/26/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
A Brief Market Comment
Even as the Iran war continues to threaten energy flows and shipping, the political signals this week keep pointing toward a conflict measured in weeks, not months. President Trump reinforced that view directly. As we noted in our trade alert earlier today, he rescheduled his delayed summit with President Xi for May 14th-15th, which suggests the White House expects this war to be brought under control before then. Trump also extended his deadline for destroying Iran’s power plants by 10 days today.
There was also a secondhand report that Vladimir Putin expects the Iran war to be over within the next month or so. Alexander Shokhin, the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, said after a closed-door meeting with Putin that the Russian president told business leaders he expected the crisis would probably be resolved within the next three to four weeks.
So, we’ll keep adding bullish exposure selectively here. Our trades are usually aimed months out, when we’ll likely be on the other side of this conflict. And the best source for those trade ideas remains our Top Names.
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 earlier this month:
3-leg combo on Viavi Solutions (VIAV 1.75%↑). Entered for a net debit of $1.15 on 1/9/2026; exited the February $17/$15 put spread at a net debit of $0.16 on 1/28/2026; sold half of the June $19 calls for $11.20 on 2/27/2026 and the second half for $16.00 on 3/2/2026. Profit: 1,069% on premium outlay (return on max risk: 372%). 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 9/25/2025.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from September 18th, 2025 returned -5.22%, versus -0.16% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 144 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 19.84% 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.
