Top Names, 3/5/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
Trading Through The Iran War
In our Top Names post two weeks ago, we linked to our post about hedging Iran War risk.
We’re now almost a week into that war, which has added to the volatility of some individual names in ways not fully captured by overall market volatility measures. Fortunately, we have options structures that can use that volatility to our advantage. And in the big picture, our core themes (reindustrialization, AI buildout, etc.) remain intact, and some defense-related names we’ve traded, such as mLIGHT (LASR 0.00%↑) have gotten a tailwind from the war.
If you want to add downside protection during the next market bounce, our website and iPhone app enable you to can for optimal hedges.
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.
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:
3-leg combo on Viavi Solutions (VIAV 0.00%↑). 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 9/4/2025.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from September 4th, 2025 returned +23.97%, versus +5.6% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 141 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 20.35% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 10.10%. 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.
