Top Names, 4/16/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
A Brief Market Comment
Here’s a version that adds the color on internals without stepping on the later performance section:
A Brief Market Comment
The market’s recent rally has been extreme. The strongest leg of it coincided with investors starting to price in a ceasefire and broader de-escalation in the Iran war (something we’ve been anticipating from the beginning), and by today’s session the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Russell 2000 had all pushed to fresh highs. The Nasdaq has now logged a 12-session winning streak, its longest since 2009, while the S&P 500 is up about 11% from its March 30 low.
And it’s not just the indexes. Breadth has been strong too, with advancing stocks beating decliners across the major exchanges, even if volume has been a bit light. At the same time, momentum is getting stretched: the 14-day RSI had climbed to about 68.4 on the Nasdaq and 67 on the S&P 500, both approaching overbought territory.
That kind of backdrop can produce some eye-popping moves in the hotter names. Our Market Watchers space names from Monday is already up more than 20% since then,
And our Market Watchers photonics name from Wednesday’s alert is already up about 29% from our entry.
By comparison, our Top Names have looked relatively boring over the last couple of weeks. But in a market where some of the flashier areas are starting to look stretched, that may not be a bad thing.
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 week:
3-leg combo on Nokia Corp. (NOK 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $0.59 on 1/21/2026. Exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.05 on 1/30/2026, sold half of the calls at $2.50 on 3/2/2026, and sold the other half of the calls at $4.20 on 4/13/2026. Profit: 423% (return on max risk: 242%). 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 October 16th, 2025.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from October 16th, 2025 returned 4.46%, versus 6.45% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 147 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 17.28% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.47%. 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.
