Top Names, 4/30/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
A Brief Market Comment
The market ended April by doing something that would have looked unlikely a month ago: it rallied through war, oil volatility, and another round of inflation worries. On Thursday, the S&P 500 rose 1.0%, the Nasdaq gained 0.9%, and the Dow jumped 790 points, capping the market’s strongest month since 2020. The lesson, for now, is that earnings strength is still enough to offset a lot of bad macro news.
That does not mean the macro backdrop is clean. Oil is still trading far above prewar levels, with the Strait of Hormuz disruption and U.S. blockade continuing to feed an energy-risk premium into the market. That matters because higher oil prices can show up everywhere: in transport costs, fertilizer inputs, industrial margins, consumer spending, and inflation expectations. The market can rally through that for a while, but it can’t ignore it indefinitely.
The more encouraging side of the tape is that this has not been a narrow defensive rally. Earnings have been strong enough to support risk assets, and the AI buildout remains one of the market’s dominant investment themes. Even when investors punish individual companies for spending aggressively, the broader message from the hyperscalers is still clear: they plan to keep pouring capital into data centers, power, chips, networking, and the physical infrastructure needed to support AI.
That combination—oil shock risk on one side, AI and reindustrialization capex on the other—helps explain why our Top Names have recently been tilted toward energy, fertilizer, materials, and infrastructure-adjacent companies. The market is not just rewarding software stories here; it is also rewarding the companies tied to the physical world: molecules, metals, power, pipes, plants, and machines.
Our system’s Top Names seem to have anticipated that shift. As we’ll see below, this week’s list again leans toward companies that can benefit from supply shocks, energy dislocations, and the ongoing rebuild of America’s industrial base.
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:
Diagonal calendar spread on Applied Materials (AMAT 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $8.50 on 3/24/2026; exited at a net credit of $17.15 on 4/30/2026. Profit: 102%. 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 30th, 2025.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from October 30th, 2025 returned -2.06%, versus +5.45% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 149 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% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.69%. 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.
