Top Names, 4/9/2026
A brief market comment, followed by this week's Top Ten Names.
A Brief Market Comment
The big news this week was the ceasefire announced Tuesday night.
On Tuesday morning, before that happened, we bet against oil on the view that the Iran war was more likely to end sooner rather than later.
That trade’s in the money now, but since then, the market has sent a mixed message. Stocks have kept rallying—the S&P 500 and Nasdaq just logged their seventh straight up day, their longest winning streak since 2024—while oil, though up a bit on Thursday, is still far below where it was before the ceasefire. And the VIX dropped below 20 for the first time since the conflict began, even though the Strait of Hormuz is still being throttled by Iran and fighting is continuing between Iran and its Gulf neighbors, as well as between Israel and Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. (Barron’s)
Our own view hasn’t changed much. We’re still cautiously optimistic this gets resolved within the next few weeks—whether by negotiations, more combat, or some combination of both. In the meantime, we’re staying disciplined and continuing to add long exposure, especially from our strongest source of alpha: our system’s 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 this week,
4-leg combo on ITT (ITT 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $3.35 on 10/13/2025. Exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 10/29/2025, and exited the call spread at a net credit of $16.00 on 4/8/2026. Profit: 372% (147% on max risk). Signal: PA Top Names.
No Performance Update This Week
Before we post our new Top Names, we usually post a performance update on our Top Names from six months earlier. There was some inconsistency in the data last week, that we thought had been cleaned up, but we’re still having issues today. We’ll plan on getting the performance tracking corrected before next week’s post.
This Week’s Top Names
Below are Portfolio Armor’s current top ten names as of Thursday’s close.
