Top Names, 5/14/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
A Brief Market Comment
You’re Not Bullish Enough
Yesterday, in our Zero Hedge post, “You’re Not Bullish Enough,” we argued that the market may still be underestimating the scale of the AI buildout—not as another dot-com bubble, but as a real industrial cycle built around chips, memory, optics, power, cooling, grid capacity, and automation.
Today’s earnings reinforced that point. Applied Materials (APLD 0.00%↑) reported better-than-expected fiscal Q2 results and guided fiscal Q3 revenue to about $8.95 billion, well above consensus, citing sustained AI and data-center infrastructure demand. Management also raised its 2026 semiconductor-equipment growth outlook to more than 30%, another sign that the AI buildout is broadening into the manufacturing layer behind the chips.
China Weighs In On The Strait of Hormuz
The Trump-Xi summit added another concrete tailwind on the geopolitical side. According to the White House, Trump and Xi agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy, and that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. Shortly afterward, Iranian media reported that Chinese vessels had begun transiting the Strait again, with Iran’s state broadcaster saying about 30 vessels had passed through since Wednesday evening.
If Chinese pressure helps reopen Hormuz more broadly, that could ease oil, shipping, and inflation pressure—another reason risk assets may still have more upside than the skeptics expect.
Our takeaway hasn’t changed: the AI infrastructure trade is broadening, not narrowing. The best opportunities may increasingly be in the bottlenecks around the buildout—power, optics, semiconductors, materials, and the industrial suppliers behind the next wave.
Subscription Prices Are Going Up
Subscription prices for the Portfolio Armor Substack are going up from $40 per month/$400 per year to $50 per month/$500 per year tonight, but current subscribers will be grandfathered into the price they’re currently paying. So consider joining now, if you’re a free subscriber. If you join and change your mind, I’ll be happy to give you a prorated refund at any time.
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 yesterday:
4-leg combo on Nebius (NBIS 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $0.25 on 11/4/2025; exited the put spread at a net debit of $5.00 on 11/14/2025; exited the call spread at a net credit of $16.28 on 5/13/2026. Profit: 4,412% (return on max risk: 210%). 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 November 13th, 2025:
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from November 12th, 2025 returned +36.84%, versus +10.27% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
The top-performing name there shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this post of ours from last week,
So far, we have 6-month returns for 151 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 16.97% 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.
