Top Names, 5/21/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
A Brief Market Comment
The Buildout Broadens
As we noted in today’s trade alert, Nvidia’s (NVDA 0.00%↑) latest report reinforced the idea that this is not just another dot-com-style stock-market mania.
Nvidia’s revenue hit a record $81.6 billion, up 85% year-over-year, and CEO Jensen Huang also described the buildout of AI factories as “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history,” while Nvidia’s new reporting framework now explicitly includes Edge Computing, covering physical AI applications such as robotics and automotive.
That last point is worth emphasizing. The AI buildout is no longer just about training clusters and data centers. It’s moving toward the physical world—robots, autonomous systems, industrial automation, sensing, power, storage, and the suppliers behind all of it.
Priced For Excellence, Still Delivering
Nvidia slipped after the report, but the stock was already up about 9% over the last month—a large move for a company now worth roughly $5.4 trillion. The market appears to have priced in another exceptional quarter, and Nvidia delivered one. For our purposes, the more important signal is that demand for AI infrastructure remains strong, and the opportunity set around it keeps broadening.
Our Top Names Have Been Capturing This Theme
Our Top Names list is not a news-chasing list. It’s a systematic ranking of securities by their estimated potential returns over the next six months. But it’s notable how many of the recurring themes in recent Top Names lists—semiconductors, semiconductor equipment, defense electronics, power infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and industrial suppliers—line up with the bottlenecks around the AI and robotics buildout. As you’ll see below, the Top Names list from six months ago included names such as Micron (MU 0.00%↑) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 0.00%↑) , both of which fit squarely within that broader AI infrastructure theme.
So our posture remains the same: bullish, but selective. We’ll keep using the Top Names system as our primary source of alpha and we’ll keep looking for names there and elsewhere that pass our technical screens and provide attractive options structures.
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 today:
3-leg combo on Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $1.55 on 12/8/2025; exited the March $9/$7 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 3/11/2026; sold half of the June $12 calls for $7.50 on 4/22/2026 and sold the second half for $13.00 on 5/21/2026. Profit: 548% (return on max risk: 233%). 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 20th, 2025:
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from November 20th, 2025 returned +53.4%, versus +13.66% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 152 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 17.21% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.71%. 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.
