Top Names, 5/28/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
A Market That Wants The Ceasefire To Hold
The headlines around the Strait of Hormuz remain mixed.
On the bullish side, the U.S. and Iran have reportedly reached a preliminary agreement to extend the current ceasefire and move toward reopening shipping through the Strait, though final approval was still pending. On the bearish side, this is still an active kinetic environment: U.S. forces reportedly shot down Iranian drones near the Strait and struck a drone-control station near Bandar Abbas, while Iran fired a ballistic missile toward Kuwait that was intercepted.
The market’s verdict, at least for now, is that diplomacy has the edge. The VIX at a 15-handle today suggests traders are leaning toward an extension of the ceasefire, or at least enough containment that equities can keep looking through the headlines.
Our Top Names have already been sending us in a useful direction here. In recent weeks, they’ve had us adding exposure to energy, defense-adjacent names, and companies based in Europe and the Western Hemisphere—areas that can benefit if the Strait remains throttled longer than expected, without depending on a full-blown crisis.
he AI Buildout Is Still Showing Up In The Numbers
Then there was Dell (DELL 0.00%↑).
Dell reported a blowout quarter after the close, raised its annual revenue and profit forecasts, and pointed to surging demand for AI-optimized servers as data-center buildout continues to accelerate. Reuters reported that Dell now expects $60 billion of AI server revenue for fiscal 2027, up from a prior forecast of $50 billion, while annual revenue guidance moved up to $165 billion–$169 billion from $138 billion–$142 billion.
That is the part of the AI story that keeps getting missed by people waiting for the “bubble” to pop: the revenue is real. The earnings are real. The capex is real. The customers are ordering the hardware.
There’s a policy angle too. Dell had just been awarded a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract, and a number of accounts on our Market Watchers X list noted the Trump connection after the stock ripped higher.
We weren’t in Dell, but we got a taste of the same phenomenon earlier today with Aevex Aerospace (AVEX 0.00%↑), a drone name we added in thos morning’s trade alert after reports that the Trump administration was considering funding selected U.S. drone companies.
AVEX closed up more than 31% on the day.
That’s the kind of market this is. Policy support matters. AI infrastructure matters. Defense and autonomy matter. And when those themes line up with actual contracts, revenue growth, or capital flows, stocks can move fast.
Still Bullish, Still Selective
Plenty of putatively smart people have spent the last few months warning about crashes, fading momentum, and waiting for a better entry point.
We’re taking the other side of that approach—not by ignoring risk, but by continuing to look for new places to add bullish exposure selectively.
That starts with Portfolio Armor’s Top Names. They’re not a news-chasing list. They’re a systematic ranking of securities by their estimated potential returns over the next six months. But lately, they’ve kept pointing us toward many of the same areas where the market is rewarding real earnings power and real strategic importance: AI infrastructure, energy, defense-adjacent companies, industrial suppliers, and companies positioned around bottlenecks in the physical-world buildout.
So our posture remains the same: keep scanning, keep pricing trades carefully, and keep adding exposure where the story, the screens, and the structure line up.
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:
3-leg combo on Riot Platforms (RIOT 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $1.36 on 12/9/2025; exited the April 17th, 2026 $13/$9 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/8/2026; sold the June 18th, 2026 $18 call for $9.00 on 5/27/2026. Profit: 547% (return on max risk: 139%). 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 26th of last year.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from November 26th, 2025 returned +20.75%, versus +10.35% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 153 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 17.23% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.72%. 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.
