Top Names, 7/23/2026
A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.
The Cost Of The Boom
Last week, we wrote that the market was fighting an expanding Iran war and a hard rotation out of former AI leaders. Thursday fused those pressures into the worst session in a month. Brent crude cleared $100 after attacks on two Saudi tankers threatened the Red Sea route now carrying diverted Gulf exports, while the 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.7%. The S&P 500 fell 1.2%, the Dow 1.0%, and the Nasdaq 2.2%.
The oil move is a tailwind for the energy-related stocks our rankings began surfacing in early April, when four energy names entered the top ten.
By April 20, seven of the ten names in our ranking generally benefited from firmer energy prices.
The Market Sold The Spending
The other pressure came from earnings. Alphabet beat estimates, but its shares fell 7.1% after it raised this year’s capital-spending forecast to $195–$205 billion. Tesla dropped 14.5% after weaker-than-expected profit. The market was repricing capital intensity, fuel costs, and financing costs all at once.
Alphabet’s operating evidence was far stronger than the share-price reaction suggested. Revenue rose 24% year over year, Google Cloud revenue accelerated 82%, Cloud backlog reached $514 billion, and the company’s model APIs processed about 22 billion tokens per minute, up from 16 billion in the prior quarter. Management also said demand remained supply constrained.
The Suppliers Answered
Earlier Thursday, Nokia added a supplier-side confirmation: sales to AI and cloud customers rose 105% year over year, optical-network sales grew 20%, and AI-and-cloud order intake reached €2.8 billion. Nokia expects roughly half those orders to convert to revenue over the next 12 months and says supply remains the industry’s main constraint.
This is the week’s central tension. AI demand keeps accelerating, while the market raises the return threshold for every dollar spent to serve it. Higher oil and bond yields make that threshold tougher still. The companies selling scarce hardware and infrastructure can keep growing even while their customers’ multiples compress.
What Our Rankings Are Saying
Eight of this week’s top ten names have direct exposure to semiconductors, memory, chip-testing equipment, or data-center cooling. The ranking remains concentrated in the physical AI buildout after one of the roughest days for that trade this year.
That concentration deserves both attention and discipline. Our system continues to find its highest estimated six-month returns in the picks-and-shovels layer, while Thursday’s tape demands wider stops, controlled position sizes, and patience. The basic strategy below lets the ranking select the names and trailing stops determine when price action has overruled the forecast.
Our Basic Strategy
Our basic strategy is 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 last week:
4-leg hybrid combo on Targa Resources (TRGP -0.22%↓). Entered at a net debit of $2.45 on 4/20/2026; exited the July 17, 2026 $210/$200 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 5/14/2026; then sold the September $270 / July $280 call calendar for a net credit of $18.25 on 7/15/2026. Profit: 637% on net debit (125% on max risk). 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 January 22nd.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from January 21st, 2026 returned -7.36%, versus +9.08% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
So far, we have 6-month returns for 160 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 18.16% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.67%. 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.
