Top Names, 7/31/2025

Revisiting our core strategy and updating our top names performance.

Our Core Strategy

Our core strategy is to buy equal dollar amounts of the Portfolio Armor web app’s top ten names, put trailing stops of 15%-20% on them, and replace them with names from the current week’s top ten when we get stopped out of a position.

A Note About Portfolio Armor’s Top Names

The price of this Substack is the same as the price of a Top Names subscription in the Portfolio Armor iPhone app.

I priced it that way because I wasn’t sure how much value I would be adding above that of Portfolio Armor’s Top Names. I think I am adding some—e.g., neither Tecogen (TGEN 0.00%↑) or Sana Biotechnology (SANA 0.00%↑) were PA top names, and we’ve had some nice gains on both recently. But I was reminded of the power of Portfolio Armor’s security selection algorithm this week.

One of our top ten names last week was TransMedics (TMDX 0.00%↑), a company that transports organs for transplants. The company was mentioned in a horrific New York Times article a couple of weeks ago (“A Push for More Organ Transplants Is Putting Donors at Risk: People across the United States have endured rushed or premature attempts to remove their organs. Some were gasping, crying or showing other signs of life.”)

Because of that, I didn’t place any trades on TMDX. Our loss: the stock was up more than 10% today, after crushing earnings. Portfolio Armor’s dispassionate algorithm was smarter about the stock than I was.

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 30th, 2025.

Our top names from January 30th returned 17.68%, on average, over the next six months, versus 4.97% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY 0.00%↑).

So far, we have 6-month returns for 109 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 16.25% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.21%. 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.