Top Names, 8/13/2026

A brief market comment, followed by a Top Names performance update, and this week's Top Ten Names.

A Record High, With AI Still In Front

The S&P 500 rose 0.7% to a record 7,798.99 on Thursday, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.8%. The immediate catalyst was a better inflation backdrop: July producer prices were unchanged, following a revised 0.1% decline in June, and their 12-month increase slowed to 4.7% from 5.5%.

The details were firmer than the headline. Producer prices excluding food, energy and trade services rose 0.4% in July. Wednesday’s consumer-price report was more encouraging, with headline prices up 0.1% and core prices up 0.2%. The combination eased pressure on Treasury yields and gave growth stocks another lift.

Tonight’s Top Names still put the AI stack at the center of the opportunity set. Semiconductor designers, chip equipment, data-center connectivity and storage account for half the list, including each of the four highest-ranked securities. That’s a smaller concentration than last week’s first six, but it keeps the industry’s earnings and capital-spending cycle in front.

A Broader Set Of Catalysts

The other half of the list spans digital health, payments, specialty materials, gaming and consumer internet. Our Market Watchers feed echoed that shape this week. Recent earnings summaries included a clean beat from a digital-finance company, but misses from an AI-infrastructure contractor.

Friday’s July retail-sales report and preliminary University of Michigan consumer-sentiment reading will test that broadening. Resilient demand alongside slower inflation would support both sides of tonight’s list: valuation-sensitive AI infrastructure and the more economically sensitive consumer names.

Portfolio Armor ranks securities from the bottom up, but the sector mix shows where estimated six-month returns are clustering. Tonight it points to a market with AI infrastructure as its strongest engine and a second group of opportunities developing outside it. Next week, we’ll watch whether those non-AI names remain in the rankings after Friday’s data and whether the post-earnings AI leaders hold their technical support.

Another Use For Our Top Names

We also use our top names in options trades, such as this one we exited last week:

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 February 12th.

Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from February 12th, 2026 returned +3.47%, versus +13.33% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).

So far, we have 6-month returns for 164 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 17.64% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.68%. 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.