A Narrow Rally With New Leadership
The S&P 500 rose 0.7% Thursday, and the Nasdaq 100 gained 1.4%, but the headline indexes concealed an unusually narrow session. Technology climbed 3.4%, while every other S&P sector finished lower and the equal-weighted S&P 500 declined.
Results and long-range guidance from Nvidia (NVDA 0.00%↑) kept the AI capital-spending cycle in front, while software supplied Thursday’s most important shift. Salesforce (CRM 0.00%↑), CrowdStrike (CRWD 0.00%↑), Okta (OKTA 0.00%↑) and Veeva Systems (VEEV 0.00%↑) all surged after reporting results. Those moves extended the day’s leadership beyond semiconductors into software and cybersecurity.
Thursday’s strength remained concentrated within growth. Treasury yields rose modestly, Brent crude held near $89 per barrel, and Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech on Friday will shape the market’s next move in rates.
Oil Flows And Memory Investment
One of those pressures is easing at the margin. Bloomberg reported that oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz have increased to roughly 7 million to 8 million barrels per day, from about 4 million in mid-July. Kuwait and Qatar have restored their combined exports to about 70% of prewar levels. More barrels can contain crude prices and inflation, but the recovery relies partly on shuttle operations and ship-to-ship transfers, traffic remains below prewar levels, and another tanker was struck this week. The near-term signal combines improving supply with persistent geopolitical risk.
President Trump also highlighted a planned multibillion-dollar investment in new U.S. memory-research labs. The spending will fund long-horizon work over the next decade, while much larger domestic manufacturing commitments address future production. Together, those investments reinforce memory and storage’s strategic role in the AI buildout as current supply remains tight.
Tonight’s Top Names reflect that concentration. Seven of the ten are tied to the technology stack, and the four highest-ranked securities are concentrated in memory, storage and AI infrastructure, with estimated six-month potential returns ranging from 79% to 86%. The other three span consumer businesses and biotechnology. Portfolio Armor ranks securities from the bottom up, but the sector mix shows where its six-month return estimates are clustering.
Friday’s reaction to Warsh will show whether Thursday’s new software bid can survive another move in rates and whether the market’s strongest AI-infrastructure names can hold their gains. Broader participation would strengthen the advance; continued concentration would increase the importance of security selection and our basic strategy’s trailing stops.
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% or more 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:
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 26th.
Over the next 6 months, our top ten names from February 26th, 2026 returned -6.1%, versus +11.19% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY 0.23%↑).
Our three biggest losers in that cohort were a satellite company and two silver ETFs, one of which was leveraged.
So far, we have 6-month returns for 166 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 17.52% 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.
