Top Names, 9/4/2025
Updating our top names performance and presenting this week's top ten names.
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 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 March 4th, 2025.
So far, we have 6-month returns for 114 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 16.13% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 9.10%. 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.
Screen capture via Portfolio Armor on 9/4/2025.
If you’re starting our core strategy now, you’ll want to buy equal dollar amounts of each at or near these prices, if possible, on Friday, and then enter trailing stops of 15% to 20% on each of them. As you get stopped out of positions, you’ll add new ones from the then-current top ten names.








I’m wondering if it would be advisable to buy long dated put options on each as opposed to shares. Normally I don’t buy less than 100 shares of a stock, so buying 1 call option on each would in effect be similar. Thoughts?