Top Names, 12/19/2024

Continuing our core strategy while updating our Top Names performance.

A Brief Market Comment

Although I post these top names here once a week, the Portfolio Armor system generates a top ten names list every day the market is open. On Tuesday and Wednesday, none of them looked attractive to me. On the short side, I had planned to short one of the quantum computing companies, but it dropped ~40% before I had a chance. So this week’s correction so far hasn’t presented me any opportunities on the long or short side—until now. Tonight’s #1 name is one I plan to make a bullish options bet on tomorrow though, market permitting. I also have a shorter term lotto play in mind.

For conservative investors, as a reminder, you can download our iPhone hedging app by aiming your iPhone camera at the QR code below (or tapping here, if you are reading this on your phone).

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 June 13th, 2024.

Our top names from June 13th were up 12.46%, on average, over the next six months, versus up 12.08% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY 0.00%↑).

Note that if you were following our core strategy with this top names cohort, your performance would likely have been better than that, because you would have been stopped out of MRNA 0.00%↑ after it dropped 15%-20%, rather than holding it for a 71% drop.

So far, we have 6-month returns for 77 weekly top names cohorts since we started this Substack at the end of December, 2022.

And as you can see above, our top names have averaged returns of 18.72% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 12.77%. 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.