Top Names, 8/1/2024

A brief market comment, then on to our performance update and core strategy.

Market Comment

We’ve had some market headwinds this week, which seem to be partly due to economic weakness, and partly due to concerns about the election. A game plan for dealing with the uncertainty:

1. If you’re concerned about downside risk for positions you already own, consider hedging. As a reminder, you can download our iPhone hedging app here, or by aiming your iPhone camera at the QR code below.

   

    

2. We’ll use up days to add short positions, and down days to add long positions, when we surface compelling ideas.

3. We had a couple of successful exits of options trades today, including one on one of Portfolio Armor’s top names, Carvana (CVNA 0.00%↑),

   

   @dpinsen @dpinsen ♬ Tongue Tied - GROUPLOVE

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   But I’m going to be cautious about using our top names for options trades until we get a better sense of market direction. I will still use them for our core strategy though.

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 February 1st.

Over the next six months, our top ten names from February 1st were up 6.81%, on average, versus up 11.36% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY 0.00%↑).

So far, we have 6-month returns for 58 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 22.38% over the next six months, versus SPY’s average of 13.02%. 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.