Quantarded Weekly Signals #012 — Week 12, 2026

After a one-week pause on the publishing side because I was out for personal reasons, this issue picks the thread back up with the new Week 12 basket. One practical consequence is that the performance review below looks back to Week 10, which was the last basket actually published in the newsletter.

This week’s Reddit basket looks reasonably concentrated at the top, but less dominated by a single name than some of the earlier issues. The top three picks account for most of the allocation, while the bottom two still matter enough to move the weekly result if they break hard in either direction.

For context, this week Quantarded processed 28 House trade disclosures filed during the week, 284,033 Reddit comments analyzed and 23,649 stock ticker mentions detected and classified. As always, what matters is not volume alone, but how agreement evolves as volume grows.

Reddit picks

As a reminder, a ticker is labeled BUY or SELL only when it clears a minimum imbalance threshold. High visibility alone is not sufficient; divided sentiment is explicitly penalized.

This week’s basket is still somewhat top-heavy, but in a more clustered way than the last published issue. The first three names carry most of the weight, while the fourth and fifth picks are clearly smaller. In practice that means the basket is not a one-name trade, but it is still driven primarily by the upper tier.

$META: SELL, 25% share

$META enters as the largest position in the basket, but only narrowly. The signal is a SELL, and what stands out in the extended report is not extreme breadth, but a clear directional imbalance within a relatively compact participation footprint.

That combination usually reads as a focused negative view rather than broad market consensus. In other words, the name made the basket because the disagreement was not balanced enough to wash the signal out. It is not the most visible ticker in the universe this week, but it was directional enough to survive the filter.

The confidence score is also the highest among the qualifying names, which matters because the top of the basket should reflect not just attention, but attention with a usable directional skew. That makes $META the clearest structural driver on the Reddit side this week.

As contextual background only, recent Reuters coverage around $META has focused on AI spending and workforce trade-offs: Exclusive: Meta planning sweeping layoffs as AI costs mount, Meta lays out a jobs vs AI tradeoff.

$AAPL: BUY, 25% share

$AAPL comes in just behind the leader and does so with the strongest positive imbalance among the larger qualifying names. The extended report shows a relatively small but clean signal profile, with BUY weight comfortably ahead of SELL weight.

This is the kind of pick that reflects agreement rather than raw scale. Participation is not massive, but the directionality is clear enough that the model assigns it a large share anyway. That tends to produce a signal that is fragile in breadth terms, but still legitimate in confidence terms.

The result is a high-ranking BUY that is more about clarity than size. If the conversation remains aligned, it can matter a lot. If the flow broadens and sentiment splits, it can decay quickly. That is the usual trade-off for compact but decisive signals.

As contextual background only, Reuters coverage around $AAPL recently centered on product launches and stronger China sales: Apple launches iPhone 17e at $599, boosts base storage to 256 gigabytes, Apple's China smartphone sales jump 23% to start 2026, bucking industry trend.

$SNDK: BUY, 23% share

$SNDK is the third-largest allocation and keeps the basket’s upper tier intact. Its BUY signal is slightly smaller than the two names above it, but still strong enough to form part of the core cluster rather than the tail.

The extended report shows a solid positive imbalance and a participation footprint that is larger than the raw share might suggest. That makes the signal a bit more interesting: not dominant in the final basket, but supported by enough breadth to avoid looking like a pure one-thread anomaly.

In practice, this is the kind of name that can stabilize the basket if the top pick becomes too dependent on one narrow narrative. It is still not the leader, but it has enough participation and enough directional skew to matter as more than a peripheral add-on.

As contextual background only, Reuters coverage around $SNDK has been tied to AI-driven storage demand and Western Digital’s stake sale: Sandisk forecasts profit surge, secures supply deal as AI fuels storage demand, Western Digital to sell partial stake in Sandisk for $3.17 billion to cut debt.

$QQQ: BUY, 14% share

$QQQ enters as the fourth position and is materially smaller than the top three. The signal is still a BUY, but the lower share tells you that conviction was enough to qualify without becoming a central portfolio driver.

What stands out here is that the imbalance is positive while the participation footprint stays fairly contained. That usually produces a signal that is cleaner than broad index chatter normally is, but also easier to dislodge if the discussion becomes more mixed.

Because this is an ETF rather than a single-company equity, the framing is naturally broader. It is less about one corporate narrative and more about the direction of the tech-heavy risk bucket that dominates a lot of Reddit trading behavior.

As contextual background only, $QQQ discussion is naturally tied to broader Nasdaq and growth-stock conditions: Nasdaq seeks SEC approval for prediction markets options on major stock index, Wall Street skids as Middle East turmoil fans inflation fear.

$OXY: BUY, 14% share

$OXY rounds out the basket as the smallest allocation, though only marginally behind $QQQ. The most notable feature in the extended report is the sheer imbalance quality: the signal is based on very one-sided sentiment, even if the overall participation is small.

That makes it a textbook fragile-but-clean qualifier. It does not take much volume to enter when the directional split is this strong, but that also means it is more vulnerable to reversal if the conversation broadens next week.

So $OXY is not here because it was one of the biggest Reddit names overall. It is here because among the smaller energy-related discussions, the BUY side was unusually dominant. That is enough to qualify, but it should still be read as a lower-breadth signal than the names above it.

As contextual background only, Reuters coverage around $OXY has recently focused on production economics and Berkshire’s writedown on its stake: Oil industry needs $70/barrel to grow production, executives say, Berkshire Hathaway profit falls on lower insurance income, Occidental writedown.

Several tickers showed visibility without conviction this week. Names such as $SPY, $MU, $MSFT, and $NVDA drew heavier discussion volume in the extended report, but sentiment remained either too divided or too weakly expressed to pass the imbalance threshold required to enter the basket.

House trades

This week produced no qualifying signals from House trade disclosures. That does not mean the feed was empty. It means the activity did not consolidate into repeatable ticker-level patterns strong enough to justify a recommendation.

The extended report is a good example of why that distinction matters. The flow was concentrated by filer, not by ticker. Josh Gottheimer accounted for the largest share of the week’s disclosures, while Thomas Suozzi and Thomas H. Kean Jr. also contributed multiple trades. That is enough to create volume, but not enough to create a clean basket.

Ticker recurrence was also weak. A few names repeated, but not in a way that built a convincing directional cluster. $XOM showed up twice on the BUY side, but from the same filer. $AAPL and $MSFT both appeared with mixed direction across different filers. Most of the rest were one-offs.

So the correct read here is straightforward: there is color, but there is no signal. On the House side this week, the data is better described as scattered disclosure flow than actionable clustering.

Performance review

Last week’s results

Because there was no issue published last week, this review covers Week 10, which was the last published basket.

The story of that week was concentration, and not in a subtle way. One name completely dominated the outcome, another delivered a strong positive contribution, and the rest of the basket mostly ranged from mildly negative to clearly negative. That is exactly how concentrated signal portfolios behave when one thesis catches a major move.

There was also meaningful path dependence. The basket started with a huge move, kept enough strength through mid-week to stay constructive, took a notable hit on Thursday, and then recovered again on Friday. That does not change the final result, but it does matter for anyone trying to understand how uncomfortable the ride may have felt in real time.

The broader point is the same as always: a positive week does not necessarily mean broad-based correctness across all names. Sometimes it means one or two picks were so strong that they overwhelmed the rest of the distribution.

Portfolio tracking

• End of 26W10 return: +15.81%
• YTD (2026) return: +30.60%
• Cumulative return since inception: +43.88%

As of 2026-03-15, the portfolio stands at $14,373.17 starting from $10,000 on 2025-12-21.

Knowing the algorithm

One question that comes up often is not just what the basket says, but how to actually use it in practice.

My own view is that the newsletter works best when treated as a weekly framework, not as a rigid intraday trading script. The signals are built from sustained directional agreement over the week, so the execution layer should probably stay simple as well.

A few practical rules of thumb:

• A dynamic stop around -10% during the week is a reasonable risk-control layer if you want something mechanical. The goal is not to eliminate volatility, because these baskets are volatile by design. The goal is to stop one broken name from overwhelming the rest of the portfolio.
• Try to get exposure as early as possible on Monday, including pre-market when liquidity and spreads look sane. The edge, if there is one, comes from following the published basket consistently, not from waiting too long and then chasing after the week has already started.
• If a stock shows up again in the following issue, there is usually a good argument for continuing to hold it rather than mechanically forcing a full reset. Repeated inclusion is itself useful information: it means the signal persisted instead of disappearing after one burst of attention.
• Read the basket hierarchically. The higher-share names are usually the ones most likely to drive outcome. The smaller positions still matter, but they are often secondary contributors rather than the main source of P&L.

None of that turns the newsletter into a guaranteed system. It just makes the process more coherent. The signal generation is one layer, and execution discipline is the other. You do not need either layer to be perfect, but you do need both layers to be internally consistent.

Disclaimer

This newsletter is not financial advice.

All content is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Markets involve risk, including loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own research.

Links

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