Quantarded Weekly Signals #013 — Week 13, 2026

This week’s basket forms in a more stressed market environment. The situation around Iran has tightened energy markets, with oil prices moving higher on supply-risk concerns linked to the Strait of Hormuz, while broader equity sentiment has weakened as investors reassess the macro impact of a prolonged disruption. See Reuters on broader market weakness across Gulf equities, petrochemical and energy-market disruption, projected oil supply loss from a prolonged Hormuz disruption, and AP on the wider economic pressure from the conflict.

The structure also leans more negative than positive. Three of the five qualifying names cleared the threshold on the SELL side, while the two BUY signals entered with clearly smaller shares. In practice, that gives the basket a sharper directional profile than usual, but also a more obvious concentration risk.

For context, this week Quantarded processed 24 House trade disclosures filed during the week, 374,493 Reddit comments analyzed and 27,683 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 decisively top-heavy. The first name takes more than half of the total allocation on its own, the second is still material, and the remaining three are clearly smaller. In practice that means this is not a balanced five-name basket. It is a concentrated signal stack led by one dominant SELL.

$MSFT: SELL, 47% share

$MSFT enters as the clear anchor of the basket, and not by a small margin. The extended report shows the largest qualifying share, the highest confidence score among the final picks, and a participation footprint that is much broader than anything else that made the cut.

That combination matters. This is not a tiny but extreme signal sneaking into the basket on skew alone. It is a large-footprint name with enough directional imbalance to stay negative even after a substantial amount of discussion. That usually makes the signal more structurally stable than the lower-volume qualifiers below it.

The most important point is that $MSFT is carrying the week on the Reddit side. If the dominant signal holds, it will define the basket. If it breaks, the rest of the portfolio is probably too small to fully compensate.

Reuters coverage on $MSFT includes Microsoft freezes hiring in major cloud, sales groups and Microsoft to rent Texas data center dropped by Oracle and OpenAI.

$META: SELL, 24% share

$META is the second-largest position and forms the only real upper tier alongside $MSFT. Its confidence is materially lower than the leader, but the directional imbalance is still strong enough to make the signal meaningful rather than incidental.

The extended report suggests a more compact participation footprint than $MSFT, which makes $META somewhat less broad and therefore a bit more fragile. Even so, it still has enough volume and enough one-sidedness to rank comfortably above the smaller names in the basket.

So the correct read is not that $META is weak. It is that it is clearly secondary. The basket is led by one dominant SELL, and $META reinforces that same direction without matching the breadth or weight of the top name.

Recent $META news including Meta is laying off hundreds of employees, source says, Meta boosts top executives' pay with stock options as AI race heats up, and Meta shares drop on fears U.S. verdicts open door to deluge of lawsuits.

$AAPL: BUY, 14% share

$AAPL is the largest of the two BUY signals, but it sits well below the top two positions overall. What it does have is a cleaner positive imbalance than its final share might initially suggest, which is why it still survives the filter despite the smaller footprint.

This is the kind of qualifier that reflects clarity more than scale. Participation is modest, but the directional split is strong enough that the model still assigns it a real place in the basket. That makes it a legitimate signal, though not a core driver unless the two larger SELLs weaken.

In practical terms, $AAPL works as a counterweight inside an otherwise negative basket. It adds diversification of direction, but not enough size to redefine the overall posture of the portfolio.

As contextual background only, recent Reuters coverage on $AAPL includes Apple plans to open Siri to rival AI services, Bloomberg reports, Apple adds Bosch, Cirrus Logic and others to U.S. manufacturing program, and Apple launches new MacBooks with M5 chips, bigger base storage.

$AMZN: BUY, 9% share

$AMZN comes in as the fourth pick and the smaller of the two BUY names. The extended report shows a positive imbalance that is still respectable, but built on a noticeably narrower participation footprint than the names above it.

That makes the signal valid but fragile. It is directional enough to qualify, yet small enough that it should be read as a secondary expression of sentiment rather than a central thesis for the week. This is especially true in a basket where the top SELL is absorbing such a large share of total weight.

Still, there is a useful distinction here. $AMZN did not enter because it was broadly dominant in discussion volume. It entered because the positive side of the conversation remained sufficiently ahead of the negative side to justify inclusion.

Some relevant context: Amazon plans smartphone comeback more than a decade after Fire Phone flop, Amazon to invest additional $21 billion in Spain for data centres and AI, and Amazon launches 1-hour shipping in U.S. cities to challenge Walmart.

$SNAP: SELL, 6% share

$SNAP rounds out the basket as the smallest allocation, but it does so with the most extreme imbalance among the final five. In other words, this is a very one-sided signal built on a very small base.

That is a classic fragile qualifier. The directional skew is strong enough to enter, but the breadth is limited enough that it would not take much new discussion to change the picture. Signals like this can be useful, but they should not be read with the same confidence as broader names.

So $SNAP is best understood as a tail position with clean negativity rather than a major portfolio driver. It matters because it qualifies, not because it carries much of the basket.

Some related news: Snapchat hit with EU probe into alleged failure to prevent child grooming and illegal goods sales, Snap reports upbeat revenue as holiday season fuels ad sales, and Snap's direct revenue hits $1 billion annualized run rate as subscribers top 25 million.

Several tickers showed visibility without conviction this week. Names such as $MU, $NVDA, $TSLA, and $GOOGL drew meaningful 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. The feed was not empty, but the activity did not consolidate into any repeatable ticker-level pattern strong enough to justify a recommendation.

The extended report makes the reason fairly clear. Week 13 contains only two disclosures in scope, split across two different filers and two different tickers: Tim Moore reported a BUY in $CBRL, while Warren Davidson reported a SELL in $GEHC. That is not clustering. It is just isolated flow.

There is also no recurrence to build on. No ticker repeated, no filer dominated the week through multiple related trades, and no directional pattern accumulated across participants. So the correct interpretation is straightforward: there is some color, but there is no signal.

Performance review

Last week’s results

Last week finished positive, but only narrowly. The final result was held together by a strong move in $META and a solid gain in $OXY, while $SNDK was the clear laggard and more than offset most of the quieter names.

The distribution was wide enough to matter. One name finished strongly positive, one was sharply negative, one was moderately positive, one was broadly flat, and the index proxy finished negative. That is not a smooth basket profile. It is a mixed week where a small number of names ended up doing most of the work.

The broader lesson is familiar by now. A positive portfolio print does not require most names to be right in the same way. It often just requires the winning side of the distribution to be strong enough to dominate the losers.

Portfolio tracking

• End of 26W13 return: +0.49%
• YTD (2026) return: +31.09%
• Cumulative return since inception: +44.43%
• YTD return vs NASDAQ: +39.51 pp
• Cumulative return vs NASDAQ: +53.25 pp

As of 2026-03-29, the portfolio stands at $14,442.68 starting from $10,000 on 2025-12-21.

Knowing the algorithm

A stock does not need huge volume to make the basket.

Some names qualify because they attract broad discussion and still keep a clear directional imbalance. Others qualify in a more counterintuitive way: the total conversation is smaller, but the sentiment is unusually one-sided. Fewer people are involved, yet they are leaning strongly enough in the same direction that the signal survives the filter.

That can still be a real signal. In fact, small discussions are sometimes cleaner than large ones, because they contain less noise and less internal contradiction. A ticker with modest volume but very strong alignment can be more informative than a heavily discussed name where sentiment is split down the middle.

The limitation is stability. Broad signals tend to be more durable because they hold their direction across a larger participation footprint. Smaller signals are often more fragile. They can qualify honestly, but they can also change faster if new discussion comes in and the imbalance weakens.

That is why the basket includes both core positions and smaller tail names. The bigger names usually reflect stronger or broader agreement. The smaller ones are often narrower signals with cleaner imbalance, but less support underneath them. They are still part of the picture, just not the part that should be read the same way.

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.

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