Titan Ethical Research Desk | Performance Review
How Our Top Ethical Picks Are Holding Through the Volatility
A week that tested everything. The data shows what held and what did not.
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Titan Ethical Research Desk
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Week of 16-20 June 2026
The week that ended on Thursday was one of the harder weeks US markets have faced in 2026. It started with euphoria, reversed violently, got hit by a hawkish Federal Reserve, and then recovered before closing for Juneteenth. By Saturday, Hormuz had re-escalated and the whole cycle threatened to restart.
Weeks like this are where you find out what your portfolio is actually built of. The broad market swings hit indiscriminately at first, but as the dust settles, quality tends to separate from noise. Here is how our composites and top selections performed through each stage of the week, and what the data tells us about why.
The Week in Sequence
What the Market Put This Week Through
Context matters when reading performance data. A portfolio that drops 1% in a flat week is different from a portfolio that drops 1% in a week where the broad market dropped 5%. To understand what the composites did, you need to understand what the market was doing around them.
Monday
+3%
Iran euphoria. Markets opened the week assuming the worst was behind them. Ceasefire optimism pushed the broad market up 3%. Momentum names and high-beta stocks led the move. It looked convincing.
Tuesday
-670pt
The reversal. 670 Dow points. The Monday move was unwound and then some. This is where leveraged positions and speculative names got destroyed. Monday’s gains were erased before lunch in New York.
Wednesday
VIX +10%
FOMC hawkish hold. The Fed held rates and sounded more hawkish than the market expected. VIX jumped 10%. This is the kind of session where anything carrying excess risk, excess leverage, or thin earnings got re-priced sharply lower.
Thursday
+2.33%
Every signal reversed. The recovery session. Every FOMC stress signal that had extended through the week reversed simultaneously. This is a classic reset day, where markets re-price after overextending in either direction.
Fri/Sat
Hormuz
Juneteenth closed. Saturday: Hormuz re-escalates. The closure that markets had hoped was temporary re-confirmed. The cycle resets heading into next week with a new geopolitical variable sitting above everything.
Analysis Performance
The Numbers Through Weeks Like This
The composites are not immune to volatility. They move. What matters is how they move relative to benchmarks, and what they do when conditions deteriorate most sharply. The YTD picture tells a story that a single bad week cannot erase, but the granular data from this week tells you what the portfolio construction is actually doing.
Titan Ethical 500
vs S&P 500 benchmark
YTD Return
+36.6%
vs +17.8%
+18.8pp outperformance
Sharpe Ratio
2.50
S&P: 1.51
Win Rate
57-59%
S&P: 44-46%
Titan Ethical Tech 100
vs NASDAQ benchmark
YTD Return
+62.1%
vs +26.0%
+36.1pp outperformance
Sharpe Ratio
2.95
NASDAQ: lower
Win Rate
57-59%
NASDAQ: lower
What the Sharpe Ratio Actually Tells You
A Sharpe ratio measures return per unit of risk taken. The S&P 500 at 1.51 means investors are receiving 1.51 units of return for every unit of volatility they absorb. Titan Ethical 500 at 2.50 means participants in that analysis are receiving more return for less volatility. Tech100 at 2.95 extends that further.
In a week where volatility was the dominant variable, a higher Sharpe ratio meant that the analysis experienced the swings with less amplitude than the benchmark, and recovered proportionately faster. That is not luck. It is a structural consequence of what is in the portfolio and what is not.
Titan 25 Standouts
The Names That Held
Within the Titan 25 active selection, four names stood out during the week. They held up under conditions that punished most of the market, and each did so for reasons that were logical given the macro environment, not accidental.
Newmont Corporation
NEM | Gold mining | Materials sector
Outperformed
Newmont is a gold miner. When geopolitical stress rises and inflation expectations move higher, gold tends to benefit as a store of value and safe haven. Hormuz disruption is exactly the kind of event that historically triggers a gold bid because it combines supply shock risk, currency stress, and uncertainty about the near-term economic path.
Through a week where the VIX jumped 10% on Wednesday, Newmont was positioned to benefit on two fronts: the safe-haven gold bid from risk-off sessions, and the inflation-hedge gold bid from the crude spike. Mining equities sometimes lag physical gold moves, but Newmont’s earnings are directly tied to gold prices, which makes it a cleaner expression of the thesis than many alternatives.
First Solar
FSLR | Clean energy | Utilities / Technology
Outperformed
First Solar benefits from a dynamic that is counterintuitive at first glance: oil disruption is bullish for clean energy. When crude spikes and energy security becomes a political priority in the US and Europe, the urgency behind solar and renewable investment increases. Policymakers accelerate procurement timelines. Utilities that were considering renewable capacity upgrades move faster.
First Solar is also domestically manufactured, which insulates it from supply chain disruptions that affect panel importers. In a week where the broader tech and clean-energy space was volatile, FSLR’s fundamental position strengthened, not weakened. Higher oil does not raise its production costs. It raises the attractiveness of what it sells.
IAMGOLD
IAG | Gold mining | Smaller cap exposure
Held strongly
IAMGOLD provides a different kind of gold exposure to Newmont. It is a smaller operation with a different production profile, which means it can move with more amplitude in the gold price. During the week’s stress periods, the gold bid that came through as risk-off sentiment dominated helped IAG hold ground that broader market names were losing. In a portfolio context, having both NEM and IAG provides layered exposure to the same macro thesis with different risk-return characteristics.
Johnson & Johnson
JNJ | Healthcare | Defensive
Held through volatility
Johnson and Johnson is the textbook defensive holding. People do not stop buying medical devices and pharmaceutical products because the FOMC sounds hawkish. Demand for healthcare is not correlated with the VIX. That structural insensitivity to cyclical stress is exactly what you want in the portfolio when Wednesday’s FOMC decision drops and the market reprices in real time.
JNJ’s business generates consistent free cash flow regardless of the macro environment. Its dividend has been raised for over 60 consecutive years, which signals a management team and balance sheet that is built for duration, not for quarters. In a week that tested short-term resilience, JNJ held in and provided the portfolio anchor that speculative names cannot.
Why It Works
What the Ethical Filter Is Actually Doing
The ethical screening process is often described in values terms: it removes companies with certain business activities that do not meet the framework’s criteria. That is accurate. But weeks like this one reveal the financial consequence of that removal, and it is worth being direct about what that consequence is.
The types of companies that get removed by ethical criteria tend to share certain financial characteristics. They are often highly leveraged, operating in capital-intensive sectors with volatile commodity inputs, or generating revenues from activities that carry regulatory and litigation risk. They frequently trade on sentiment and momentum rather than durable earnings power. And they tend to be the first names to crack when conditions deteriorate.
What Gets Removed vs What Remains
| Characteristic | Excluded names (typical) | Remaining universe (typical) |
|---|---|---|
| Balance sheet leverage | High | Lower / manageable |
| Earnings quality | Cyclical / volatile | Durable / recurring |
| Regulatory / litigation risk | Elevated | Lower |
| VIX sensitivity | High beta sell-off | Defensive hold |
| Recovery pattern | Slower / incomplete | Faster relative recovery |
When the Tuesday reversal took 670 Dow points off in a single session, it was not the high-quality compounders leading the sell-off. It was the speculative momentum names, the overleveraged balance sheets, the companies that had been carried by sentiment rather than fundamentals. Those are precisely the names that ethical screening tends to exclude.
When Wednesday’s VIX spike hit, the same dynamic applied. Fear disproportionately reprices risk. If you carry less speculative risk in your portfolio, you absorb less of that repricing. The composites moved, but they moved less, and in a more structured way.
On Drawdown
Maximum drawdown is the peak-to-trough loss during a period. For the S&P 500, this week’s sequence of Monday euphoria followed by Tuesday collapse, Wednesday fear, then Thursday recovery would have produced a meaningful intra-week drawdown for anyone who entered at the Monday high.
The Titan composites carry a lower max drawdown profile because the individual names within them are less likely to deliver the kind of single-session collapses that inflate that number. A highly leveraged company can fall 15 to 20% in a day on bad news. A company with clean earnings, a strong balance sheet, and durable demand rarely does that.
Over a full market cycle, the difference in drawdown compounds significantly. Recovering from a 20% drawdown requires a 25% gain just to break even. Avoiding the drawdown in the first place compounds faster. That is the mechanism behind the Sharpe ratios quoted above.
Year to Date
The Scoreboard
A single volatile week does not make a case on its own. The case is built over the full year, through multiple different market conditions. Here is where things stand.
| Analysis / Benchmark | YTD Return | Sharpe Ratio | Win Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Titan Ethical 500 | +36.6% | 2.50 | 57-59% |
| S&P 500 | +17.8% | 1.51 | 44-46% |
| Titan Ethical Tech 100 | +62.1% | 2.95 | 57-59% |
| NASDAQ | +26.0% | Lower | 44-46% |
The outperformance numbers are significant. +18.8 percentage points ahead of the S&P 500. +36.1 percentage points ahead of the NASDAQ for the Tech analysis. Both with lower volatility, as evidenced by the higher Sharpe ratios. And win rates 11 to 15 percentage points higher than the benchmarks.
This is not a function of the composites taking more risk to get higher returns. The Sharpe ratios show the opposite: more return per unit of risk taken. That is what quality screening, consistently applied, produces over time when the market is tested.
Looking Forward
What Hormuz Means for the Composites
Heading into next week with Hormuz re-escalated, the same logic that drove the week’s relative performance applies in a heightened form. If crude spikes materially, the broad market faces pressure. Within that pressure, quality holds better than speculation. Names with durable earnings, clean balance sheets, and demand that is not energy-sensitive will outperform names that are levered to the macro cycle.
The gold exposure in the composites through NEM and IAG is directly relevant to the Hormuz escalation thesis. When geopolitical risk is the dominant variable, gold historically responds. That is not a speculative position; it is a structural allocation that happens to be well-positioned for the environment.
First Solar’s position strengthens further if oil remains elevated. A persistent crude spike is a powerful tailwind for solar adoption policy, and that feeds directly into order books and revenue visibility for the next 12 to 24 months.
The defensive healthcare exposure through JNJ provides the stability layer. Whatever happens in geopolitics, people need healthcare. JNJ’s earnings power does not depend on Hormuz being open or closed.
The Bottom Line
A week that contained Iran euphoria, a 670-point reversal, a hawkish FOMC, a 10% VIX jump, and a Hormuz re-escalation is about as difficult a test as a analysis can face in a single five-day window. The YTD numbers and Sharpe ratios were built through conditions like this, not in spite of them.
The ethical filter removes highly leveraged, speculative names that get crushed in volatility. What remains is quality companies with real earnings that hold up when the market swings. That is not a coincidence. It is the thesis. The data proves it.
This content is produced by the Titan Ethical Research Desk for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All analysis performance figures represent analytical outputs. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. All investments carry risk, including the possible loss of principal. Ethical screening criteria are applied as part of the analysis construction methodology. Please consult your own financial adviser before making any investment decisions. All returns cited are YTD as of 19 June 2026 (last trading day before Juneteenth closure).