2 Large Cap Stocks to Add to Your Portfolio

There was a lot of volatility last week in the equity markets — that being said, each major index closed in the green by Friday, as investors positively reacted to the administration’s amenable comments surrounding tariffs.

At the same time, bond yields made a half-hearted mid-week recovery, only to then continue on their earlier downward trajectory.

The main beneficiaries of volatile environments such as these are stable, mature businesses — in other words, companies with large market capitalizations, as they tend to benefit from lower fixed-income yields more so than their small-cap counterparts. 

And we’re already witnessing a rotation — large caps have had their best week since the first half of August. So, you might want to consider allocating a bit more of your own portfolio to large caps.

The basic premise is sound — the only issue is that since large caps have so much visibility, they often end up overcrowded where the prices get ahead of their fundamentals.

Our goal here isn’t just to find healthy large businesses — it is to find exceptional large businesses are being undervalued. That combination always has and always will lead to outperformance. 

To track down stocks with this rare blend of appealing attributes we turn to our…

Large Cap Stock Strategy

There is a staggering amount of information to take into account when evaluating a stock. We distill a broad and detailed overview of 115 factors tied to outsized performance into a single metric — our Zen Ratings.

The system assesses equities through 7 categories — Value, Growth, Momentum, Sentiment, Safety, Financials, and Artificial Intelligence. We track roughly 4,600 stocks — and those in the overall top 5% are given a Zen Rating of A (Strong Buy).

Immediately, we’ve narrowed the search down to a twentieth of its original scope. The only issue is that this leaves us with 230 stocks, give or take, on any given day.

So how do we narrow the search down even further? 

We turn to rigorously selected, focused portfolios — our coveted Zen Strategies.

Each of these 11 portfolios is precisely focused on the task at hand. That is to narrow down to the top 7 stocks in order to deliver maximum performance. 

Indeed that is the case with one of 2025’s top performers — the Large Caps strategy.

This is our second-best performing portfolio on a YTD basis, which has provided a return of +29.98% since the start of the year — more than twice the S&P 500’s 13.55% gain.

Below, we’ll take a look at two particularly interesting stocks from the portfolio…

Aptiv (APTV)

Aptiv is a major player in automotive electronics, which gives it a great degree of exposure to a significant trend in the form of the EV boom. This $18.02 billion market cap stock ranks in the top 2% of the equities that we track. 

APTV has beaten earnings estimates for 12 quarters in a row — in the last 7 quarters, we’ve had double-digit EPS growth on a YoY basis. And that streak seems set to continue — with forecasts of a yearly EPS growth rate of 34.47%, above the industry average of 23.55%. That puts APTV in the top 11% in terms of its Growth rating.

Citigroup’s Michael Ward (a top 6% rated analyst) recently initiated coverage on the stock with a Strong Buy rating and a Street-high $109 price target, which implies a hefty 31.71% upside. Aptiv actually ranks in the top 7% when it comes to Sentiment, so this is far from a fringe opinion.

At a P/E of 18.64x and a PEG ratio of 0.6x, the stock is a bit of a bargain — and currently ranks in the 76th percentile for Value. This is even more significant once we factor in how stable the company’s operational metrics are — Aptiv is also in the top 3% with regard to Safety. 

APTV is gaining traction, and has rallied by 4.20% in the past week — so you might want to get in early (and at an attractive price), as the next earnings call is in just 8 days.

Leidos Holdings (LDOS)

Leidos Holdings wears many hats — aviation, IT services, and even biomedical research — but the company’s core operations are concentrated around the defense industry. Defense spending is set to increase significantly, and global tensions are rising — this otherwise bad news is, however, great news for LDOS, which ranks in the top 7% of the stocks that we track.

First off, we have a 9-quarter earnings beat streak. And this isn’t some barely-above-the-mark, anemic streak either — in the last 6 quarters, LDOS has outperformed EPS estimates by an average of 36% on a YoY basis. Despite that, we also have a placement in the top 7% when it comes to Value — so it appears as if the market at large hasn’t quite caught on yet.

Company insiders certainly seem bullish, however — insider buying and selling  has more or less been evenly matched this year, which is quite exceptional. When looking at Sentiment, Leidos Holdings ranks in the top 7%.

A lot of the $23.67 billion market cap company’s revenue comes from long-term contracts, and the stock has been in a pretty steady uptrend since Q2 of 2023 — which puts LDOS in the 89th percentile with regard to Safety. To cap everything off, LDOS also falls in the top 11% when it comes to Financials.

Leidos also recently unveiled Imperium, an AI-powered platform made for information operations — while it’s still too early to tell how things will turn out, the company seems intent on at least taking a bite out of Palantir’s lunch. We wouldn’t wait to find out, however — the next earnings call is in two weeks, and could ignite a rally.

Interested In More Great Stock Picks?

The 2 stocks highlighted above are just a fraction of what you get from our proven Large Cap strategy. 

That’s because each day our system recalibrates — and Zen Strategies members get access to the 7 top Large Cap stocks based on 115 different parameters that point to outperformance. 

See all Top 7 Large Cap stocks here > 

However, maybe large caps are not your thing. Perhaps you would like to see all 11 of our market beating strategies including Growth, Value, Momentum and our coveted AI Factor model. 

Each featuring the top 7 stocks.

Each featuring tremendous performance.  

We spell it all out in this timely presentation below:

77 Best Stocks Now! > 

What to Do Next?

• 77 Best Stocks NOW! >
• See All “A” Rated Stocks with +32.52% Average Annual Return >
• 2 New Stocks to Buy from Steve Reitmeister >

Want to get in touch? Email us at news@wallstreetzen.com.