(This is The Best Stocks in the Market brought to you by Josh Brown and Sean Russo of Ritholtz Wealth Management.) Note: Best Stocks in the Markets will be on hiatus June 1-5. Josh — Today we have a great story about a stock that made it onto our list of best stocks in the market and has been included in our internal Porterhouse portfolio strategy. Porterhouse currently only has 58 names, but our list includes over 150 of the best stocks. Porterhouse has stricter selection criteria than larger lists, so I pay particular attention to stocks that enter and stay. Well, here’s the story I promised…Once upon a time, there was a man named Miles “Lowell” Edwards. A childhood bout with rheumatic fever sparked a lifelong fascination with how the human heart works. At age 60, a time when most men consider retirement, Edwards decided he wanted to turn his passion into a new business. When he decided his next endeavor was to build the world’s first artificial heart, he already had 63 patents in multiple industries. He consulted heart surgeon Dr. Albert Starr and, with $5,000 of his own money, set to work. The goal of a fully mechanical heart proved too ambitious for the moment, but what they produced instead changed medicine forever. The Starr-Edwards mitral valve was first successfully implanted on September 21, 1960, and was the first commercially available artificial heart valve ever manufactured. To this day, nearly 70 years later, Edwards remains one of the most important companies in its field. Edwards Laboratories was based in Santa Ana, California and changed hands twice over the next several decades. First, the company was acquired by American Hospital Supply in 1966 and then by Baxter International in 1985. Baxter spun off as an independent public company in 2000 and has since traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker EW. What started as a retired engineer with $5,000 and a dream to mechanize the human heart has grown into a $46 billion company that has helped treat more than 2 million heart patients worldwide. Pretty cool, right? Sean will explain the modern basics of the company, and then I’ll cover the technical stuff. Thanks for visiting! Stocks to watch: Edwards Lifesciences Corp. (EW) Sean — Edwards Lifesciences is a medical device company focused on structural heart disease. While the stock price has been flat for most of the past five years, EW has been on a steady upward trend since bottoming out in July 2024. The company researches, develops and markets treatments for patients with heart valve disease. Growth was primarily driven by early disease detection, expanding the total addressable market. Josh and I are never bad at speaking medical terminology, but the basics jump off the screen. Edwards’ modern cardiac therapy business is its fastest-growing segment, posting approximately 42% year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2026. Following the better-than-expected first-quarter earnings report, Edwards raised its full-year 2026 outlook to constant currency growth of 9% to 11%, suggesting sales of $6.5 billion to $6.9 billion. Adjusted EPS guidance was raised to $2.95 to $3.05, with operating margin expected to be at the high end of a range of 28% to 29%, an increase of approximately 150 basis points. Longer term, management reiterated its goal to grow annual sales by an average of approximately 10% and expand annual operating margins by 50 to 100 basis points from 2027 onwards. This is what we both want. Edwards Lifesciences checks the most important boxes for our momentum strategy. That means solid fundamentals, a meaningful growth slope, and a stock price that’s starting to support the story the business is telling. This is the perfect place for both Best Stocks List and Porterhouse. Risk Management Josh — Edwards has spent the past six months building a foundation between $75 and $87, consolidating gains from the October lows. This $87 level served as a ceiling throughout the period from November to May and was tested without compromise many times. Now that a breakout has occurred, retesting is already in the plan. The price pulled back to around $81, held there, and then rebounded towards higher highs. Since there is no competing overhead power supply, the path of least resistance is chosen. I like situations where a stock breaks out, picks up a leg, and digests the move for a few months before the next breakout. When I see them, I pay attention. To me, that’s a sign that the buyer is putting the seller away until the seller is done. This new high indicates that people who wanted to retire have run out of stocks to dispose of. We’re also seeing buyers becoming more aggressive and willing to pay more than they were a few quarters ago. If this matches the higher basic intonation, it’s a great setup. The RSI is reading 63, showing healthy momentum with no signs of fatigue. The indicator has shown a pattern of rising readings since the February lows, confirming that buyers have become more aggressive with each successive push. Traders can use a close below $81, the level where this retest found footing, as a stop. For investors, the 50-day moving average and 200-day moving average are converging in the same zone, and a clean rebound from there makes that an important lower bound. If there is a violation there on a closing price basis, the character of this chart will change. Disclosure: We currently own shares in EW for clients of Porterhouse Strategies. 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