Public companies, contract flow, and an honest answer about stocks

Every federal aviation-parts contract action we track names a vendor by CAGE code. Most of those vendors belong to a company you can buy shares in. As of today we map them: 46 listed parents, matched on vendor name with their known subsidiaries, covering 88% of the dollars in the last year. Sierra Nevada, General Atomics and Anduril are the big ones we cannot map, because they are private.

The pages

/companies lists every parent with obligations over the last 52 weeks against the prior 52, actions, the last 90 days, and directives naming their products. Each company page, Lockheed Martin for instance, shows weekly flow this year against last, the units that win, what they win by supply class and stock number, the latest actions, FAA directives and headlines.

The Flow Score

At the top of each company page: a one-line description of the current state, computed fresh as awards post. Flow unusually strong or weak against the company's own trailing year, a four-week trend, and FAA pressure. Underneath it, in words, what weeks like this one have been followed by, for companies of this size, with the count of cases. It is the same for every reader, it never says buy or sell, and it says no measurable effect where that is what the data shows.

The study

We did the obvious test before writing any of that. For 23,638 company-weeks since 2012, we scored each week's contract flow against the company's trailing year, treated it as knowable the Wednesday after (FPDS posts with a lag), and measured the stock's return over the next 20 trading days against the aerospace ETF. For Lockheed, Boeing, RTX, GE, Northrop, GD and Honeywell: nothing. A big award week is followed by returns indistinguishable from any other week. For mid-caps, a small edge with a real sample behind it and one large caveat, which the page explains. The whole thing, method and numbers and the weeks that went against us, is at /research/contract-flow-and-stocks, and it rescores itself every Sunday.

None of this is investment advice. It is public contracting data and public price history, described carefully.