RTX Corporation
RTX
ExchangeNYSE: RTX
Segment / HQMissiles · Tucson, AZ
Largest DoD award (24mo)loading…
DEFENSE STOCKS COMPOSITE · EDITORIAL
COMPANY RESEARCH IN THE BLOG →
By the time the headline reaches the public, the contract is already signed, disclosed, and priced in. There is a window — a short one — between money being committed and the market noticing. Defense Stocks tracks that window every business day.
You're in — first briefing lands Friday.
SOURCE: USASpending.gov · Department of Defense prime contract awards · rolling 14-day window, sorted by obligated amount.
We didn't invent the underlying numbers — SEC EDGAR, USASpending.gov, and the World Bank publish them for free. What we changed is how fast you can get to them, and what shape they're in when you do.
Every meaningful defense contract is public. It sits in SEC EDGAR, in USASpending, in the Pentagon's daily 5pm announcement.
Access was never the problem — volume and speed were. Thousands of filings, dozens of agencies, hundreds of companies. Separating what matters from what doesn't takes hours most investors simply don't have.
By the time a story reaches your feed, it has already passed through analysts, institutional desks, and algorithms. You get the echo, not the event.
Defense Stocks reverses that order: read the raw record the moment it posts, structure it, and put it in front of you before it becomes a headline. From what happened to what it means.
These aren't hypotheticals — they're pulled from our own event-study research, fully sourced and cross-checked against public market data.
One of the fastest, largest single-day moves in the sector's recent history — and a useful reminder that the initial spike is a sentiment move, not by itself a thesis.
Read the full event study →We measured the ITA ETF's return at 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, and 12 months after 22 major geopolitical shocks since 2001. Fewer than a third produced a lasting re-rating.
See what separated the 7 that lasted →Source: Defense Stocks event-study research, cross-referenced against ITA ETF and individual equity closing prices. Past performance does not predict future returns; this is historical analysis, not a forecast or a recommendation.
Live from the World Bank. Toggle between absolute dollars and share of GDP — the ranking changes completely, and that gap is the whole story.
Loading historical series…
Source: World Bank — Military expenditure (MS.MIL.XPND.CD and % of GDP, MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS), latest reported year. Figures refresh live on load; every claim above is computed from the returned data.
Business overview, strategic importance, recent developments, risk factors, and an investor takeaway — built from verified filings and live federal award data. Always the same rigor, never a recommendation.
"Largest DoD award" rows query USASpending.gov live for each recipient over the last 24 months. "Defense Stocks composite" is an editorial score, clearly labeled — not a sourced figure.
Low Earth orbit is becoming congested and contested. We explain the mission, the market, and the companies building the infrastructure.
10 MIN READ → ContractsThe single most important variable in defense company earnings quality — and what it means for investor risk.
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11 MIN READ →Contract mechanics, company deep-dives, budget cycles, geopolitical risk — every article opens with your email, instantly. No paywall later, no card on file, no trial clock.
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No rumors, no rewriting — these are the actual prime awards the Department of Defense disclosed over the past two weeks, pulled live from USASpending.gov and ordered by size.
Defense Stocks is reading the federal award feed. The single largest prime contract in the current window will appear here, with the recipient, the obligating sub-agency, and the dollar figure — verbatim from the source.
No black box. Query the same primary sources Defense Stocks reads every morning — live, in your browser, from the official federal and World Bank feeds.
Type any contractor and pull its largest Department of Defense prime awards of the last 24 months — straight from USASpending.gov.
Search a name, or tap a chip, to see real awards.
Pick a nation — see what it spends, the share of its economy and government, and the size of its forces. Live from the World Bank.
Where the Department of Defense has been committing prime-contract dollars over the last 60 days, by sub-agency.
Loading live branch totals…
Pick two companies — see their largest disclosed DoD prime awards head-to-head over the last 24 months, straight from USASpending.gov.
Pick two companies and tap Compare to pull live USASpending.gov data.
Pick a defense company — pull its most recent 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K and proxy filings directly from the SEC's own database. Every link goes straight to the actual filed document.
Pick a company and tap Pull Filings to query data.sec.gov live.
Sources: USASpending.gov (contract search, branch obligations, comparator), World Bank (country indicators), and SEC EDGAR (data.sec.gov filings feed) — all live, no key, queried directly from your browser.
Live probabilities from Polymarket's prediction markets, filtered to defense and geopolitical questions. Read them as a consensus gauge of what traders expect — never as a recommendation.
Source: Polymarket Gamma API · live. Markets are selected automatically by defense/geopolitics keywords; probabilities and volumes are exactly as reported.
Intelligence is only worth it if the provenance is verifiable. Every number on this page traces back to a primary source — and most of them you just watched load live. Analysis and commentary are AI-generated from that underlying primary-source data; they are not written or fact-checked by a human analyst, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.
The acronyms and contract terms that show up in every dossier and every budget document — defined once, referenced everywhere.
Straight answers to the questions investors search for most — no hedging, no sales pitch.
Defense Stocks is a defense-sector investment intelligence platform that tracks Pentagon contract awards, global defense budgets, and publicly traded defense company fundamentals using primary government sources — SEC EDGAR, USASpending.gov, the World Bank, Defense.gov, and Polymarket — updated every business day. The underlying data is pulled directly from those primary sources; the written analysis and commentary are AI-generated from that data, not authored or fact-checked by a human analyst. Defense Stocks publishes no buy or sell recommendations and is not a registered investment advisor.
The most closely watched publicly traded U.S. defense stocks include Lockheed Martin (LMT), RTX Corporation (RTX), Northrop Grumman (NOC), General Dynamics (GD), L3Harris Technologies (LHX), Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), Kratos Defense (KTOS), and AeroVironment (AVAV). Each occupies a different niche — from large-cap primes with multi-decade shipbuilding and aircraft backlogs to mid-cap names focused on drones, hypersonics, and loitering munitions. Our Dossiers section tracks primary-source financials and contract flow for each.
The U.S. federal defense budget (Department of Defense discretionary spending) has exceeded $850 billion annually in recent fiscal years, making it the largest single national defense budget in the world by a wide margin. Total U.S. national security spending — including nuclear weapons activities at the Department of Energy and veterans affairs — is higher still. Our Global Spend module tracks this figure alongside World Bank data for every major military power.
Defense equities typically rise on major geopolitical events because investors anticipate increased government procurement of munitions, platforms, and readiness spending. Historical analysis of 22 such events since 2001 shows an average one-month excess return of roughly 3 percentage points over the S&P 500 — but only about a third of these spikes produce a sustained 12-month re-rating, and only when the event triggers a supplemental appropriation, reveals an inventory gap, or changes an ally's structural defense posture. See our blog for the full event-by-event breakdown.
No. Defense Stocks is a data and research publication, not a registered investment advisor, and does not provide personalized investment advice, buy/sell ratings, or portfolio management. All figures are drawn from public primary sources and are provided for informational and educational purposes. Investors should consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.
All figures trace back to five verifiable primary sources. Four of them — SEC EDGAR (public company filings), USASpending.gov (the U.S. Treasury's federal contract award database), the World Bank (global military expenditure data), and Polymarket (prediction-market pricing) — are queried live from your browser on this very page. The fifth, Defense.gov, publishes the Pentagon's official daily contract announcements and is linked as a reference. No data comes from paid aggregators or unverified news wires.
Defense ETFs such as ITA (market-cap weighted, large-cap prime heavy), XAR (equal-weighted, more mid-cap exposure), and SHLD (defense-technology focused) offer diversified sector exposure without single-company risk. Individual defense stocks allow investors to express a specific thesis — for example, a view on hypersonics, loitering munitions, or a particular program's backlog — that a diversified ETF dilutes. Our blog covers this comparison in depth.
Contract award data and market signals refresh every business day, typically reflecting the daily 5pm ET window when the Pentagon publishes its major contract announcements. The Weekly Briefing newsletter is sent every Friday, summarizing the week's largest contracts, ticker moves, and historical precedent for similar events.
Every DoD contract award above $10,000 is published on USASpending.gov within 30 days of the award, including the recipient company, dollar value, awarding agency, and a description of the work. The Department of Defense also publishes same-day contract announcements on Defense.gov for awards above $7.5 million. Our Contracts module surfaces the largest recent prime awards from these same sources automatically.
Aerospace and defense companies make up roughly 1.5% to 2% of total S&P 500 market capitalization, concentrated primarily in the Industrials sector. The largest constituents by weight are RTX Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris Technologies. Despite the modest index weight, the sector has meaningfully outperformed the broader index during periods of elevated geopolitical risk since 2022.
Poland, Germany, and several other NATO members have posted the fastest year-over-year increases in defense spending since 2022, driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and NATO's move to a 3.5%-of-GDP spending target adopted at the 2025 Hague Summit. Poland now spends more than 4% of GDP on defense — the highest ratio in NATO. Our Global Spend module tracks live World Bank data across every major military power.
Backlog is the total dollar value of contracted work a defense company has not yet recognized as revenue, split into "funded" backlog (money Congress has actually appropriated and obligated) and "unfunded" backlog (ceiling value of contract vehicles like IDIQs that has not yet been ordered). A large, growing funded backlog is one of the strongest indicators of multi-year revenue visibility in the defense sector, since government contracts are rarely cancelled once funded.
A Continuing Resolution (CR) freezes federal spending at the prior year's levels and legally prohibits starting new programs or increasing production quantities until a full-year appropriation is enacted. This delays contract awards rather than eliminating them — Congress has not passed a defense appropriations bill on time since FY2010 — and typically produces a visible surge of catch-up contract awards in the fiscal fourth quarter (July–September) once funding is resolved.
Foreign Military Sales (FMS) is a government-to-government process managed by the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, where the U.S. government negotiates price, manages the contract, and oversees delivery on behalf of a foreign buyer. Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) let a U.S. defense company sell directly to a foreign government after obtaining a State Department export license, without U.S. government contract management. The United States is the world's largest arms exporter, accounting for roughly 40% of global defense exports by value.
Generally yes. Small and mid-cap defense companies typically carry higher revenue concentration in a small number of programs, less diversified backlog, and greater sensitivity to a single contract loss or delay than large primes like Lockheed Martin or RTX, which spread risk across dozens of programs and multiple military branches. In exchange, smaller companies often have higher growth rates and more direct exposure to emerging technology categories such as drones, hypersonics, and AI-enabled systems.
70 analyses. 4 live data feeds. Every week: the biggest contracts, who won, which tickers moved, and what historically happens next. One email. No noise. Built for those who decide with data, not hype.
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