How Tidings reads a federal award
Hundreds of contract awards post every market day. Almost none of them matter to a stock. This is the screen we run before anything reaches the wire — and the rules that decide what gets sealed.
Every market day, the federal government publishes contract awards in dense procurement language — modifications, option exercises, ceiling increases, and, buried among them, the occasional award that genuinely changes a company's year. Tidings exists to find that last category while the information is still new.
This note explains the screen as it actually runs, because a research record you can't interrogate is marketing, not research.
Step one: resolve the awardee
The first question is not "is this award big?" It is "who actually won it?" Awardees post under subsidiary names, joint ventures, and holding entities. The screen resolves each awardee against public-market listings; what doesn't resolve is marked unresolved rather than guessed. A wrong resolution is worse than none — every downstream judgment depends on this step.
Step two: size it against the company, not the headline
A $1.2 billion award to a mega-cap prime is rounding error. A $20 million award to a company with a $180 million market cap is not. The screen measures every award against the awardee's market capitalization and annual revenue, because materiality is a ratio, not a number.
- Under roughly one percent of revenue: logged, not flagged.
- Low single digits: worth attention when the award is new work.
- Double digits: rare, and the reason this screen exists.
Step three: separate new money from old news
Most dollar figures in the daily feed were already in guidance. Modifications, option exercises, extensions, and definitizations restate revenue the market has already priced. The screen reads the award text for what kind of money it is — a new prime award for production or delivery counts; a ceiling increase on a five-year-old vehicle does not.
The useful part is not the data. It is the filtering.
What happens to a flag
An award that survives all three steps becomes a signal with a conviction grade, visible to members immediately and sealed on the public wire. From that moment the record keeps score: entry timestamp, peak move, final result, and exit reason — held to fixed rules, published winners and losers alike, on the record page.
Nothing on the public side ever reveals a sealed company's name or ticker before release. That redaction is enforced in the data layer, not in the page — the public feed simply never contains the sealed fields.
Why publish the method
Because the record only means something if the method is fixed before the outcome is known. The screen's rules are versioned, its calls are timestamped, and its misses stay published. When we write about a company here in the library, this screen is how it earned the attention.