Reading signals
Docs · reading signals
Every card in the feed answers three questions: what happened, how much it should matter, and whether you're early. The class tells you where in the chain the future leaked; the score and fields tell you the rest.
The five classes
A signed award on the public record: contract awards, subawards, federal grants. The fact is certain; the only question is whether the market has priced it yet, which is what the timing field answers.
An award that doesn't exist yet: a contract nearing expiration or an open solicitation, with the likely winner named and a stated win probability. Wrong sometimes, by design; the probability is the honesty.
Appropriated money that hasn't been spent. Budget lines and program funding traced forward to the incumbents positioned to receive them: the earliest, slowest-burning class.
The company said it first: an 8-K or press release announcing a contract. We verify the claim against the federal record and score the gap between what was said and what's filed.
The tape already believes something: unusual options activity or a sentiment spike around a ticker with federal exposure. Read it as confirmation or as a warning that the edge has faded.
The fields on a card
| Field | How to read it |
|---|---|
| Score | 0–100, fully published: the percentile of the award's size within the historical scored population, the only ranker that survives out-of-sample testing. 80+ is the top rank (top quintile); see the track record for the evidence. |
| Timing | How fresh the read is: same-day, or flagged "likely priced in" when the market has had time. A stale flag on a big award is the signal doing its job. |
| Materiality | The award's size against the company's market cap and revenue: a $50M award is noise for a prime, transformative for a microcap. |
| Action | The model's read, in plain words: buy watch, monitor, or fade. It is a research label, not a recommendation. |
| Win probability | Predicted-class only: the model's stated probability that the named company wins the award. |
| Score breakdown | Terminal only: the context components (materiality, sector and agency history, regime) as diagnostics derived from the outcome ledger, shown so you can see the context and where to disagree; they are not hidden ranking weights. |
Where the numbers come from, and the realized results behind them, is covered in Methodology.