Every quarter, billions in federal contract awards hit the public record, and the pitch writes itself: a company winning government money has a visible, funded revenue stream, so follow the awards. We track these awards with the recipient verified against the ticker, so we lined up each company's last-twelve-months contract dollars against its stock. The result is a clean no.
The biggest contract winners are the year's biggest losers
Here's what the tracked companies pulled in over the last twelve months in verified federal awards, next to how the stock has actually done in 2026:
| Company | Last-12mo federal awards | 2026 stock |
|---|---|---|
| Raytheon (RTX) | $9.7B | +7% |
| Lockheed Martin (LMT) | $6.5B | +11% |
| General Dynamics (GD) | $3.1B | +10% |
| Northrop Grumman (NOC) | $2.9B | −6% |
| Leidos (LDOS) | $2.6B | — |
| Booz Allen (BAH) | $1.2B | −25% |
| Accenture (ACN) | $1.0B | −47% |
| Palantir (PLTR) | $1.0B | −23% |
The defense primes — Raytheon, Lockheed, General Dynamics — win the most and are up modestly. But the moment you leave hardware, the "signal" inverts. *Accenture and Booz Allen booked billions in government work and fell 25–47%. Palantir, the name everyone points to as the government-contracts stock, took in a billion dollars of awards and round-tripped to −23%.* If contract flow were a signal, these are the last stocks you'd expect at the bottom of the leaderboard.
Why contracts don't predict the stock
Three structural reasons, all of which we ran into trying to build a signal out of this data:
- A contract is backward-looking. By the time an award is public, the revenue is already in the company's guidance and the analysts' models. You're not front-running anything — you're reading a receipt.
- The dollar figures are lumpy and inflated. Awards carry multi-year
ceiling values booked in a single month, so "contract momentum" swings wildly on accounting, not business. We measured it two ways — total award dollars and number of new awards — and for the same companies they routinely point in opposite directions. Palantir's award dollars were up triple digits while its award count was down. When two honest cuts of the same data disagree, you don't have a signal.
- The stock is a bet on multiples, not backlog. Palantir didn't fall because its government business shrank — its contracts grew. It fell because a stock priced for hypergrowth met a market that repriced hypergrowth. The contracts were never the variable that mattered.
What contract data is actually good for
Not timing — context. Knowing that a company derives a large, sticky share of revenue from federal agencies tells you something real about its business: downside support in a recession, exposure to budget fights, a moat competitors can't easily cross. That's a reason to understand a company, not to trade it on the next award headline. Browse the award flow on /contracts — as a map of who depends on Washington, not as a buy list.
The honest version of "follow the government money" is that the money already followed the fundamentals, and the fundamentals already followed the stock. The receipt arrives last.
Methodology: last-twelve-month federal award totals per company, with each award's recipient verified against the ticker to exclude the fuzzy-matched mislabels that plague raw contract feeds. Award dollars are agency-reported and include multi-year ceilings. Stock returns are year-to-date 2026. Not investment advice.