Welcome to Issue #14 of The Obligated. Every week I monitor USASpending.gov, congressional stock disclosures, and SEC insider filings to find the 3 signals hiding in plain sight. The government publishes billions of dollars of market-moving information every day. Almost nobody reads it.
🟢 SIGNAL #1 — FREE THIS WEEK $TLS Telos Corporation · NASDAQ · ~$350 million market cap WHAT HAPPENED On Aug. 28, 2026, the Air Force's 772d Enterprise Sourcing Squadron awarded Telos Corp. of Ashburn, Virginia a $37,777,500 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to modernize Air Combat Command's cybersecurity framework with new artificial-intelligence tools and risk-management capabilities. The award was posted to War.gov the same day the contract was made public and drew 30 competing offers. As of this writing, it has not been picked up by any mainstream financial outlet — it shows up only in the raw War.gov contracts listing and routine SEC-filing trackers. WHY IT MATTERS Telos is a small company, worth roughly $350 million. A single $37.8 million award equals close to 11% of its entire market value — one of the largest contract-to-market-cap ratios of any publicly traded company that won Pentagon business this week, and a scale that would barely register for a company the size of RTX or General Electric. The contract runs through January 2031, and Telos's total revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was $47.7 million, so an award of this size has real potential to move the company's revenue trajectory, not just pad a backlog number.
WHAT TO WATCH Watch Telos's next quarterly filing for how the company books this award into backlog, and watch for the first task orders issued against the IDIQ ceiling over the next 90 days — indefinite-delivery contracts like this one can sit unfunded for months before real dollars start moving.
🟢 SIGNAL #2 — PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY $RTX RTX Corporation · NYSE · ~$300 billion market cap WHAT HAPPENED Over three days last week, the Air Force and Army handed RTX's Raytheon and Pratt & Whitney units a combined ceiling of more than $880 million across a new bomber-radar production line and a fighter-engine upgrade program — and buried in the fine print is a detail about one program's cost history and schedule delays that... [ Upgrade to read — $19/mo or $149/yr at theobligated.com ]
🟢 SIGNAL #3 — PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY $NOC Northrop Grumman Corporation · NYSE · ~$78 billion market cap WHAT HAPPENED A modification quietly posted to War.gov on Aug. 25 nearly doubled the contract value of a Space Force deep-space radar site Northrop has been building since 2024 — and the identity of the host country tells you which allied partner is about to become a lot more central to America's deep-space tracking network... [ Upgrade to read — $19/mo or $149/yr at theobligated.com ]
🟢 WEEKLY RECOMPETE WATCHLIST — PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY 2 contracts moving toward recompete or protest resolution in the next 90 days. These companies are about to win or lose revenue — before any press release. (Note: this week we could only fully verify two upcoming recompete events from public sources — see the editor's note in this week's summary.)
🟢 $LDOS — DISA "Defense Enclave Services" sole-source expansion (~$11B ceiling); GDIT's GAO protest decision due — Oct. 2026
🟢 $CACI — DHS/CBP Air & Marine Operations Center C4I systems support recompete (~$50M–$100M) — Sept. 2026 [ Upgrade to unlock — $19/mo or $149/yr ]
⚠️ Disclaimer The Obligated is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, or financial planner. Nothing in this newsletter constitutes personalized financial, legal, or tax advice. All data is sourced from publicly available government records including USASpending.gov, War.gov, SEC EDGAR, Capitol Trades STOCK Act disclosures, and the Senate Lobbying Disclosure database. We do not recommend buying or selling any security. All investment strategies involve risk of loss. You are solely responsible for your own investment decisions. Consult a licensed financial professional before acting on any information provided. The Obligated · theobligated.com · Issue #14 · August 31, 2026