FedSignal — Federal Contract Exposure for Public Companies

Rank US-listed issuers by the change in their federal contract obligations between the two most recent comparable quarters. Use to find which public companies are gaining or losing federal business. Ranked by issuer rather than by recipient name, which requires rolling subsidiary entities up to a ticker. USAspending can rank recipient names but cannot tell you that Electric Boat and General Dynamics Land Systems are the same investable company. Large swings frequently reflect award timing rather than business trajectory, because a single multi-year obligation lands entirely in one quarter. Treat this as a list of things to investigate, not conclusions.

Issuers where three or more distinct insiders bought on the open market inside the same window. Several independent insiders acting alike is the most informative pattern in the Form 4 dataset. Returns participant names and roles so the caller can judge whether operators or outside holders are responsible.

US-listed companies where insiders made open-market purchases in the same window the company was winning federal contract obligations. This requires both corpora at once: award data has no concept of an insider, and Form 4 data has no concept of a customer. Officer, director, and 10-percent-holder purchases are reported as separate counts, because an outside fund accumulating is a materially different signal from an operating executive buying. Only open-market purchases (Form 4 code P) are counted; grants, option exercises, gifts, and tax-withholding dispositions are compensation mechanics and are excluded. Co-occurrence only. An insider purchase during a period of award activity does not imply knowledge of those awards, and obligations are not revenue. If the result is empty, call index_coverage before concluding there is no activity: the insider index covers a limited number of filing days.

Federal contract obligations for one US-listed company over time, rolled up across every award recipient entity that belongs to it, including subsidiaries that file under completely different names. Use this for any question about a public company's government revenue, defense or agency exposure, or federal contract trend. Why not query USAspending directly: award recipients and SEC issuers share no identifier, and large issuers receive most of their federal money under subsidiary names. Searching USAspending for 'Lockheed Martin' returns a small fraction of Lockheed's obligations because the majority arrive as 'Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation'. Searching for 'UnitedHealth' returns almost nothing because its federal book arrives as 'Optum Public Sector Solutions'. This tool resolves those roll-ups. Returns per-quarter obligations, a trend measured against the mean of prior quarters, every attributed recipient entity with its match method and confidence, and awarding-agency concentration. Obligated amounts are agency obligations, not recognized revenue.

Normalized Form 4 transactions with USD values computed, insider role resolved, 10b5-1 status flagged, and a link to the original SEC filing so any figure can be verified at source. Filter by ticker, transaction code, or minimum value.

Report exactly what the index covers: Form 4 date range and filing days ingested, transaction and issuer counts, award period range, number of issuers with attributed awards, and last refresh time. Call this before treating a small or empty result as evidence of absence. Screening tools fail quietly, returning fewer rows rather than an error, so an agent that skips this step will misreport index depth as market fact.

Map a federal award recipient's legal name to the US-listed issuer that owns it, or state authoritatively that no listed parent exists. Use when you have a contractor name from a solicitation, award notice, or news story and need to know which public company it belongs to. Returns the ticker, the match method, a confidence score, and a written explanation. Critically, it distinguishes 'no match found' from 'this affirmatively has no listed parent'. Recipients such as national laboratory operator consortia (Triad National Security, which runs Los Alamos), universities, companies taken private (ManTech, taken private by Carlyle in 2022), and US subsidiaries of foreign-listed parents (Marinette Marine, owned by Milan-listed Fincantieri) correctly resolve to no ticker. That is a real answer, not a gap, and it prevents attributing federal revenue to the wrong issuer.

Screen all indexed US public companies by net open-market insider buying and return the strongest names ranked. Supporting tool for when no ticker is known yet. Rule 10b5-1 planned trades are excluded by default because they were scheduled in advance and carry no information.