A ceiling contract is a license to maybe spend money. An obligation is a check the government actually wrote.
Indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicles — IDIQ contracts — make this distinction so badly that most contract feeds break on them. When a $14B IDIQ ceiling posts, the headline reads like a windfall. In reality, that $14B might be split across ten contractors, deployed over five years, with no guarantee any single dollar gets spent.
What does get spent flows through delivery orders and purchase orders against those ceilings. Those are the tradeable events. The ceiling itself is paperwork.
Sentrix's filter separates ceiling vehicles from obligated awards before anything reaches your terminal. We score the value confidence on every notice. Anything where the obligated dollar amount is unclear gets held back from alerting and never appears in the live feed.
The result is a smaller, cleaner stream. Most competing tools surface 5x more rows. The other 4x is paperwork.
