Guidance is a promise. Backlog is a receipt
Earnings season starts Tuesday. Guidance will move every stock in my book → and I’ll be listening closely, because forward numbers are where re-rates begin.
But guidance is a promise. Backlog is a receipt → and receipts are how you know which promises to believe.
So here’s the screen: companies walking into earnings with the revenue already SIGNED → sitting in RPO and contracted backlog, waiting to become prints:
→ $WYFI $921M contracted → more than 10x its annualized revenue. Anchor live and billing.
→ $IREN $3.1B in contracted ARR → megawatts already spoken for.
→ $ONDS $457M backlog, up from $68M at year-end → against a $4.3B pipeline.
→ $NBIS a $27B hyperscaler deal underneath everything else.
→ $RKLB, $EOSE, $PL, $ARM: billions more signed across launch, storage, imagery, and licensing.
The playbook: when guidance gets raised WITH backlog growing faster than revenue, the raise is underwritten → believe it. When guidance gets raised on air, that’s a request, not a receipt. The gap between the two is where the trade lives.
Guidance moves the stock. Backlog tells you whether to believe the guidance. Read them together → trade the gap.
