Every figure XENA publishes carries a grade, every probability has a stated basis, and our own predictions are scored against what actually happened. This page explains all three, because intelligence you cannot interrogate is just opinion with formatting.
Every value, quantity and unit cost in XENA carries one of four grades. The grade travels with the number everywhere it appears — in the pipeline, in company profiles, in Insight reports and in exports.
| Grade | What it means |
|---|---|
| Actual | A signed contract, a statutory filing, or an official document stating the figure. The strongest grade — a legally accountable source published it. |
| Reported | An official announcement that is not yet a contract: a budget request line, a ministry press release, a US DSCA notification ceiling, a framework-agreement value. Real, dated, citable — but the figure can still change before signature. |
| Estimated | A credible third-party estimate: an audit-office projection, a programme-office lifecycle estimate, a well-evidenced analyst range. We name the estimator. |
| Modelled | XENA's own arithmetic — a unit-cost multiplication, a currency conversion of a historic figure, an inference from comparable programmes. We show the working in the value note. |
Two rules govern the grading. A figure is never graded up to make a row look more authoritative — a ministry announcement stays Reported even when we believe it. And where no defensible figure exists, the field is left empty rather than filled: Gulf states frequently do not publish contract values, and an honest gap outlasts a plausible invention.
Each of the 900+ programmes in the procurement pipeline carries a probability of go-ahead: the likelihood the programme reaches a signed contract. This number is not sentiment. It is derived from a structural model of how each country actually decides to buy defence equipment.
For 26 countries (and the US Foreign Military Sales process as a system in its own right) XENA maintains a gate model: the sequence of approvals a programme must clear — requirement validation, budget committee, parliamentary vote, contract negotiation — with, for each gate, whether passing it is publicly observable, how long the next stage typically takes, and what share of programmes historically survive it. A programme's PGO reflects the last gate it has demonstrably cleared, adjusted for programme-specific risk: financing constraints, export-control dependencies, political calendars.
Why this matters in practice. A German procurement reaching the Bundestag budget committee's €25m list converts to contract roughly 90% of the time — a strong, evidenced signal. A signed Polish framework agreement looks similar in a headline but is materially weaker, because Poland's binding constraint is financing capacity, not approval. An Indian Acceptance of Necessity is routinely reported as an order; the evidence supports roughly 55–65% eventual conversion, over three to six years. The same press release deserves three different probabilities in three different countries — and gets them.
Where a country's process is genuinely opaque, we model observed behaviour instead, grade the country's transparency honestly, and say plainly what cannot be known from open sources.
XENA's forward claims — analysis predictions, stock-impact forecasts, and the PGO numbers themselves — are resolved against real outcomes on a weekly cycle. A prediction is marked correct, wrong, partially correct or lapsed; a prediction too vague to score is recorded as exactly that, which is itself a finding about how we write. The scoring is deliberately harsher than the predicting: a +0.4% drift against a predicted +5–8% move is wrong, not a near miss.
Resolved outcomes feed a calibration record — hit rate against stated confidence, broken down by country and by claim type — and that record adjusts the gate model and the forecast agents that produced the claims. When the resolved sample is large enough to be meaningful, we will publish the scorecard, including the misses. We are not aware of another provider in this market that scores its own record; we think that is precisely why it is worth doing.
XENA monitors 3,000+ sources: the newsroom, press and investor-relations estate of every tracked company on its own publication rhythm, plus a named registry of ministry and parliamentary channels, procurement portals, trade press, financial data and multilateral publications — weighted deliberately toward Arabic, Turkish, French and Hebrew sources that rarely reach English-language coverage. Every item is resolved against a single entity spine of companies, programmes and countries, so the same fact links the news item, the pipeline row, the company profile and the capability entry it concerns. The live source count and category breakdown are on the About page.
We do not publish figures we cannot source, we do not launder single-source claims into fact, we do not treat a belligerent's announcement as a capability, and we do not delete cancelled programmes — a cancellation is intelligence, not an embarrassment. Where XENA runs model portfolios to test its own intelligence, they are nominal paper simulations; nothing on this platform is investment advice.
Questions about methodology: contact the team. Definitions of defence terms used across the platform are marked inline and available on any Insight report.