Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) rocketed ~10.6% to about $568.59 on Thursday — its biggest single-day jump in roughly 25 years — after a Q2 that beat on both lines and a full-year guide that went up across the board.

The print itself was solid: adjusted EPS of $7.94 on $20.1B revenue (up 11% YoY), ahead of the ~$7.23 EPS and ~$19.4B the street had penciled in. But the real jolt was the order book. Lockheed booked ~$65B of new orders in the quarter, headlined by a $35B multi-year THAAD interceptor contract with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. That one deal nearly doubled the Missiles & Fire Control backlog to $87.9B and pushed total company backlog to a record $230B — roughly three years of sales already booked.

Management then lifted the full year: revenue to $79.75B–$81.75B (from $77.5B–$80B), EPS to $29.95–$30.65, and free cash flow to $7.0B–$7.2B. Record backlog plus a higher cash guide is exactly the combo the market wanted after a 2025 dented by fixed-price program charges.

The ripple

This wasn't only an LMT story — it's a Pentagon-restocking story. RTX jumped ~7.7% the same day on its own record $289B backlog, with Patriot, AMRAAM and Standard Missile volumes ramping. The transmission is direct: the same missile-defense demand filling Lockheed's THAAD line feeds RTX's interceptor lines. The read-through for defense investors is that munitions and missile-defense — not fighter jets — are where the fresh dollars are landing right now.

The one thing that flips it

Lockheed's Q2 2025 EPS was gutted to $1.46 by charges on fixed-price programs. This rally is priced on that record backlog converting cleanly into cash — so watch the Q3 report in late October: another classified or fixed-price write-down would squeeze margins and unwind a chunk of this move, record backlog or not.

As of Thu 23 Jul 2026, 6:02 PM ET. Sources: 24/7 Wall St., Benzinga, Reuters via Yahoo Finance. For discussion and education only — not investment advice. Verify before acting.