Most 2022 defense trade coverage says: war happened, stocks went up.

That is not an explanation. It is a timeline.

The actual story is in the 13F filings from Q3 2021 — four months before the invasion. Citadel had $466.9M in LMT. D.E. Shaw had $406.2M. Burry had 24.82% of his entire book in it. 51 funds were long before a single missile crossed the border.

The entry logic is in a public SEC filing, not a rumor. Clough Capital's N-CSRS filing dated April 30, 2022 states it plainly: defense stocks were trading at 7–9% FCF yield. New program authorizations would compress that to ~5%. The re-rating between those two numbers is the alpha.

And the counterintuitive finding from a 2025 peer-reviewed event study: the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 generated cumulative abnormal returns statistically indistinguishable from zero. Ukraine generated +10 percentage points. The difference is not the violence. It is the policy cascade.

I wrote the full reconstruction — SEC filings, 13F forensics, three documented thesis structures, the European asymmetry (Rheinmetall +1,700%), and the GE Aerospace duopoly play that needed no geopolitical thesis at all.

Every claim is sourced. Every number has a primary source link.

Full piece here: