Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

Spot markets are basically everyone’s leftovers. If a customer doesn’t have a preferred carrier to haul a shipment, they will place it on the Internet. If a truck needs freight and isn’t near a regular customer, they place themselves on the Internet. Hopefully the two hookup, make a deal, freight gets where it’s supposed to go and the trucker gets paid and everyone is happy.

If you’re tired of trying to find something useful in all of the free recruiting rags at all the truck stops? Try the magazine that’s put out by Internet Truckstop, the intenet load board. What is really insightful is they track trends in freight and truck availability. It’s from the freight and truck availability on their website, but if they’re not the largest load board on the net, they’re one of the biggest. Their freight and truck trends seem to be more meaningful than ATA’s numbers that come out once a month. Stats are a few months behind, but they all are.

There is a monthly fee like most load boards, but they keep a copy of their magazines online (Sep/Oct). The viewer isn’t the best way to read online, but it works.

Page 4 shows Freight Trends and Rate Trends. The fine print says that if the line is above 7, it’s more freight and good for trucks. Below 7, means more trucks and good for brokers. There is a sharp rise in the summer and Aug looks like the start of a dive downward. My gross numbers kind of match the graph. My June and July were great but that’s when fuel was at its highest so the net number wasn’t that great and August took a dive. September which isn’t on the graph yet was just as good as July. While October was horrible. November isn’t looking much better. It looks like rates go up when fuel prices went up and go down when fuel prices go down, but maybe it’s just me.

A sharp drop in demand over the last two months indicates a signiicant loosening on the capacity side. Although freight was down, more trucks made themselves available and the combination of the two made the MDI plummet. Expect demand to strengthen in September and October some and then tumble in November.

The next graph is rate trends. Different lines for different trailers. Black is reefers, white is vans, grey is flatbeds.

As fuel and demand dropped in July and August, so did freight rates, although not as severely as expected. Rates have held up better in this downturn than in previous downturns and the expectation is that they will flatten or even rise over the course of the next two months.

Since the graph ends at August, the next two months means September and October. So freight availablity tumbles, but rates stay the same or go up.

This is old information, but it’s the latest I can find online. The printed version is at truck stops if you can find it. These graphs and analysis is usually the first couple of pages.

These numbers are not from the entire trucking industry and are only from the Internet Truckstop numbers from their load board.  Now that you have the numbers from a few months ago what can you do with them. Absolutely nothing. Hopefully you can spot a few trends and you or your company can be prepared to take advantage of a rate increase or try and put off the rate decrease as much as possible. This is the country as an average and individual regions around the country can vary greatly from one area to another.

This really just shows how tough trucking is right now and we can only do what we can do.