FreightWaves Today | October 14

Craig Fuller (0:08)

Welcome to FreightWaves Today, it is Wednesday. It's my favorite day of the week. It is the AAR weekly rail report. We get to see how the industrial economy is performing. And of course, we've got earnings coming up. Earnings scenes is coming up. We have JB Hunt tomorrow night after, tomorrow after the bell.

We're gonna hear really what earnings seasons are all about from our own Todd Maiden who worked on Wall Street for many years and decided a better path for him and us is to be here at FreightWaves reporting on all of these great public companies.

RxO is not going to be really that interesting anymore. You don't think so? Well, I think they'll give us some sense of the market. We'll get some comments. But like the issue is when you're a public company being acquired, is the level of what you say doesn't matter. Wall Street doesn't seem to care because it's all priced for the transaction. There's very little doubt that this transaction is going to clear. The shareholder is going to vote for it. CH. Robinson, as well as the government, is not going to stop at the SEC or the Federal Trade Commission, are just not going to stay in the way of this transaction because it's just too small relative to the overall market. So having said that, we're not going to hear a lot of depth. And I think the comments from RxO's management will be measured. But with CH. Robinson, we give us some perspective. JB Hunt always sets things in motion. We get to learn how the quarter is performing, what these public companies are seeing. I expect their comments to be a little softer. Todd Maiden has his own perspective. So we can talk a little bit about a little bit of seasonal softness. Maybe not as robust of a peak season as perhaps we had hoped for based on what we're looking at in the data.

LTL, I think, would be really strong. I think LTL may be benefiting from some of the weaker truckload volume elements in early peak season because shipment sizes will come out a little smaller. I think we'll hear from that. So just a lot of excitement. The end of a quarter or quarter earnings is always a super fun time for me. As a finance nerd and as a freight data nerd, it's a chance to validate what we've been thinking, what we've been hearing. Now, one of the interesting things, Malcolm, is having tracked this public companies for been a part of, my family's been a part of it for well over 30 years. I've watched these markets, but one of the things that I think is really interesting, particularly in the last decade, the larger truck transportation companies, and this is true in truckload, it's true in LTL, it's true in international parcel, as well as Ocean, having really tracked the high-frequency data that we have and looked at public companies, they oftentimes don't see the market develop as fast as we do. And look, I remember back in 2015, there was a pretty substantial sell-off, Todd Maiden may remember this, of the big truckload stocks. I remember this painfully because I was actually trading truckload stocks back in those days and was long, but then all of a sudden DAT's data started to show some softness in the spot market and all the big truckload stocks sold off because there was sort of felt like we're into the cycle. And so what was interesting about it is if you go back in 15, the large public companies talked about that things were really strong, but they clearly weren't. There was a big disconnect between what Wall Street was seeing and the high frequency data, the spot data that you get through load boards and other sources before Sonar existed.

They were seeing some softness in the market, the cycle peaking, but yet the larger trucking companies, truck load carriers in particular, didn't see it. And I remember thinking, and I talked to my dad, he was a pro at the time USpress was private. And I was talking to my father about this. And he was like, no, business is good, business is good. And it was something interesting about, there's a pretty significant disconnect between the larger carriers and the small carriers, and the overall spot market. What was also interesting is to sort of pass, Ford, we now have Sonar. But this also happens in container markets. I've seen it with the International Ocean Containers. Henry Byers a couple of years ago, wrote an article about imports dropping off a cliff. He talked to the large container companies, they weren't seeing softness.