Intermodal Era, Legal Liability & Public Surveillance | Freight Expectations

Craig Fuller (0:15)

I am in a cold and windy South Lake, Texas here coming to you from a hotel for a special edition of Freightways Today. And we're going to get to Freight Expectations in just a second. But let's talk a little bit of Sonar Update to give you a market update. First of all, let's talk Tender Rejections because that is really the bellwether of the overall freight market. Tender Rejections in terms of what we're seeing, this doesn't feel like a real heated October. Zach Strickland a couple of days ago talked about how it was picking up. I think it was really the hurricane that was really causing some disruptions. But we're not seeing really peak season really tighten right now. And so things seem a little bit off in terms of demand. That's really driving it. You know, capacity is tight. I think we will hear from the large public truck load carriers. We heard from JB Haunt. Cycle still is early. But we're not seeing what we would have thought would have been momentum into a peak. And so there's really no signs yet of peak season. But it will happen. The question is, how late in November does it happen? Does it repeat what we saw last year's? We saw tightness around Thanksgiving. I don't know, but we're going to keep watching it. But again, nothing to really celebrate. Let's look over at, now one thing to keep in mind is we are well above last year. So I'm going to keep that clear. I'm not talking about the fact that we are not, things are not good. They're just not as strong and as robust as they were. Moving on to spot raids. We're way up and this is spot rates. The NTIL includes or does not include fuel. So fuel surcharge is ripped out of the number. And so this, in terms of spot rates, we can see how much further we've come in terms of truckload line haul rates year over year.

Like it's not what we saw back in June in terms of high record spot rates, but certainly well above where we were a year ago, by about 70 cents a mile. So I feel like things are good, but not great.

Maybe a little lukewarm on demand, which I think is really sort of overhanging the overall freight market is volume is not what we had hoped for. And that seems to be a drag on the overall freight picture. You could see this in the volume chart, where we look at year over year activity.

We're ahead of where we were a year ago, but we're not where we were. If you look at where we started the year, you could see the blue line, how much greater we were of the past couple of years. Things have started to cool off a bit really since June.

We're not, we have not seen that momentum continue the way we saw earlier in the year. And so that gives us a little bit of pause about the robustness of the overall volume picture. But I think it's constructive. I think largely I've said this, a lukewarm demand market, but tightening capacity seems to be sort of a goldilux environment for truckload carriers. They're able to handle the volume and really high fuel prices, not super robust tender rejections do keep a lid on capacity expansion, which will give them a much longer cycle than what we could see if things really went off the rails, no pun intended. So that is the Sonar Update. You can get all this data on gosonar.com. This is high frequency data. If you're looking at your freight market, you're looking at your bids, Sonar has all the tools available for you.

So next let's move to my favorite guest, part of the week you have been glaring for. Matt Leffler is in red today. Matt, you're back to wearing some reds. This feels like a different shade. Might be my screen, but is this the same jacket as always?

Matt Leffler (4:30)

This is the same thing. So I just got back from Norfolk, Virginia for the Virginia Maritime Association. I was up at three on a plane at five so I could be here.

And I'm so excited to talk to you. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. I got to tell you, just for everyone who's watching this and who's listening, we have a bit of a crisis here at my home. When I arrive, my fish tank, which I am looking at right now, has a slow leak. So this is exciting. I need to get some insurance for my fish tank like Centerline does for the trailers. And I do love those trailers.