Trucking Is Booming Again, And Drivers Aren't Happy About It

**Reed Loustalot** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:23)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:24)
It's been too long since we've done a trucking episode. This is just an objective fact that we need to get out of the way.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:29)
It is time. I mean, to be fair, to be fair. Yes. I think we've both written about trucking in the Odd Lots Newsletter. I'm sure. I think back in January, you started to get some of the freight and logistics companies talking about maybe they were starting to see an upturn and looking at some share prices since then. So I've got, look up Nightswift at the moment.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:51)
What's the trigger? I mean.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:52)
It's KNX.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:53)
Okay, KNX.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:54)
I've got Nightswift or JB. Hunt, but Nightswift is a little bit more dramatic.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:00)
I mean, since January of this year.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:02)
Oh, yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:03)
No, it's a great run.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:04)
It's had a great run. So I think the trucking rebound, it seems to be here.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:09)
It seems to be here. The problem was going a long time. I mean, as you mentioned, we do write about it, so it's not like we're ignorant. But one of the things that we learned when we did a lot of trucking episodes, particularly in the years after the pandemic, was when we talk about the business cycle, it's like these multi-year cycles. When truckers talk about the cycle, there might be eight up and down cycles within one boom or within one recession, just extraordinary cyclical business.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:36)
If we or hopefully anyone else have learned one thing from the truck episodes, it is that this is such an incredibly cyclical industry. The standard explanation is that you have these really low barriers to entry for owner operators and trucks. So as soon as trucking rates start to go up, everyone decides to become a trucker, the market gets flooded, it overexpands, and then inevitably the rates start to come down, and then you have a bunch of independent owner operators who start to go bust and then capacity comes out, and the whole cycle can begin again.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:08)
True. It seems real boom bust. You mentioned the share prices of Night Swift and JB Hunt, but another way to look at it, I'm just looking at the Internet Truck Stop Van Rate Index, just a sort of basic measure of how much it costs to move. That was in December of last year, it was like $1.94, I guess that's probably per mile, and now it broke three, it came down a little bit. So just by measuring the cost of trucking, it's clearly gone up. So we need to figure out what's going on.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:36)
Sorry, I'm just looking at this Night Swift chart again. You know they've outperformed Metta this year.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:42)
That's amazing.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:43)
I know.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:43)
Look at JB Hunt. I think it's almost a double.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:47)
Yeah, forget about AI. The money apparently is in trucking.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:51)
Well, for real.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:52)
This is how the cycle starts. People start saying the money is in trucking and then everyone gets it.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:57)
How are the turbines getting to the data centers? True. We know that there is a lot of demand for physical goods as part of this AI story, and the physical goods have to get to the data center somehow.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:10)
So I think this is part of the story. This is the question. Is this the same rebound that we've seen before or is there maybe something more structural that's happening here? We've also had some recent developments with the actual supply of truck drivers, which is also something that clearly impacts capacity. So there's a lot to talk about.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:29)
There's a lot to talk about. It's time to revisit the trucking market. We have a guest that we've never had on before, but someone I've known from the Internet for a while, who really knows the space very well. We're going to be speaking with Reed Loustalot. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Truck Parking Club, and so Reed, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

**Reed Loustalot** (3:48)
Joe, Tracy, thanks for having me. Joe, I got to give you credit, man. I said you weren't going to do it, but you did it, and you said my name right, so congratulations.