FreightWaves SONAR releases new tools to measure the domestic truckload market

• Bulk analysis of rates by lane (via bulk CSV upload or manual in-line entry)
• Contract and spot rate comparison with high and low values
• Contextual data based on tenders

Leveraging more/variant data empowers users to understand negotiation strength, overarching pricing strategies and volatile markets. Users can use this as a benchmarking tool for rates but also see their direction. The contextual data can also provide deeper insights on lane conditions from a capacity standpoint. All the data is available to export into a spreadsheet for deeper analysis. 

The NTI Forecast — NTIF is a 28-day forecast of the current NTI based on dry van loads moving more than 250 miles. The forecast is based on more than just historical rates and includes high-frequency inputs from data points such as customs, wholesale fuel price and contract rates. Rigorous data science and machine learning was used to identify which data had the most predictive qualities and was back-tested to find an overall correlation of 85 for the full 28 days, a 99 from one to seven days. 

The primary use for a spot rate forecast is to visualize trends in the trucking space, whether you are a:

• shipper, looking to manage a volatile transportation budget
• carrier who is trying to project shippers’ capacity needs
• broker who simply needs to know how tight or loose the market will be in the coming weeks.

The NTIF provides an objective data point to support near-term planning. 

FreightWaves also provides historical predictive values from 28 (NTIF28), 14 (NTIF14) and seven days (NTIF7) to show accuracy. 

The NTIF will be continuously improved, and if predictions vary too far from the actual result, the variables and weights will be adjusted to meet usable levels of confidence.