About this index
The Freight Market Conditions index turns the trade and business press into a daily number. It scored 20,975 articles from 10 Apr to 5 Oct 2026, of which 2,949 (14%) were judged relevant to the truckload market. Each relevant article casts one vote — up, down or neutral — on a single market driver, and the votes are rolled up into two readings of the same news.
How to read it
- •Both lines run 0–100. 50 means no net news; above 50 the coverage favours that side of the market, below 50 it runs against it.
- •Carrier view = 35% demand + 30% tightness + 20% carrier health − 15% cost pressure. It is the reading for the carriers, brokers and 3PLs that sell capacity.
- •Shipper view = −60% tightness − 40% cost pressure. Tight capacity and rising costs are bad news for the shippers that buy it.
- •Votes decay with a 14-day half-life, so the line reflects roughly the last two to three weeks of coverage.
- •One story syndicated across many outlets is damped, so it does not count once per outlet.
- •It measures news flow, not the market itself: it tells you what the press was saying, not what rates did.
Caveats
This is six months of history, so there is no seasonal baseline yet and the warm-up at the start (shaded on the chart) is the index finding its footing. The ±2 standard-error bands show how much of each day's reading rests on a handful of articles.
The news feed itself changed during the period: on 24 Aug the feed switches to 5-word headlines and on 25 Sep the feed volume halves. Both are marked on the chart; treat moves that coincide with them with care.
Topic colours in the heatmap follow each topic's own driver: for diesel prices, "rising" means prices reported rising, which is good news for nobody who buys fuel. That is why the index is read twice rather than once.