Why this site carries no freight rate index

Anyone who follows shipping markets knows the names: the Freightos Baltic Index, the Baltic Dry Index, the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index, Drewry’s World Container Index, Xeneta’s rate benchmarks. They are widely quoted, genuinely useful to people who move freight for a living, and absent from every page on this site. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight, and it is worth explaining.

What these indices are

Each of these indices is a commercial product. A company collects rate data, usually from carriers, forwarders or shippers under a confidentiality agreement, aggregates it into a published number, and sells access to the detail behind the headline figure. The headline number itself is often available free, as a marketing tool for the paid product behind it. That is a reasonable business. It is also a different business than the one this site is in.

Why that matters here

This site’s purpose is to keep a permanent, sourced record of disruptions to the movement of goods, and to measure what public data shows about the effect of those disruptions. Everything on it has to trace back to a source that is open enough for a reader to check the underlying number themselves, and stable enough that the record does not silently change under us.

A commercial rate index fails both tests for our purposes. We cannot show the underlying data, because it belongs to the company that licenses it. We cannot promise the number will still mean the same thing in five years, because methodology changes are made at the vendor’s discretion and are not always documented in a way an outside reader can audit. And because these indices move on supply and demand as much as on any single disruption, citing one next to an event would imply a causal story that the index itself cannot support.

What we use instead

We measure effects against public operational data: IMF PortWatch’s daily port call and chokepoint transit counts, drawn from AIS ship tracking. A count of vessels calling at a port or passing through a strait is not a price. It cannot tell you whether shippers are paying more or less. It can tell you, with a source anyone can check, whether fewer ships showed up during a canal closure, and by how much, against a baseline built from the weeks before it.

This is a real trade-off. Prices are more directly what shippers care about, and the news coverage this site’s daily news list carries will quote rate indices constantly, because that is what the trade press reports on when a rate spikes. We do not remove those mentions from other people’s reporting when we link to it. We just do not repeat the numbers ourselves as if they were part of the site’s own dataset, and we never let a denylisted index appear anywhere in our own text next to a number, whether that is in an event record, a chart or a line of generated copy. A script checks this on every build.

The result

Every chart on this site traces to a source you can open yourself: IMF PortWatch, a government port authority, an official government statistics agency. When you read that a chokepoint’s transits fell by a stated percentage during an event window, that number came from counting ships, not from a licensed index we cannot show you the inputs for. It is a narrower kind of evidence than a price signal. It is also one this site can stand behind without asking you to trust a number you cannot check.