Truckstop.com, in partnership with FTR, has introduced the Rate Forecasting tool, which is designed to project spot market rates using historical paid rate data.

The Rate Forecasting service can allow customers to plan based on how rates are expected to fluctuate in the days, weeks, and months ahead and can also provide rate analysis for specific markets down to the lane level.

Rate Forecasting uses a "Big Data" back-end to analyze 10 years of market trends from across the Truckstop.com marketplace as well as FTR's proprietary economic modeling algorithm that measures 13 million data points each month. The result is a forecast showing different trends on each of 160,000 lanes (state to state and 3-digit zip) and 6 million origin/destination pairs.

“We look really hard at the historical data. We never have before. Now we're able to," said Noël Perry, who serves as FTR and Truckstop.com's chief economist. "We look at how the market has been trending and what's been driving that trend such as the economy, fuel prices, and productivity."

Rate Forecasting is the result of a partnership between Truckstop.com and FTR. The tool is available on Truckstop.com's Rate Analysis platform as well as through an API integration.

"Rate Forecasting balances seasonal, geographic, random, economic, regulatory, and permanent trends on each lane with deep statistical modeling, better than a human can on the fly," said Perry. "Spot rate forecasting is not impossible if you combine a little common sense and this tool."