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The Load Letter

Freight market news for freight brokers · by a freight broker

The Load Letter · Issue of August 9, 2026

Van rates look soft. The trucks left anyway.

Trailer duties, a forty-year demand spike, and thieves hunting your priciest loads.

By Andrew Sarris, a working freight broker · · 896 words

Week of August 03–August 08, 2026

The market spent all week looking soft and acting tight. Van spot held at $2.38 while shippers moved less freight in Q2 and paid more to do it, and the culprit wasn't fuel, it was capacity walking out the door. If you're still reading soft van rates as a buyer's market, you're playing last year's tape while carriers thin out underneath you.

01Shippers Paid More To Move Less

FreightWaves confirmed a capacity-led Q2 — volumes down, transportation spend up, and tightening trucks, not diesel, doing the damage. Schneider told the market driver capacity cuts run through the back half of 2026, PAM booked another loss and kept culling its fleet, and Homeland Security is now investigating CDL schools. Van looks cheap today, but the carrier base covering that cheap freight is shrinking and getting riskier at the same time.

02Trailer Costs Just Rewrote Capacity Math

Washington slapped antidumping duties on dry and refrigerated van trailers from Canada and Mexico, making new boxes more expensive to buy, while Wabash called Q2 trailer demand unlike anything they've seen in forty years. Used Class 8 supply stayed tight on top of it. Pricier, scarcer trailers mean carriers hold equipment longer, get pickier about drops, and price trailer commitments into their rates — a next-two-quarters problem, not a next-week one.

03Cargo Thieves Went Upscale, Vetting Went Formal

CargoNet says organized rings are stealing fewer loads but hunting far higher value — metals, electronics, high-ticket industrial — driving record losses through identity theft and double-brokering. At the same time, Carrier Assure's new BAVRA standard is giving sophisticated shippers a way to grade brokers before freight ever gets tendered, and a Texas court kept accident liability flowing downstream to the middle. Your carrier vetting just became both your liability firewall and your sales pitch.

This week's numbers

Dry Van$2.38/mi
Reefer$2.87/mi
Flatbed$2.87/mi
Diesel$5.31/gal

Source: DAT and EIA  ·  Week of August 4, 2026

This week's cold email line

You're absorbing the tariff hikes, the $5.31 diesel, and rising last-mile rates all in-house right now, and I've got a way to take at least one of those fires off your desk.

Aim this at small and mid-size shippers still booking their own trucks — they're the ones drowning trying to solve three rising cost lines at once, and they're ready to hear from a broker selling relief instead of a rate sheet.

Outbound  ·  Done-for-you prospecting

The market gives you the angle.
Outbound puts it in the inbox.

Every angle above only earns money when it lands in front of a shipper. Outbound is the done-for-you version: I research your target shippers, write the sequences in your voice, and keep the follow-ups going while you cover freight.

This week's sources

That is the read for this week.

Andrew
The Load Letter

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