Why Freight Needs Its Own Prediction Market Platform

Prediction markets are having a moment.

You probably saw it play out with Venezuela. Hours before President Trump announced that U.S. forces had captured Nicolás Maduro, prices on Polymarket started climbing. One trader turned $32,000 into more than $400,000 overnight.

Whether that was smart pattern recognition or insider trading is now a matter for Congress to sort out. But the bigger point stands: Prediction markets have moved from academic curiosity to mainstream.

When you ask people to put something on the line, they tend to be more honest about what they predict. And collectively, crowds often know things before the rest of us catch on.

That same volatility? You live it every week. Winter storms send spot rates up double digits in 72 hours while your carriers ghost you. Tariff rumors have shippers panic-pulling imports, spiking container rates overnight.

You called it. Maybe not the exact numbers, but you felt it coming. The problem is you called it in your group chat, or in a LinkedIn comment that got buried, or to your ops manager who forgot by lunch. There's no record. No scoreboard. No way to prove you were right when everyone else was wrong.

The Predictions You're Already Making

If you work in trucking, you're forecasting constantly. You have a view on where spot rates are heading. You've got opinions about diesel prices, port volumes, cross-border flows. These expectations shape real decisions about capacity, pricing and timing.

You're making these predictions anyway. They cost you when you're wrong. But here's the real kicker: When you're right, nobody remembers. When you called that rate spike and told your shippers to lock in contracts, they saved money. Did you get a bonus? Probably not. A LinkedIn post with 12 likes? Maybe.

“Rates are sky right now”

Someone that knows nothing about trucking https://t.co/XHnrbHxA5s

— Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🚂⚓️ (@FreightAlley) January 18, 2026

The current system is broken. You post your takes on LinkedIn. They get 3,000 impressions and die in the algorithm. You share hot takes on X, mixed in with people who don't know what a lane is. There's no aggregation. No scoreboard. No way to separate the people who actually know markets from the people who just post the most.

What We're Building

Rig Load is a scoreboard for your gut instincts.

You make forecasts. We track whether you're right. You build a public track record that proves you know what you're talking about. Not in a "thought leader" way — in a "here's my hit rate" way.

Everyone in freight says they have a feel for the market. We're building the place where you can prove it. Where you can say, "My rate forecasts have been accurate over 18 months," and back it up with data.

For younger brokers building their book, this is differentiator fuel. Imagine pitching a prospect and showing them your forecasting record on their lanes. Imagine being the broker who called the last three rate spikes before they happened — and having the receipts.

It's not homework. It's your reputation, quantified.

How It Works

Each market asks a simple question. Some follow binary structures like: "Will national dry van spot rates break a certain threshold by a certain date?"

You pick yes or no, and depending on how early you make a correct call, you'll receive additional early bird points.

Your scoreboard tracks two things. Accuracy: Did you pick the right side? Timing: When did you pick the right side? Someone who's confident and correct early lands higher on the leaderboard.

The aggregate of everyone's forecasts becomes the consensus. When that consensus shifts quickly, that's signal. That's informed participants updating their views. That's what you want to watch.

We Don't Know If This Will Work

This might flop.

We've got three big questions.

First, will enough people participate? Prediction markets need critical mass to beat individual guesses. If only a handful of people show up, it's just noise.

Second, will the crowd actually be wise, or just loud? There's a version of this where it's just people posting hot takes with no skin in the game. We're thinking hard about mechanics that reward good forecasting over frequent forecasting.

Third, will this feel like another dashboard to check? If it does, we're dead. We're building for speed — the goal is seconds to make a call.

We know prediction markets have worked in other domains. We know freight is full of people with strong opinions and real information. We're betting that if we make it easy enough and valuable enough, you'll show up.

Where This Could Go

Near-term, we're focused on building a community of forecasters who find this useful and maybe a little fun. Leaderboards. Bragging rights. The satisfaction of being right when your competitor was wrong.

Medium-term, we're exploring ways to make top performance mean something tangible. Prizes, recognition, ways to turn a strong track record into professional credibility.

Long-term? Possibly real derivatives. A prediction market could be your on-ramp — build a track record here, then graduate to trading actual contracts.

But we're focused on proving the basic value first. Does crowd wisdom work for freight? Let's find out.

A Prediction of My Own

I'll close with a forecast, because fair's fair.

I think the Supreme Court strikes down some of Trump's tariffs this year. When that happens, shippers who planned around certain cost structures are going to scramble. Carriers who positioned for one reality will face another. The forecasts everyone's running their business on will need to be rewritten.

That's exactly the kind of event we want to track. Not because we know the answer, but because the industry collectively might.

Get Involved

We're building this with the industry, not just for it.

If you want early access, sign up. If there's a market you want to see, tell us. If you think this whole idea is stupid, tell us that too.

The signal comes from the crowd. We're building that crowd one forecaster at a time.