Shipping Cycle Monitor

Shipping is a supply-cycle business: freight rates are set less by how much cargo moves than by how many ships are chasing it. Fleet capacity turns slowly — an order placed today delivers in two to three years — so the supply side is the part of the cycle that can actually be seen in advance. This page tracks it from official UN statistics, and links each segment to the listed companies that live in it.

Where each segment sits in its own supply cycle

Annual growth of the world fleet by vessel type, in deadweight tonnes. The percentile compares this year's growth with the last twenty years of the same segment: a low number means capacity is expanding unusually slowly, which is the condition freight rates need.

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Fleet growth history

Year-over-year change in fleet deadweight tonnage. The 2008–2012 bulge is the delivery wave ordered during the 2003–2008 boom — the classic illustration of why orders, not demand, end shipping cycles.

Deliveries versus scrapping

Gross tonnage built and sold for recycling worldwide. Scrapping is the release valve: it accelerates when rates are poor and stops almost entirely when they are good, which is what turns a soft market into a long one.

Listed shipping companies

The US-listed shipping universe by segment, with the TCF Score computed from each company's own SEC filings. Most of these are foreign private issuers filing 20-F and 6-K rather than 10-K, so their quarterly detail is thinner than a domestic filer's.

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What this page deliberately does not show

Spot freight rates and the Baltic indices are licensed commercial data — their terms prohibit public display, and we do not republish them here or anywhere else on the site. The same applies to broker weeklies and container-rate indices, which we read for our own research but may not reproduce. What you see above is limited to sources that are free to redistribute with attribution, plus company figures from public filings.