Cass Freight Data Have Bad News for Stocks

Some recent data on trucking shipments in the U.S. serves as bad news for stock prices.  The folks at Cass Information Systems keep track of how much stuff is getting shipped by truck in the U.S., and how much the shippers are having to pay for that. Most of the time their data on shipments and expenditures move together, but there are slight differences which can be informative.

And more important for my purposes, both sets of data show an interesting relationship to stock prices.  This week's chart compares the SP500 to the 12-month rate of change (ROC) for both the Shipments and Expenditures Indices which Cass maintains.  Using an annual rate of change is helpful because it factors out any seasonal factors in shipments.

When the 12-month ROCs for both Shipments and Expenditures are above zero, the SP500 tends to do very well.  Things went a little bit off track in 2022 when we had a bear market while both of these 12ROCs were still above zero, but that was a function of the trucking industry working to digest a big disruption from Covid, and from the resulting port snafu with container ships lined up off of the Long Beach, CA harbor waiting to offload.  There has been a depression in the trucking industry since February 2023.

In April 2025, the Expenditures Index's 12ROC popped up above zero, as shippers were willing to pay extra to get delivery of all the stuff they ordered trying to front-run the imposition of tariffs.  But Shipments has remained in a depression.

Now both indices have their 12ROCs back down below zero, which is where they typically hang out during bear markets for the SP500.  This news does not tell us how bad things might get for stocks, nor when any bearish period might precisely begin or end.  It is just one piece of evidence saying that the economy has bigger problems than the FOMC and their recent quarter point rate cut are taking into account.