Article — Markets — 2026
Shipping Markets
Understanding the connection between physical commodities and financial markets.
01
The landscape
- What shipbrokers do
- Brokers sit between shipowners and charterers, matching cargo with vessels and negotiating the terms.
- Freight markets
- The price of moving goods by sea, which moves with supply of ships and demand for cargo.
- Baltic Exchange
- Publishes the benchmark freight indices that much of the market prices against.
- Futures
- Contracts that let participants take a view on, or protect against, future price moves.
- FFAs
- Forward Freight Agreements — derivatives settled against freight indices, used to hedge freight exposure.
- Tanker markets
- The segment moving crude oil and refined products, closely tied to energy markets.
- Physical vs financial
- How the physical movement of goods and the paper markets built on top of it influence each other.
02
What I learned
These are observations from a week spent around a futures and shipping desk — not the view of a trader.
[Personal observations to be added: what stood out about how brokers, traders and clients interact, and how physical and financial markets connect in practice.]