Our Mission
Pickett Research, LLC was established in 2020 to fill a void in the US Truckload Freight Marketplace for analysis, forecasting, and market guidance that is both objective and credible. While there is certainly no shortage of data available and opinions offered as to their potential meaning on a near daily basis, there has been no reliable source of truth that has proven able to offer truly unbiased and consistently accurate guidance on the long-term direction of the market, the forces behind the moves, and the implications for all major market participants – or the What?, the Why?, and the So What? Our mission at Pickett Research is to fill that void by leveraging a unique market philosophy, framework, and forecasting methodology that was developed and refined over more than a decade of commercial market experience scaling one of the largest and fastest-growing truckload freight brokers and 3PLs in North America from scratch.
Our Philosophy
While it remains exceedingly difficult to predict the behavior of any individual buyer or seller in the US Truckload Freight Market, the behavior of the herd has proven to be quite consistent over the past 15 years – through recessions, energy crises, natural disasters, and even a global pandemic.
When demand exceeds supply, rates move higher. As rates move higher, net Class 8 tractor orders spike and incremental capacity enters. And in a market governed by human beings making financial decisions, we always overshoot. We always overdo it.
Too much capacity enters relative to demand, rates hit a peak then collapse – along with Class 8 tractor orders – towards a deflationary trough. From there, the cycle reverses, unprofitable capacity exits, everyone forgets about the last cycle, and history repeats itself. And as long as the market remains structured in the same way, with fragmented supply making decisions in silos based on individual best interests, the cycle is doomed to repeat itself in perpetuity. While each cycle unfolds a little bit differently than the last as influenced by the nuances of the times, the pattern remains the same.
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes.”
– Mark Twain (attributed to)
Our Team: Chris Pickett
From 2006 to 2020, Chris played key leadership roles (including Chief Strategy Officer from 2010-2020) at Coyote Logistics (a UPS Company), a leading provider of non-asset based 3PL solutions across North America and Europe. He was responsible for helping the Coyote leadership team develop, evolve, and execute an enterprise growth strategy geared toward leveraging Coyote’s unique operating advantages across an increasingly dynamic global market and competitive landscape. Over various periods along the way, he held operational responsibility for all activities related to North American Sales, Marketing, Operations, Supply Chain Engineering, and Pricing Strategy – ensuring that all remained aligned to identify, implement, and innovate capacity, process, and technology solutions for Shippers across the global Coyote network.
Chris’ passion for understanding US Truckload Freight Market dynamics and predicting the direction of spot and contract rates stems from his work at Coyote over this period where long-term contract commitments were often made based on an expected long-term cost of capacity in the spot market. It has since become a borderline obsession, where his fascination in these market phenomena continues to drive the evolution of the market cycle framework and the predictive value it delivers.
Before joining Coyote in 2006, Chris served in various strategy development and consulting roles at Adjoined Consulting (now Capgemini), Agile Software Corp. (now Oracle), Electron Economy (now Viewlocity), and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). Throughout his pre-Coyote career, Chris architected, implemented, and managed a variety of supply chain management and customer service-related technology solutions for global market leaders in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, and consumer technology sectors. He earned a B.S. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech, an M.Eng. in Logistics from MIT, and an MBA from Georgia Tech.
More recently, Chris joined the leadership team at Flock Freight as Chief Strategy Officer in July 2021. Flock Freight is a San Diego-based B Corp founded in 2015 that has pioneered Shared Truckload (STL) as a scaled modal offering by leveraging a suite of first-to-market advanced algorithms that pool shipments to maximize the utilization of available industry capacity. Flock’s STL offering bypasses asset-intensive hub-and-spoke terminal networks to minimize transit times, eliminate product damage, and drastically reduce carbon emissions.
Our Mascot: The Hedgehog
So, why a Hedgehog?
“The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing.” This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox – his essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. While there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to propose a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a Fox, but he believed in being a Hedgehog.
Applied to Pickett Research, no such paradox exists. We are Hedgehogs through and through when it comes to the central, all-embracing system that we propose powers the US Truckload Freight Market and the forecasting methodology that it supports. We respect and admire the Foxes, but our conviction in our process makes us proud Hedgehogs in this arena – and we represent that in our logo.