The Baltic Dry Index is a single number, published once a working day around 13:00 London time, that condenses the cost of moving dry bulk cargo across the planet into one figure. Behind that figure sit three vessel-class sub-indices, roughly two dozen named routes, a panel of shipbrokers who report what real cargoes are fixing at, and a settlement role in a derivatives market that turns over billions of dollars in paper freight. The index itself never tells an owner what to charge. It tells the whole market what comparable steel is earning, and from that benchmark every voyage decision, charter negotiation, and hedge is priced. The time charter equivalent calculator does the arithmetic that connects a quoted index level to a ship’s actual daily earnings, and the voyage profit calculator carries that through to the bottom line on a specific fixture.
This article covers the family of maritime freight benchmarks: the Baltic Exchange dry-bulk indices (the BDI and its Capesize, Panamax, Supramax, and Handysize components), the tanker indices (the dirty BDTI and clean BCTI) and the Worldscale system they ride on, the container indices (FBX, WCI, SCFI), and the LNG freight assessments (Spark). It explains how each is built, names the specific route codes that matter, and shows how the Time Charter Equivalent normalizes all of them into the one unit the industry actually plans around: dollars per ship per day.
The Baltic Exchange and what an index is
The Baltic Exchange is a London membership body whose origins trace to a coffee house in the eighteenth century where ship and cargo merchants met to fix business. Today it is owned by the Singapore Exchange (SGX), which acquired it in 2016, and its commercial weight rests on one thing: it is the recognized independent producer of dry-bulk and tanker freight-rate benchmarks. Member shipbroking firms sit on panels for each index. Every working day each panellist submits an assessment of what they judge the going rate to be on each route they cover, based on the fixtures they have seen and the negotiations they are running. The Exchange averages the panel submissions, applies the route weightings, and publishes the result. The panellists are bound by a code of conduct, and the methodology is documented in the Exchange’s published guides so that a number used to settle a derivative can be audited.
An index is not a price anyone paid. It is an assessment of where the market is, route by route, expressed so that it can be compared day to day and used as a settlement reference. That distinction matters because the Baltic numbers are not transaction prints from an exchange order book. They are panel assessments, the same methodological family as a benchmark interest rate or an oil-price assessment. Their integrity depends on the panel being broad, the routes being defined precisely, and the published rules being followed. After the LIBOR scandals reshaped how the world treats benchmark-setting, freight indices moved toward the same governance discipline, with documented methodology and oversight.
The reason a benchmark is worth this machinery is that the spot freight market is opaque. A Capesize fixed for an iron-ore voyage from Brazil to China is a private contract between an owner and a charterer, often arranged through brokers, and the rate is not posted anywhere. Without an index, an owner negotiating a fixture would have only the handful of deals they personally heard about. The Baltic assessment pools the panel’s collective view of dozens of such deals into a published level that both sides of a negotiation can point to. That shared reference is what makes a freight derivative possible at all, because a forward contract needs an agreed way to determine the final settlement value.
The Baltic Dry Index: history and composition
The Baltic Exchange began publishing a daily freight index on 4 January 1985. That first index was the Baltic Freight Index (BFI), and it existed to settle a futures contract: the Baltic International Freight Futures Exchange (BIFFEX) contract, an early attempt at exchange-traded freight risk. The BFI was built from voyage routes, covering cargoes that ranged from small fertilizer parcels up to 120,000-tonne coal cargoes, and it carried no timecharter routes at the start. The Baltic Dry Index replaced it on 1 November 1999, continuing the time series but shifting the methodology toward timecharter assessments for distinct vessel classes. So the common shorthand is right in substance: the benchmark dates from 1985 as the BFI and became the BDI in 1999. Treat the long historical series with care, because the routes and vessels inside the index have changed repeatedly, and a 1990 BDI value is not measuring the same fleet as a 2026 value.
The BDI as published today is a weighted average of three timecharter sub-indices. Since 1 March 2018 the weights are 40% Capesize, 30% Panamax, and 30% Supramax. Before that date the index had been an equal-weighted blend of four classes, Capesize, Panamax, Supramax, and Handysize at 25% each, since 2009. The 2018 reweighting dropped the Handysize timecharter average out of the BDI entirely. The Exchange justified the change with a study of how each vessel type actually contributes to the dry-bulk trade, measured from fleet composition, utilization including ballast legs, and cargo moved using import and export data and AIS vessel-tracking, which put Capesize at the largest share. The Handysize class did not disappear from the Baltic stable; the standalone Baltic Handysize Index (BHSI) is still published. It is simply no longer a component of the headline BDI. The Exchange reviews the weightings on a periodic basis, so the 40/30/30 split is current methodology rather than a permanent constant.
One feature of the BDI confuses newcomers: it is a dimensionless index number, not a dollar figure. The component sub-indices are built from timecharter assessments quoted in US dollars per day, but the BDI itself is scaled by a multiplier so that it prints as a level (for example, 1,400 or 2,100) rather than as a daily rate. To read an actual earning level you go to the underlying sub-index timecharter average, which is published in dollars per day. The BDI level is the headline that financial media quote as a barometer of global trade; the sub-index dollar figures are what a chartering desk actually works from.
Capesize: the BCI and the 5TC
A Capesize is the largest standard dry-bulk class, too big for the Panama and historically the Suez canal in the laden iron-ore trades, named for the routing around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. The Baltic Capesize Index (BCI) is built on a standard reference vessel of 180,000 to 182,000 tonnes deadweight, non-scrubber-fitted, with defined dimensions and a maximum age. The Exchange specifies the standard ship precisely because a timecharter assessment only means something against a defined vessel; an older or larger ship earns differently.
The headline Capesize timecharter figure is the 5TC, a weighted average of five timecharter routes. Following the 2020 route changes, the C5TC basket is built from routes C8_14, C9_14, C10_14, C14, and C16. The weightings applied have been 25% on C8_14, 12.5% on C9_14, 25% on C10_14, 25% on C14, and 12.5% on C16. These routes describe round voyages and trips that together span the Atlantic and Pacific Capesize trades: C8 is a transatlantic round voyage in the Gibraltar-Hamburg range, C9 a fronthaul from Northwest Europe to the Far East, C10 a transpacific round voyage in the China-Japan range, C14 a round voyage from China out to Brazil and back, and C16 a backhaul trip. The “5TC” name means a five-route timecharter average; it is the number a Capesize FFA settles against. The Capesize TCE calculator works a specific Cape voyage through to its daily equivalent so an owner can compare a single iron-ore fixture against the published 5TC.
Two single voyage routes dominate the Capesize conversation even though they sit alongside the timecharter basket rather than inside the 5TC. C5 is the iron-ore route from West Australia, the Port Hedland and Dampier load region, to Qingdao in China, quoted in dollars per tonne. C3 is the iron-ore route from Tubarao in Brazil to Qingdao. These two cover the world’s two largest seaborne iron-ore flows into the Chinese steel industry, and a Capesize owner watching the market watches C5 and C3 closely because they price the cargoes that fill the class. When commentators say the Capesize market moved on a Chinese steel signal, the C5 and C3 dollar-per-tonne assessments are usually what moved first.
Panamax: the BPI
A Panamax in Baltic terms is a bulk carrier in the 65,000 to 85,000 deadweight band, named for the largest ship that could transit the original Panama Canal locks. The Baltic Panamax Index (BPI) is built on a defined standard vessel and a basket of timecharter routes. The core routes are P1A_82, a transatlantic round voyage with delivery in the Skaw-Gibraltar range; P2A_82, a fronthaul trip from the Skaw-Gibraltar range out to the Far East (the Taiwan-Japan or Hong Kong-South Korea redelivery range); and P3A_82, a transpacific round voyage with delivery and redelivery in the Far East range. The “82” suffix marks the standard-vessel size the routes were rebased to. The BPI publishes a timecharter average across its route set, and like the Capesize 5TC that average is the settlement reference for Panamax freight derivatives.
Panamax cargoes are more varied than Capesize cargoes. Where the Cape market is dominated by iron ore and coal, the Panamax fleet carries grain, coal, bauxite, and minor bulks, which makes the BPI sensitive to the agricultural calendar, the South American and US Gulf grain seasons in particular. An owner trading a Panamax across the grain season uses the charter TCE voyage calculator to test whether a specific grain fixture beats holding out for a period timecharter at the prevailing BPI level.
Supramax and Handysize: the BSI and BHSI
The Baltic Supramax Index (BSI) covers the geared bulk-carrier class around 58,000 to 63,500 deadweight, the workhorses that carry their own cranes and so can work ports without shore cargo gear. The BSI standard vessel is specified at roughly 63,500 deadweight, non-scrubber-fitted. The Supramax timecharter average is built from a larger basket of routes than the Capesize 5TC, reflecting how dispersed Supramax trading is across many small ports and minor-bulk cargoes. The Supramax sits at 30% of the BDI, equal with the Panamax.
The Baltic Handysize Index (BHSI) covers the smallest standard bulk class, around 38,000 deadweight, again geared. As noted above, the Handysize timecharter average was removed from the BDI in 2018, but the BHSI continues as a standalone benchmark for the Handysize trades and remains relevant to owners and charterers of those ships even though it no longer moves the headline number. The smaller the class, the more diverse the cargo book and the more local the rate drivers, which is part of why the Exchange concluded the Handysize contributed least to a single global dry barometer.
Time Charter Equivalent: the unit that ties it together
A dry-bulk voyage fixture pays freight per tonne of cargo. A tanker voyage pays a Worldscale percentage. A timecharter pays hire per day. These are not comparable as quoted, and an owner deciding whether to take a voyage cargo or fix the ship on time charter needs them in the same unit. The Time Charter Equivalent (TCE) is that common unit. It restates the economics of a voyage as a daily figure, the dollars per day the ship earns after voyage costs, so it can be set beside a timecharter rate directly.
The calculation strips the voyage-specific costs out of the gross freight and spreads the remainder over the days the voyage takes:
| Symbol | Meaning | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Hire / freight gross of commissions | USD | |
| Direct voyage spend | USD |
Source: Stopford - Maritime Economics
Calculate Time Charter Equivalent →The numerator is gross freight minus voyage costs. Gross freight is the lump sum the voyage earns before address commission and brokerage. Voyage costs are the direct, owner-paid spend of running that particular voyage: bunker fuel for the laden and ballast legs, port charges and disbursements at load and discharge, and canal dues where the routing transits Suez or Panama. Crucially, voyage costs do not include the ship’s daily running costs (crew, stores, insurance, maintenance) or capital cost, because TCE is designed to sit on the same line as a timecharter rate, and under a time charter the charterer pays the voyage costs while the owner still bears running and capital costs. So TCE answers a clean question: at this freight, on this routing, after I have paid for fuel and ports, how many dollars per day is the ship putting on the table for me to cover everything else.
The denominator is round-voyage days, the full door-to-door duration including the ballast leg to the load port, loading time, the laden passage, discharge time, and any waiting. Using round-voyage days rather than just the laden leg is what makes the figure honest, because a ship that ballasts 12 days to pick up a cargo is genuinely earning over the whole cycle, not only the days it is loaded. The Baltic Exchange itself publishes many of its dry-bulk timecharter routes as TCE in dollars per day for exactly this reason, so the index value and an owner’s own voyage estimate are already in the same unit. The break-even freight calculator runs the relationship backward: given a target daily earning and the voyage costs, it solves for the freight per tonne the owner needs to quote.
TCE is also why the same index can be read by both sides of the market. A charterer comparing whether to take a ship on voyage or on time charter computes the voyage TCE and sets it against the timecharter offer; the owner does the mirror-image sum. Both are working from the published Baltic route as the anchor, then adjusting for their own ship’s speed, consumption, and the actual port costs they expect. The index gives the market level; TCE personalizes it to the specific ship and voyage.
Why TCE beats a freight rate for comparison
A freight rate of, say, 25 dollars per tonne tells an owner almost nothing on its own. The same 25 dollars is a strong number on a short Pacific round voyage and a poor one on a long Atlantic-to-Far-East fronthaul that burns three times the bunkers and ties the ship up for two months. Converting both to TCE exposes which voyage actually earns more per day, which is the figure that matters because the ship’s costs accrue daily regardless of how the cargo is priced. This is the core discipline of voyage estimation, and it is why a chartering desk’s first move on any cargo inquiry is to run the TCE, not to look at the headline rate. The voyage profit calculator extends the TCE into a full profit-and-loss for a candidate fixture, netting the daily running cost against the TCE to show the margin.
How the daily assessment is made
The number that moves markets is built by people, not by an exchange match. Each Baltic sub-index has a panel of shipbroking firms, and every working day each panellist independently reports an assessment for each route they cover. A Capesize panellist reporting C5 is stating, in dollars per tonne, where they judge a standard 160,000 to 170,000-tonne iron-ore cargo from West Australia to Qingdao would fix that day, given the cargoes they have seen done and the negotiations they are running. The panellist is reporting a market level for the defined standard ship on the defined route, not the rate of any single deal they happened to broker. The Exchange collects the submissions, removes the route definition’s ambiguity by holding everyone to the same standard vessel and laydays, and publishes the panel average.
This is why route definitions are written so tightly. The C5 assessment specifies the load region, the discharge port, the cargo, the laycan window, and the reference ship size, because a panellist’s number is only comparable to another panellist’s number if they are pricing the identical notional voyage. Loosen the definition and the panel submissions diverge for reasons that have nothing to do with the market. The published guides run to dozens of pages of route descriptions for exactly this reason, and the Exchange revises them as trades shift, which is what happened when the Capesize routes were reworked in 2020 to reflect the iron-ore and bauxite flows that had grown into the trade.
Panel governance is the integrity layer. Panellists sign a code of conduct, the methodology is documented and published, and the Exchange operates an oversight function so that a number used to settle a financial contract can be defended. After the manipulation of interest-rate benchmarks reshaped how regulators treat any reported reference figure, freight-index providers moved toward the same documented-methodology, conflict-managed model. The result is that a Capesize 5TC settlement value can be traced back to dated panel submissions against a published route specification, which is what a cleared derivative needs.
Tanker indices and the Worldscale system
The tanker market prices freight differently from dry bulk, and understanding the Baltic tanker indices means understanding Worldscale first. Worldscale is the New Worldwide Tanker Nominal Freight Scale, published by the Worldscale Association in two arms, one in London and one in New York, each governed by panels of leading tanker brokers. It is a freight schedule, recalculated every year, that lists a flat rate in dollars per tonne for thousands of port-to-port combinations. The 2026 schedule covers on the order of hundreds of thousands of route combinations, including multi-port loadings and dischargings.
The logic of the flat rate is that it is calculated to give the Worldscale standard vessel the same notional daily return on every route. The standard vessel is a 75,000-tonne capacity tanker, an Aframax-scale ship, with defined speed and bunker consumption. For each route the Association works out the round-voyage time, the bunkers burned at the standard consumption, the port costs, and the canal or transit fees, and sets the flat rate so that after those costs the standard ship earns its target daily return. That flat rate is, by definition, Worldscale 100, written WS100. Because the schedule is rebuilt annually using updated bunker prices, port costs, and exchange rates, the WS100 flat rate for a given route changes year to year even though the route is unchanged. That annual revision is why fixtures always reference the current Worldscale year.
A tanker fixture is then quoted as a percentage of the flat rate. A fixture at WS50 pays 50% of the published flat rate per tonne. WS135 pays 135%, that is 35% above flat. So Worldscale separates the slow-moving cost geography of a route (captured in the flat rate, updated once a year) from the fast-moving market level (captured in the percentage, which moves daily). This is why a tanker broker can quote “WS75” and a counterparty halfway around the world knows exactly what dollars-per-tonne that implies on a given route, without restating the whole cost structure. The Worldscale freight calculator converts a Worldscale percentage and the flat rate into the dollars-per-tonne and the lump-sum freight for a stated cargo quantity.
BDTI and BCTI
The Baltic Exchange publishes two headline tanker indices. The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index (BDTI) tracks crude-oil and dirty-product tanker rates across vessel classes from VLCC down to Aframax and Panamax. The Baltic Clean Tanker Index (BCTI) tracks clean-product carriers, the ships moving refined products like gasoline, jet, and diesel, where cargo cleanliness constrains the trade and the fleet skews smaller toward MR and LR sizes. Each index is a basket of named routes, and the route assessments are themselves published in Worldscale terms and, increasingly, as dollar-per-day TCE so owners can read them directly.
On the dirty side, the most-watched single route is TD3C, the 270,000-tonne VLCC voyage from the Middle East Gulf to China. TD3C is the bellwether of the crude-tanker market because it prices the largest single crude flow on the largest tanker class; when analysts talk about VLCC earnings, the TD3C assessment, often expressed as a TCE in dollars per day, is the reference. The VLCC TCE the Exchange publishes blends TD3C with other VLCC routes. Other dirty routes carry their own TD codes covering Suezmax and Aframax trades in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
On the clean side, two routes anchor the Atlantic and Pacific product trades. TC2_37 is the 37,000-tonne clean voyage from the Continent (Rotterdam load region) to the US Atlantic Coast, the classic transatlantic gasoline arbitrage route. TC7 is the 30,000 to 35,000-tonne clean voyage from Singapore to East Coast Australia, a core Pacific product trade. Both are quoted on Worldscale and settle the corresponding clean-tanker freight futures. A clean-tanker owner reads the BCTI for the overall market and the individual TC routes for the specific trade their ship is positioned for.
Container and LNG indices
Dry bulk and tankers are chartered ship by ship, which is why the Baltic panel-assessment model fits them. Container shipping is different: it is a liner business, run on published schedules and slot rates, dominated by a handful of large carriers and their alliances. So the container benchmarks are built by different providers and on a different unit, dollars per container (per FEU, the forty-foot-equivalent unit, or per TEU) on a named trade lane rather than dollars per tonne or per day.
Three container indices are quoted most often. The Freightos Baltic Index (FBX), produced by Freightos in association with the Baltic Exchange, tracks spot container rates on twelve major global trade lanes and is published daily; it is positioned as the IOSCO-compliant, EU-regulated container benchmark. The World Container Index (WCI), produced by the maritime research firm Drewry, tracks spot rates on eight major lanes such as Shanghai to Rotterdam and Shanghai to Los Angeles and is published weekly. The Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI), introduced in 2009 and run from the Shanghai Shipping Exchange, reflects spot export rates out of Shanghai across many destinations and is valued for its sensitivity and timeliness given Shanghai’s standing as the world’s largest container port. A shipper or carrier choosing an index for a contract escalation clause weighs lane coverage, publication frequency, and regulatory standing, which is why these three are not interchangeable.
LNG freight is younger as a traded benchmark. Spark Commodities publishes LNG freight price assessments, and its first set of LNG freight indices, listed at the end of the first quarter of 2021, underpin the LNG freight futures listed on the Intercontinental Exchange. The two anchor routes are Spark30S, an Atlantic-basin route from Sabine Pass on the US Gulf Coast to the Gate terminal in the Netherlands, and Spark25S, a Pacific-basin route from the North West Shelf in Australia to the Tianjin terminal in China. The contracts trade and settle in US dollars per day, which puts LNG freight on the same per-day footing as a dry-bulk timecharter even though the cargo and the ships are specialized. As a benchmark family, LNG freight assessment is the newest member of the freight-index world and the least standardized, which is why owners and traders still cross-check assessments against fixture reports more than they do in the mature dry and tanker markets.
How the indices drive freight derivatives
The most consequential use of a freight index is not informational, it is contractual. A Forward Freight Agreement (FFA) is a cash-settled contract on a future freight level, and it settles against a published Baltic route or basket assessment. A Capesize 5TC FFA for a given month settles on the arithmetic average of the daily BCI 5TC timecharter figure over that month. No ship and no cargo change hands. At settlement, the party that agreed to receive freight pays or is paid the difference between the agreed forward level and the realized index average, in cash. The index is the referee.
This is what lets an owner or a charterer manage freight-rate risk without touching a physical ship. An owner who expects to have a Capesize open in three months but fears the market falling can sell a forward FFA at today’s forward level; if the spot market drops, the loss on the eventual physical fixture is offset by the gain on the paper position, because the FFA settles against the same index the physical market tracks. A charterer with cargo to move in the future does the mirror trade, buying forward to lock a freight cost. The cleaner and more trusted the index, the tighter this hedge works, which is the practical payoff of the Baltic’s documented methodology and broad panel. The mechanics of forward freight hedging are covered in the forward freight agreements article.
Spot versus period is the other axis the indices structure. A spot fixture is a single voyage at today’s rate. A period charter fixes the ship for months or years at an agreed daily hire. The forward curve built from FFA prices, the term structure of freight, is what an owner reads to decide between the two: if the period rate on offer sits above where the forward market values the spot earnings over the same horizon, fixing period locks in a premium; if below, staying spot keeps the upside. That decision is made on the same index data that settles the FFAs, so the benchmark sits underneath both the physical and the paper sides of the freight market. The mechanics of the period side, hire, redelivery, and off-hire, are treated in the time charter party article.
Owners and charterers also use the indices for plain benchmarking. A chartering manager justifying a fixture to a board shows the fixture’s TCE against the published Baltic route average for the same period: beating the index is the evidence of a well-traded book. A bank financing a bulker stress-tests the loan against historical BDI lows. A commodity trader budgeting freight for a year’s iron-ore offtake uses the forward Capesize curve as the freight assumption. In each case the index is doing the same job: supplying an agreed, auditable market level that a private negotiation can be measured against.
Reading the indices without misreading them
A few interpretation traps recur. The BDI level is a dimensionless number, so a move from 1,400 to 1,500 is not “100 dollars”; to get dollars you go to the sub-index timecharter averages. The BDI is also heavily geared to the Capesize-iron-ore-China chain through the 40% Capesize weight, so a swing driven entirely by Chinese steel demand can move the headline index while the Supramax minor-bulk market is flat. Reading the BDI as a clean proxy for all of global trade overstates it; it is a dry-bulk freight benchmark first, and a trade barometer only loosely and at a lag.
Worldscale percentages carry their own trap: a WS number is only meaningful with its Worldscale year, because the flat rate it multiplies is rebuilt annually. WS75 in a year of high bunker prices can pay more in dollars per tonne than WS90 in a low-bunker year, because the underlying flat rate moved. Comparing tanker fixtures across years on the Worldscale percentage alone, without converting to TCE or dollars per tonne at the relevant flat rate, produces nonsense. The Worldscale freight calculator exists partly to force that conversion.
Cross-index comparison is the third trap. The dry indices are dollars per day (TCE) once you reach the sub-index level; tankers ride on Worldscale percentages; container indices are dollars per box on a lane; LNG is dollars per day again but on specialized ships. They are not on one scale and cannot be added or averaged into a single “freight” number. The unifying move, where it is possible, is to convert each to a dollar-per-day TCE for the relevant ship, which is exactly what the Time Charter Equivalent is built to do, and why it is the connective tissue of this whole cluster.
Limitations
The Baltic indices are panel assessments, not transaction prints. Their accuracy depends on the panel seeing a representative slice of the market and reporting it honestly, and in a thin or distorted market, for example during a sudden geopolitical reroute, the assessment can lag the true clearing level for a day or two until enough fixtures inform the panel. An index is a consensus view, not a guaranteed execution price; an owner cannot always fix at the published level on the day.
The route definitions, standard vessels, and weightings change. The BDI weighting moved to 40/30/30 in 2018, the Capesize 5TC route set was revised in 2020, and the Exchange reviews weightings periodically. Any analysis that splices a long historical index series must account for these methodology breaks, because the index is not measuring a constant basket over decades. The figures and route definitions stated here reflect current Baltic Exchange and Worldscale methodology and are subject to revision by those bodies; before relying on an exact weighting or route specification for a contract, confirm against the live published guide for the relevant year.
The TCE formula shown here is the standard market form, gross freight minus voyage costs over round-voyage days, but real voyage estimation adds detail this single line omits: speed-and-consumption optimization across laden and ballast legs, scrubber and fuel-grade choices under the sulphur cap, weather routing, address commission and brokerage deductions, demurrage and despatch exposure, and ballast-bonus terms. The calculators linked here model these to varying depth; none replaces a full voyage estimate built on the specific ship, the actual port costs, and the bunker prices on the day. Worldscale, finally, prices the standard vessel, and a real tanker that is faster, slower, larger, or smaller than the 75,000-tonne reference ship earns a different real return at the same WS number, which is why the percentage is a market signal, not a statement of a particular ship’s economics.
See also
- Time charter equivalent calculator: converts voyage freight and costs into dollars per day on a timecharter basis.
- Voyage profit calculator: full voyage profit-and-loss netting TCE against running cost.
- Worldscale freight calculator: turns a Worldscale percentage and flat rate into dollars per tonne and lump-sum freight.
- Break-even freight calculator: solves for the freight per tonne needed to hit a target daily earning.
- Charter TCE voyage calculator: voyage-versus-charter TCE comparison for a specific cargo.
- Capesize TCE calculator: Capesize-specific voyage TCE for iron-ore and coal fixtures.
- Laytime: the voyage-charter time accounting that feeds demurrage and despatch into a voyage estimate.
- Forward freight agreements: how FFAs cash-settle against Baltic route and basket assessments.
- Time charter party: hire, redelivery, and off-hire under a period charter, the spot-versus-period counterpart.