Freight lanes: what's hot and what's not?

What's hot varies from day to day, area to area, season to season, year to year and by freight type.

 

Get a DAT or IT account and start searching locations. I would start with your areas and pick out the loads that look like they pay the best. Then I would use DAT or IT to look at the market for that area and see what they look like. If the freight coming back isn't TOO awful that might be a decent lane. If there is freight going somewhere else that still pays well rinse and repeat. The goal is to keep the truck moving at a good rate. Remember that going from a good market to a bad market means you need more money and going from a bad market to a good market means you need less.

 

Load boards. DAT and Internet Truckstop are the two big ones. You pretty much have to pick at least one. (I think Truckstop is probably slightly better for smaller trucking companies... but I could be wrong about that)

 

Dude, I am going to give you a bit of advice. Freight lanes are easy to find but sometimes you have to look beyond the rates and look at the weights, the products and sometimes the customers if you can find them in the data. As I said in your spot market thread, the problem is we have so many load boards with so much miss information that is it hard to get a grip on a big picture. One reason why I like Landstar, I (or one of the office people teach my drivers how to use their data to find niches to make money so I do recommend LS as a stepping stone if not make good money from.

 

Just put all of your questions in one thread, it will be your learning Megathread, instead of creating multiple ones

 

naw, those multiple question threads suck, they get muddled quickly and sometimes turns into a free for all.

 

Here's some pretty solid advise for ya...

DO NOT BUY A TRUCK!!!!!!
SAVE YOUR MONEY.