Contract age

Contracted age is an additional option for the Contract length market metric in that lets you exclude market rates coming from older contracts from being shown in the platform.

To measure global trends, Xeneta aggregates market rates by looking at both short and long term contracts separately. When viewing rates associated with long-term contracts, the rate on any trade lane for a single day may come from a combination of contracts signed anywhere from a day ago to several months ago.

If you find that contracts from several months ago do not reflect the current market rate, Contracted age offers three additional options for filtering long-term contracts based on how recent they are:

• All contracts — shows all long-term contracts that are valid for any given date
• Last 3 months — shows only rates from valid contracts that began no more than 3 months ago
• Last 6 months — shows only rates from valid contracts that began no more than 6 months ago

We recommend that you start with the Last 3 months option when comparing yourself to the market. Otherwise you may get a somewhat distorted view of the market if you select to include older contracts.

Contract age and today's rate

Let's look at an example where a search on a trade lane has returned five long-term contract rates. Each contract starts and ends at a different time, and each contract has a different freight rate associated with it.

Depending on which Contract age option you select for this search, the rate you see in Xeneta will be different:

• All contracts will show the final rate for today as a combination of contracts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6
• Last 6 months will show the final rate as a combination of contracts 2, 3, 4, and 5
• Last 3 months will show the final rate as a combination of contracts 3, 4, and 5.

Notice how Contract 1 is not factored into any calculation because it's not valid as of today.

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We use only six contract rates in the example above purely for illustration purposes. In practice, Xeneta needs a minimum of five rates across at least two different providers to show a market rate for any date.