Baltic Exchange Limited operates as a membership organisation within the shipping marketplace.

Its subsidiary company, Baltic Exchange Information Services Limited (BEISL) is responsible for the production of freight market information.

This section provides a brief overview and summary of BEISL's role in the determination, calculation, and management of benchmarks within the shipping industry. It aims to clarify BEISL's methodology, decision-making process, and key responsibilities in maintaining the integrity of its benchmarks.

A more detailed explanation is to be found in our Guide to Market Benchmarks(GMB) for our ocean bulk benchmarks, the FBX Guide for our container benchmarks, and the BAI Guide  for our air freight benchmarks.

BEISL publishes a series of assessments of the prevailing market rate for a specified route in the physical ocean bulk, container or air freight markets, as well as forward assessments for the FFA and options markets.

The production of our indices is regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). BEISL is an approved Benchmark Administrator under the FCA’s Benchmarks Regulation (BMR) which aims to ensure benchmarks issued are robust and reliable. This approval was on-shored to the UK authority from the EU post-Brexit.

Each ocean bulk freight index is based on an assessment of the next fixture or price point, taking into account, amongst other things, previous transactions, market conditions and supply and demand.  To achieve this, we select and vet independent freight experts (shipbroking firms) to submit route assessments based on the criteria set out in the GMB.

For the container and air freight markets a third party Calculating Agent is utilised for data collection and initial index creation before passing to BEISL for checking and assessing pre-publication.

All routes or price assessments reported are as representative as possible of the world’s principal cargo trades and reflect trade flows in the physical markets.