Issue 26.38: the boxes are here. A port-inland card in, the restart card out, and the floor moves to $2.35.

Issue 26.38 of the Positioning Matrix went out on 14 September. One card added, one retired, one rewritten from scratch, nine updated in place, and two of the deck's fixed numbers moved. The deck still holds 35 plays. Here is the receipt.

In: Port-Inland Surge

For four editions this deck carried the same September import forecast: a cliff, −5.7% year over year, and a mid-September demand hole to plan around. The 8 September Port Tracker replaced that with 2.31M TEU, +9.6%, the busiest month of 2026. The explanation is mechanical rather than a demand miracle — vessel delays out of China and rerouting away from the Panama Canal pushed July and August cargo into September, and consumers kept buying underneath the tariffs — but the freight is real and it is on the water now.

A box discharged in the second half of September dwells, clears and transloads into a 53-foot trailer one to three weeks later. That puts the truck demand in the last week of September and the first three weeks of October, inside the Q4 audition window. The geography is what makes it a card for a Midwest-and-South fleet rather than a West Coast story: Savannah and Charleston feed the Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte DC clusters; Houston feeds Dallas and San Antonio. All of it is inside the normal loop.

The card's moves: position toward the port-side DCs (Pooler, Port Wentworth, Summerville, the Houston transload belt) from the week of 21 September — that window is open now; quote the inland leg as the headhaul, not the backhaul; treat the Southeast's softness as the entry rather than the warning, because the boxes have not hit the trailers yet. The region stayed weak on schedule — Truckstop had it down again for the week ending 11 September, and Florida–Southern Georgia was the country's weakest origin at $1.44/mi. Then the inland evidence arrived where the card said it would: SONAR had Houston flip from one of the loosest truckload markets to the second-tightest of 135 in under two weeks, with van spot out of Houston up 37% week over week — September boxes becoming October truck freight. Savannah and Charleston into Atlanta and Nashville should follow on the same one-to-three-week lag. And a hard back edge: November is 2.00M TEU, −0.9%, the first forward month to flip negative, with January at −1.0%. Nothing on this card extends past October without the ~8 October Port Tracker confirming it.

Out: Post-Holiday Restart

The Labor Day card ran both halves exactly as written — the four-day scramble, the thin Tuesday, the Wednesday snap-back — and the compression week's linehaul print came in at $2.21, up 2 cents, the first weekly gain after five straight declines. That was the whole thesis. The restart half is retired until Thanksgiving, when the same shape runs again with a longer tail. The post-mortem is in two new plays for the holiday-hurricane fortnight.

Rewritten: Surcharge Lag Harvest is now Surcharge Lag Reversal

Issue 26.37 carried a card about collecting the lag: diesel had dipped 5.3¢, the surcharge was still indexed on the higher number, and the truck was roughly 0.8¢/mi ahead. One print later the pump put on 36.8¢ to $5.967 and the same lag turned into a 5.7¢/mi headwind. The card was rewritten around the discipline that survives either direction: know which EIA week every broker's schedule indexes to, diary the catch-up, and never carry the exposure on a flat rate.

The two numbers that moved

• All-in floor: $2.30 → $2.35/mi. Below it, hold the truck.
• Diesel-high signal: $6.25 → $6.50/gal. The old trigger was 28 cents away when the issue was written. Rebased so the signal means something.

The capacity half of the deck did not move, which is the point. It has since moved further in the carrier's favour: van load-to-truck printed 10.95 for the week ending 11 September — a record for week 37 — against 5.33 a year ago and 6.20 at the 2021 peak, then firmed to 11.22 for 13–19 September as load posts came back 15.0%. Van truck posts are −40.2% year over year, and total equipment posts of 153,509 are the lowest week-37 count in DAT's records. Tender rejections were 13.45% on 10 September and rose about 75 basis points in the week to 15 September. Every re-bid card leads with those, and this month they read better than the rate does.

The postscript the issue could not include

The 14 September EIA print was holiday-shifted to Tuesday, one day after the issue went out. It came in at $6.285/gal, up 31.8¢ — the highest in EIA's history, the second-largest move of the run stacked on the largest. The Midwest was $6.250, the Gulf Coast $6.027, and the Lower Atlantic jumped 49.1¢ to $6.096, straight onto the port-inland corridors this card is built on. The surcharge-lag card's read — that a second up-week widens the gap before it narrows — is exactly what happened. Then came a third: $6.529 for the week ending 21 September, up 24.4¢, another record. This time the move split by region in a way that matters for this card. The Midwest jumped 43.0¢ to $6.680; the Lower Atlantic rose just 4.3¢ to $6.139 and the Gulf Coast 15.0¢ to $6.177. The port-inland corridors went from the week's biggest spike to some of the cheapest diesel in the country. Then the run broke: $6.382 for the week ending 28 September, down 14.7¢, the first decline in four weeks — and the port corridors led it down. The Gulf Coast fell 22.2¢ to $5.955 and the Lower Atlantic 18.6¢ to $5.953, the two cheapest regions in the country, while the Midwest, with Joliet back in service, came off only 15.4¢ to $6.526. A truck running Savannah–Atlanta or Houston–Dallas now fuels 57 cents a gallon under one running out of Chicago — wider than when the refinery was down. Against a surcharge table still indexed on the $6.529 record, that is close to nine cents a mile in the truck's favour on exactly the lanes this card is built on.

Both of the fixed numbers the issue touched had to move again — twice. The Q4 stress test went to $6.75 after the national average blew through $6.25, then to $7.25 in Issue 26.40. And the diesel-high signal, rebased from $6.25 to $6.50 in this issue, went to $6.85 in Issue 26.39 and $7.15 in Issue 26.40 — three rebases in three weeks, because a trigger a few cents from the pump is not a trigger. The 28 September print put the national pump 77 cents from the new signal, the first week it has had any room. Joliet going down on 14 September and coming back in the last week of the month is the whole story of the Midwest premium: it took the regional spread from 22 to 50 cents, and the first print after the restart did not bring it back. The math is in the all-in was lying.

The full deck — all 35 plays with deep-dives and action lists — is on the Playbook page, free, no signup.