Leading commodities, markets-data news, and blockchain expert joins FreightWaves as Executive Editor and will develop the BiTA Community Organization membership engagement platform.
When DAT, Nodal and our TransRisk division launch the first trucking futures market, it is imperative that financial market participants understand how the freight market works. It is also important these individuals have reliable and near-time reporting on developments that impact freight rates. This includes both fundamental and pricing data.
It is a monstrous task to educate the financial community on how events in the freight markets will impact pricing and even more challenging to educate the freight participants on how trucking futures will work. The good news is that we have recruited the top voice in the commodity markets to help with this. He even helped to launch the Platts Data Brent assessment, the leading benchmark of global oil prices.
John Kingston, a veteran executive of the financial and commodities news and data powerhouse – S&P Platts, has joined the FreightWaves team as Executive Editor and BiTA as Head of Member Engagement. In this role, he will be working with the freight editorial team to broaden coverage, content, and data that financial market participants need to understand how the freight markets are impacted by regulatory, economic, technology, and business climate developments. Additionally, he plans to bring Wall Street to Main Street, with his coverage of broader news stories that come from outside the freight space. John plans to truckify Wall Street news coverage.
Interesting enough, members of BiTA will also benefit from John’s arrival. He most recently ran the S&P Global task force on Blockchain and has deep connections and knowledge of blockchain in the capital markets business.
John had a 30+-year career with McGraw-Hill/S&P Global, with most of his time at the Platts division of the company. At Platts, where he had a key role as the group rose from less than 100 employees to its current level well in excess of 1,000, Kingston held a wide variety of positions. He began his career in 1985 as a crude oil market reporter, rising eventually to become Director of Oil and Director of News. The Platts Data Brent assessment, now the world’s leading benchmark, was launched by Kingston in the late 1980’s. He was awarded the 2015 IAEE Award for Excellence in Written Journalism by the International Association for Energy Economics.
Kingston was also Platts’ leading “talking head,” with numerous appearances on such networks as CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He has presented at conferences on energy, and more recently blockchain, around the globe. In 2015, he was recruited to join the parent company’s management team, where he served as both President of the McGraw Hill Financial Institute and Director of Global Market Insights, working with the team of worldwide economists. He also launched the S&P Global task force on blockchain, seeking to determine how the nascent technology would impact the company.
Prior to joining Platts, he began his career with commodities-oriented media at American Metal Market. He also has worked for newspapers in New Jersey and Virginia. He is a graduate of Washington & Lee University.
FreightWaves is building market-wide economic models using aggregated data-sets to understand and analyze the health of the freight economy. To date, the company has accumulated data-sets that represent hundreds of billions of dollars in freight transactions. The information is then modeled into aggregated indices that provide a near-time map of the market and be used to create actionable outcomes for participants.
As the founding sponsor organization behind BiTA (Blockchain in Transport Alliance), FreightWaves building a panel of experts that can work with the most important technology and logistics companies in the space to construct standards and encourage commercial outcomes.
FreightWaves is the number one source to help participants navigate the freight markets, through its news service and SaaS platform; the company is the founding organization and sponsor behind BiTA (Blockchain in Transport Alliance), the transportation industry blockchain forum, think tank, and standards organization; and the creator of the world’s first freight futures contracts that help organizations with exposure to US trucking rates to hedge and trade exposure.
