Steve McCarthy will be joining FreightWaves as Executive Vice President of Events and Training following a long career with S&P Global Platts, the leading provider of commodity price reporting, news, and analytics. McCarthy spent nearly 15 years at Platts, growing their conference, awards and training businesses.
McCarthy was responsible for taking Platt’s education and community platform to a global market, with a presence that includes events and training in 30 countries. He was a 2-time recipient of the McGraw Hill/S&P Global Corporate Achievement Awards for sales and marketing excellence. He also worked for Cambridge Energy Research Associates (now part of IHS Markit) where he led program development and overall operations for CERAWeek.
“Over the past two years, we have studied commodity markets around the world, including those that have been successful and those that have not,” Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves, said in announcing McCarthy’s hiring. “We have learned that it takes a very specific formula to create a liquid futures market in any industry. This includes market-level news and data, a strong community that believes and support the market, and a lot of education. Steve’s track record for developing a platform for education and community events will be instrumental in accelerating the development of a liquid futures market. As a bonus to our BiTA Community support, Steve was instrumental in launching S&P Global Platts’ highly successful Digital Commodities Summits, which rapidly have become worldwide in scope.”
FreightWaves is hosting its first event focused on the future of transportation in Atlanta on May 22-23, 2018. The event will bring over 600 senior executives at some of the largest transportation providers and the technology companies that service them. In September, FreightWaves is hosting an event in conjunction with Georgetown University related to safety, security, and public policy. There are also plans to launch an event in November in Chicago that focuses on the freight markets and how companies should be thinking as 2019 approaches.
In addition to large scale events, FreightWaves is looking at creating a series of single-day regional and segment events that will focus on education, training and certification around key concepts in the transportation space.
“Surface freight transportation has a bigger impact on the North American economy than oil, but the tools to monitor, analyze, and de-risk the freight market are limited,” McCarthy said. “I believe the model of launching cold-start commodity markets in other markets, such as oil, electricity, and metals, can be applied to the freight markets. I look forward to joining the team and participating in this journey.”
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 partnered with 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.
FreightWaves.com is the most trafficked and engaged news source in the freight markets, according to Alexa. The company runs the BiTA community–the transportation industry blockchain forum, think tank, and standards organization–and is creating the world’s first freight futures contracts to help organizations hedge and trade their exposure to American trucking prices.
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