Data sources
APEX ingests two kinds of freight price — spot-market postings and executed-freight prices — and weights executed prices more heavily because they reflect real booked rates. Enrichment fills gaps with lower-quality inferred prices that never feed an estimate.
APEX's estimates are only as good as the prices it ingests. It draws from two kinds of source, weights them by trust, and tags every observation with a quality score so that only real, observed prices drive an estimate.
Two kinds of price
- Spot-market postings — freight offered on exchanges, with an asking or posted rate. High volume, but a posting is an ask, not necessarily a deal.
- Executed-freight prices — rates on freight that was actually booked and moved. Lower volume, but the strongest signal of what a lane really pays.
Source weighting
Because executed prices reflect real transactions, APEX weights them more heavily: an
executed-freight observation counts 3× a spot posting in the averages and percentiles. The
reported observation_count remains the count of distinct observations (unweighted), so it
tells you how many data points stand behind a number while the weighting shapes the number
itself.
Quality scoring and enrichment
Every observation carries a quality score reflecting how directly its price was known:
| Quality | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Observed (highest) | The price was directly recorded on the observation. |
| Corridor-median (reduced) | The price was missing and filled from the corridor's median during enrichment. |
| Country-median (lowest) | Filled from a broader country-level median. |
Enrichment fills gaps so that volume and analytics stay useful, but only observed prices feed
an estimate — inferred prices are excluded from the percentiles a /estimate
returns. This keeps the number you price a lane on grounded in real data, while still letting
analytics reason over broader coverage.
Why this matters
The weighting and quality tiers are what let APEX turn a noisy stream of postings and bookings into a percentile band you can trust. How that band's trustworthiness is scored is covered in Confidence & quality; how it is served is in How APEX works.
Confidence & quality
APEX computes two distinct trust scores that must not be confused — an estimate's confidence (volume + freshness, per request) and a corridor's aggregate quality (sample size, source diversity, price variance, computed during aggregation).
Using APEX from TOVR
How TOVR consumes APEX — the cost engine and bid recommendation combine APEX's market percentiles with a carrier's cost floor, and shipments are enriched with APEX market prices. APEX stays a pure market-data service; the cost floor comes from TOVR.