The core decisions of bulk shipping businesses can be summarized as the timing and the choice of period for which carrying capacity is traded. In particular, frequent decisions to trade freight either with repeated spot transactions or with a one-off long-term deal critically impact business performance. Even though a variety of freight trading strategies can be employed to facilitate the decisions, chartering practitioners have not been active in utilizing these strategies, and academic research has rarely proposed applicable solutions. The specific properties of freight as a tradable commodity are not properly reflected in existing studies, and limitations have been reported in their application to the real world. This research focused on the establishment of applicable freight trading strategies by taking into account two properties of freight: time perishability and term-dependant pricing. In addition to traditional trading strategies, artificial neural networks were applied for the first time to the test of freight trading strategies. The performances of the trading strategies were measured and compared to produce a remarkable outperformance of the ANN. This research is expected to make a significant contribution to chartering practices by enhancing the quality of chartering decisions and eventually enabling the effective management of freight rate risk. In addition to methodological expansion, the result will propose a way to approach the controversial issue of freight market efficiency.

• Hee-Sung Yun(Interocean MS Ltd.) First Author
• Sang-Seop Lim(Graduate School of Korea Maritime and Ocean University)
• Ki-Hwan Lee(Division of Shipping Management, Korea Maritime and Ocean University) Corresponding author