THE DAILY

Friday, May 8, 2026

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The Daily

RXO posts a quarter Wall Street can finally underwrite

RXO’s first-quarter print is the inflection point its shareholders have been waiting two years for, and the market voted with size. Shares jumped 14.27% Thursday afternoon to $22.43, more than double the November low of $10.43, after the brokerage delivered $6 million in EBITDA for the quarter and guided second-quarter EBITDA to a range of $27 million to $37 million.

CEO Drew Wilkerson framed the turnaround as a supply story, not a demand story. "For now, demand remains soft," he told analysts. "Our customers are still managing through macroeconomic uncertainty, and we have yet to see a sustained increase in the demand for goods." Instead, capacity is shifting. Carriers are leaving the market on the back of regulatory enforcement that began tightening late last year, and the brokerage squeeze that crushed margins on the way up may start to ease as brokers’ pricing to shippers catches up to the spot rates they’re paying carriers.

The bigger story is technology. RXO has been the quiet competitor while C.H. Robinson has built a 141% stock run on its "lean AI" message, and Wilkerson finally moved out of that shadow on Thursday’s call. "We made significant progress on our roadmap, especially when it comes to putting AI into action," he said, crediting the Coyote Logistics integration with creating a single data layer for agentic deployment. Chief Strategy Officer Jared Weisfeld said productivity, measured as loads per person per day, is up "mid teens percentage" over the trailing 12 months. Agentic AI automated more than 500,000 phone calls in the quarter alone.

Headcount is moving in lockstep. RXO ended 2025 with 9,218 team members, down 6.6% from a year earlier, and Wilkerson said brokerage headcount fell a "double digit percentage" in the first quarter. C.H. Robinson, the template here, has cut from 14,990 to 11,705 employees in two years. Wilkerson’s normalized cycle math frames the upside: mid-single-digit EBITDA margins in a normal cycle, high single to low double digits in an upcycle, against a Q1 margin of 0.6%. The path from here to a 5% EBITDA margin is the real bull case.

So What? Brokerages competing with RXO and C.H. Robinson now have a measurable AI productivity benchmark to hit, and shippers should expect the cost-to-serve curve at scaled brokerages to fall faster than capacity tightening would suggest. If you’re rebidding brokerage capacity in the second half, model in productivity gains, not just market rate. The cheap broker on your list a year ago may not be the efficient broker today.

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Top Stories

Trucking adds 4,300 jobs in April, biggest clean gain since 2022

Truck transportation employment climbed to 1,496,600 in April, an increase of 4,300 from March and the largest month-over-month gain unconnected to a one-time event since October 2022. The hire came after a 12-month stretch in which payrolls fell nine times. Arrive Logistics’ David Spencer credited "nearly six months of steady rate improvement and gradually tightening capacity conditions," and economist Aaron Terrazas said April showed no spillover yet from late-February’s oil shock. Couriers added 37,900 jobs and warehousing held steady at 1,830,700.

So What? Carriers that strategically add capacity now will be positioned for what Spencer called the strongest rate environment since the pandemic-era surge. Shippers entering the back half of bid season should reset benchmarks: the cheapest carriers on the load board last year are the ones leaving, and rates reflect it.

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Forward Air loses 10% revenue customer, abandons full sale, stock dives 40%

Shares of Forward Air sank more than 40% in early Friday trading after the carrier said a contract logistics customer representing roughly 10% of its $2.5 billion in annual revenue plans to diversify away from a single provider. The strategic review that began in early 2025 produced "no actionable proposals" for a full company sale. Management is now pivoting to a partial sale: the intermodal unit and two legacy Omni businesses, which combined for $394 million in revenue last year. Forward also reported a $34 million Q1 net loss and $304 million in trailing-12-month adjusted EBITDA, with net debt at 5.4 times EBITDA.

So What? A motivated seller in the intermodal and forwarding space tends to set the comp for the next round of M&A. Watch the Omni divestitures, expected within 60 to 90 days, for the first read on what private buyers will pay for distressed cross-border and brokerage assets in 2026.

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FedEx targets late May for MD-11 return with Memphis-Miami test flight

FedEx will dispatch six maintenance crews to 16 global locations to remove engine pylons from 29 grounded MD-11 freighters and ship them back to Indianapolis and Memphis for redesigned Boeing bearings, executives said Wednesday during an internal town hall. Two aircraft are already out of the hangar with repairs complete. The first revenue flight, pending FAA approval of Boeing’s means of compliance, will run Memphis to Miami. The fleet has been parked since the Nov. 4 UPS Flight 2976 crash in Louisville, which the NTSB linked to fatigue cracks in the pylon’s aft lug. The grounding cost FedEx $175 million in the third quarter alone.

So What? 3 million pounds of daily widebody capacity is about to come back online, starting with U.S. domestic lanes and ramping into international peak. Forwarders that absorbed FedEx’s lost capacity over the past six months should expect rate pressure as those flights return.

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Marad opens RFI on small modular reactors for U.S.-flag commercial ships

The Maritime Administration has issued a Request for Information on developing Small Modular Nuclear Reactors for commercial shipping, framing the effort as part of the Trump administration’s plan to revitalize U.S. shipbuilding. Marad Administrator Stephen Carmel said the agency is seeking input on regulatory structures, market conditions, and liability frameworks needed to scale the technology. Domestically, only Kairos Energy is actively building an advanced SMR, with demonstration reactors under construction in Tennessee. The NS Savannah, launched in 1959, remains the only U.S. nuclear-powered civilian vessel ever built.

So What? An RFI is a long way from a hull. The signal that matters is the policy framing: shipboard nuclear is now part of the U.S. shipbuilding agenda, alongside port access, insurance, and inspection rules that will need to be rewritten. Yards and operators evaluating capital plans through the early 2030s should track the SMR regulatory pathway as a credible variable.

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What We’re Watching

▸ How brokerages report Q1 against the RXO benchmark. RXO guided Q2 EBITDA up to nearly six times Q1 and credited capacity exits plus AI-driven productivity. Watch C.H. Robinson’s next update and the smaller public brokerages for whether the same supply story holds across the peer group, or whether RXO’s gain is an idiosyncratic catch-up trade.

▸ Forward Air’s 60-to-90-day Omni divestiture window. Management is targeting buyers for two legacy Omni businesses inside the next quarter and the intermodal unit by year-end. The price tags will set the comp for the next round of distressed cross-border and forwarding M&A in 2026.

▸ FedEx’s MD-11 reactivation pace. Two aircraft are out of the hangar; 27 more are scattered across 16 locations. Boeing’s repair procedure is in front of the FAA. The first revenue flight, Memphis-Miami, is the milestone. The cadence after that determines how much widebody capacity returns to the network before peak.

That’s your Daily for today. See you tomorrow.

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