Again, we’re 80% to 85% contract rates, but in October we took a leg down on contract rates. And as we look at spot rates today, those are certainly starting to firm up and our contract rates are starting to firm up as well. So I think that we can debate about whether or not we’re at the bottom. But I think when you look at the margins that are more commodity end markets are generating, when you look at the demand, sorry, the supply destruction, the capacity destruction that’s going on today in the industry, I mean, I’ve read something that said net relocations of carrier authorities are 6000 to 8000 carriers per week right now. When you look at a lot of those different things, when you look at the loss of LP drivers, owner operator drivers, and the shift to company drivers, when you start pulling a lot of those things together, I just think the rate environment is at the bottom.
We’ve never had a Q2 or Q3 where we haven’t benefited with some kind of uplift in seasonality. Even if you look at the Great Recession, we still had good seasonality in the business. And I don’t know that people appreciate this, but really, if you take the trough that we had in the Great Recession, we were back to 80%, 90% of peak rates, prerecession peak rates within 12 months. So I think that people underestimate, I can’t speak for Flatbed, but I think people underestimate that the resiliency of the industry, particularly the diversification of our model, and that its exclusively industrial facing. So I think, is 2023 going to be from a rate standpoint, a blowout year? No, it’s not. It’s not going to match what we had in 2022, but we haven’t assumed that.
There’s a lot of other things that we have going for us this year, as I mentioned. But I do think that 2024 we are expecting 2024 will be at 2022 peak rates. And really, if you look at cycles and assume that you get some repetition in cycles to predict kind of future performance, by 2025 we’ll have another massive peak. So again, we’re pretty bullish on things and we think that 2023 will be the low point if you had to call it.
Aaron Coley: Sorry Bert, I would just add to that, look, we can on a forward-looking statements we can kind of talk about that. But just to reiterate, we feel very comfortable with our outlook and achieving flat year-over-year results. We have a great net CAPEX that delivers quite a bit of free cash flow for value to the shareholders. So we’re fully committed to this and when we talk about 200, it’s a nice theory, but we believe the peak trough frame put in our current budget that we’re putting forth is a reasonable assumption that we can deliver.
Bert Subin: Got it. That’s super helpful. Maybe just my last question and clarification, how should we think about brokerage, Jonathan, I know you made some comments saying you just shift from some of the overflow to using your own assets and that’s a higher margin opportunity. But if we think about it from a modeling standpoint, can you expect Flatbed I guess, that brokerage there sees double-digit declines, and I guess logistics is maybe a little more healthy? And then just my clarification question, in terms of share count that’s been all over the place and now you have the repurchase, should we assume like 53 million as the year starts out? Thanks again for the question.
