Ron95 - Black box operation

Until end of June the up and down of the price of Ron95 can be accurately predicted using the weekly closing price of WTI weekly candlestick.

But in July the weekly closing price could no longer be used but the weekly average price still could provide some indication to the weekly price of Ron95 until it reached Rm2.12 on the first week of August. In the following two weeks in August, both the weekly closing prices and the weekly average prices were dropping but the price of Ron95 moved higher and stayed there despite the fact that WTI had dropped from above US$50 a barrel to below US$47 a barrel. It really puzzled me.

Now looking at the previous week candlestick, if we talk about the closing price, it has dropped from US$48.51 to US$47.87. But if we talked about the weekly average price, it moved from US$47.81 to US$47.89, about unchanged. Let's wait for this Wednesday's announcement and try to guess what is going on inside the black box.

Click 'ECRL - Milestone or tombstone?' for an interesting article by Dennis Ignatius.

The Cost

Chinese railway projects in Africa, for example,

1. The 752 km Addis Ababa – Djibouti rail link which was inaugurated in 2016 cost RM15 billion.  2. The 782 km Port Sudan – Khartoum railway cost RM6.4 billion.
3. The 470 km Mombasa – Nairobi railway cost RM17.18 billion.
4. The now abandoned 462 km high-speed railway project in Venezuela cost RM32 billion.

The 668 km ECRL, on the other hand, will cost a whopping RM55 billion and that does not include land acquisition costs and the inevitable cost overruns.

Projected Freight Capacity

The government is projecting the demand for freight capacity along the east coast corridor will rise to 53 million metric tons by 2030. How realistic is this given that the entire KTMB network today carries no more than 6.5 million metric tons annually?

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