How the Forecasts and Projections are generated

Premium tier members of FastFloat have access to ‘Forecasts’ (short-term) and ‘Projections’ (longer-term) for the fuel adjustments for the policies they’re accessing.

These Forecasts and Projections can be toggled on and off from the ‘Policy View’ page using the toggles highlighted in the screenshot below

FastFloat produces updated Forecasts and Projections on a weekly basis for virtually all of the fuel indexes we cover, based on a proprietary algorithm that has been developed on thousands of historic data points.

The fuel price projections for an index can be seen in the ‘Fuel Price Data’ tab and ensuring the Projections and Forecast toggles are on.

FastFloat forecasts are estimates of fuel prices (and resultant adjustments). These cover periods that are in the past, but where the full month or full week fuel price data has yet to be published or periods in the near future, where we can monitor real time trades on the crude oil and wholesale fuel markets.

FastFloat projections are typically 1-13 months into the future. Core inputs to the longer-term projections are the Crude Oil Futures markets and the Diesel Futures Markets, which allow investors to speculate on the US Dollar denominated price of Crude Oil and bulk Diesel in future months. These markets are also the mechanism typically used for ‘fuel hedging’, whereby companies effectively lock in a fuel rate by pre-purchasing futures contracts at a set rate.

As with any forecast or projection, it’s simply a best guess at where the price is likely to be in the future (and resultant Fuel Policy Adjustment) based on current information and will go up or down as the market changes.

It may be that your business has a fundamentally different take on where fuel prices are heading. If you’re right and the Diesel Futures / Crude Futures markets are wrong, there’s big money to be made - see [here] if you want to know about trading on the futures markets.

Note: Currently projections are produced on a monthly basis, with all weekly projections within a month using the same monthly figure.