A year and a bit ago, I noticed an interesting pattern in how gas stations set their prices. Since then, the gas stations have reverted back to their normal pattern of setting one price per day. So I’ve been trying to find a method to fill up when it’s the cheapest.

Lately, I’ve been trying to predict the price of gas at the stations based on the cost of a barrel of crude. There is some empirical correlation here because whenever gas peaks, there are stories in the news saying that the price per barrel has reached an all time high. But does this relationship hold when the price of gas is not at an extreme?

I set to find out the answer, using a spreadsheet to track the price of crude futures against the local gas prices. A long documentary short, I got tired of having to input the numbers every day and writing spreadsheet formulas to summarize my data. I can only say that it seems that the price changes do track together, although I had one odd week where the gas stations seemed to purposely go against the trend.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: gas, research