The national average gasoline price will hit $4.03 on Labor Day. This tops the 2012 record of $3.83. Patrick De Haan from GasBuddy announced this. He gets paid to watch numbers go up and down.
Retail traders spent the last decade learning to read candlestick patterns on their phones. They memorized RSI divergences. They argued about Fibonacci retracements in Discord servers at 2 AM. Not one of them glanced at the gas price chart. It's been trending up since April. The breakout was clean. The volume confirmed. They missed it because they were too busy losing money on SPY puts.
Americans will now pay record prices to drive to cookouts where they'll complain about record prices. The irony is free. The hamburgers are not.
De Haan probably has a whole presentation ready. Slides about refinery capacity and crude oil futures and seasonal demand patterns. None of it matters. The price goes up because the price goes up. That's technical analysis. Everything else is a story people tell themselves so they feel smart about getting f*cked at the pump.
Labor Day used to honor workers. Now it honors the labor of filling your tank three times to afford the drive to see relatives you don't like. Progress looks different than the textbooks promised.
The 2012 record stood for fourteen years. Traders love to talk about breaking resistance levels. They draw lines on charts. They wait for confirmation. Gas prices broke resistance while they were arguing about whether Tesla was overvalued. It was. Still is. Doesn't matter.
Americans will pay $4.03 per gallon and then open Robinhood to buy shares of an EV company that won't deliver a car until 2029.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
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