UK Inflation Hits 3.5%. Your Chart Still Says Buy.

Prices rose 3.5% in the 12 months to September. Economists wanted less. Economists always want less.

The culprit is motor fuel. Petrol. The thing you pour into a Vauxhall so it can take you to a job that pays you in pounds.

The Bank of England now faces a rate hike. Markets are pricing it in. Traders are calling it "cemented." Nothing is cemented. Cement has a better track record than a rate forecast.

Here is the chart. Price went up. Price will go up more, or less, or sideways. A line on a screen does not care about the Office for National Statistics. It cared about nothing before September. It will care about nothing after.

Retail traders will now open a "UK inflation thesis." They will short the pound at 2 a.m. in a kitchen lit by a single oven clock. They will use leverage. They will call it "macro."

Their macro is a man in Swindon watching a candle turn red and whispering "priced in" like a prayer.

Fuel costs surged. So the Bank of England may raise rates to fight a petrol problem. Rates cannot make crude oil cheaper. Rates can make your mortgage meaner. That is the whole toolkit. A hammer, pointed at a gas station.

Pundits will say this "complicates the path ahead." The path was never simple. The path was drawn in crayon by people who also predicted 2% inflation.

Buy the dip. Sell the rip. Fill the tank. Only one of those was ever going to cost you less than your trading course.

Your 50-day moving average has no opinion on Threadneedle Street, which makes it the best-informed person in the room.

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