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Originally Posted by VApeople
Did you get that info from a government publication or by visiting your local gas station?
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It's not info from a government publication. It is the daily closing price on the publicly traded commodity market. RBOB, which is the trading symbol for regular gasoline (it actually stands for Reformulated Blendstock for Oxygenate Blending). This is the grade of gasoline used for futures contracts on the public traded commodity exchanges. If you were long on the futures of gasoline over the past month, you got clobbered and if you played it short, you made a big return in a short period of time.
It usually takes some time for the commodities price to work its way down to the pump. Unfortunately, it takes longer for price drops than when the price is going up.
As an aside, the entire oil market has gone down. I keep track of the guaranteed home heating price offered by my oil company. Gasoline is one thing, but we go through 850-900 gallons of home heating oil a year in CT and the price of home heating oil is far more impactful to us than gas prices. In the space of one week, there was substantial decline in the fixed price I could contract to buy oil for the remainder of the winter, going from $4.179 to $3.859. That's a 7.7% drop in five days, pretty significant. Even at the lower price, that's still close to $4,000 a year with the service contract included....I won't miss paying that if we ever move full-time to FL.
All of this could easily change this week due to the situation in Israel. The oil markets do not like geopolitical events or uncertainty, particularly in that region of the world. Oil could go right back up.