Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire So-OIL

Went down a whole $ .10 cents here yesterday. 😡

The increase rate never mirrors the decrease rate.
Too many Benjamins to be made each way....

Thats the bottom line.
X amount already paid beforehand at low price
Jack up the price based on current market rate as fast as you can

If pre purchased x amount gets you thru increase and into decline in market value
Drop price as slow as possible to max profits.

If buying x amount of futures during price increase
Stretch out decrease in price even longer.


Benjamins.....

Oil is back over $100 today.

It's Putin's fault, says our marvelous leader.....

The traders know demand will spike in Summer, holiday's ,etc so they buy/sell accordingly. Same goes when a hurricane gets into/projected to get into the Gulf. They speculate that supply will be disrupted and run the price up.

Local Murphy station has it now for 3.99/gal. Two days ago they had it for 4.29/gal. Pretty good drop.


87 octane.

Always figured it was the speculators, knowing that travel would increase during those times of the year.

Stations don't come down until they sell off the gas they bought at the higher price. And get a new delivery which allows the to pay off the remaining expensive gas by averaging the new price and the old.. Sunce sales of expensive gas tend to be slower the downswing in prices always seems to take longer..

If I was cynical I'd say this translates to "people on the road are gonna buy it no matter what so we can raise the price."

I'm sure lots of people look at it like that. Another one is that distillates, aka heating oil/kerosene/diesel fuel always go up in the winter since a huge amount of the population buy heating oil to heat their homes and the traders know that as well.

There will be a point where people won't buy as much of it unless it's a necessity. Not sure what that number is, but we can't be far off. I think airline tickets will rise dramatically as well if they haven't already.

He wasn't lying.

Folks think you make profit on the margin between inventory bought, and sold.

Not true.

Unless it's your last day in business.

Profit is what is left after you replace inventory, so you can be in business tomorrow.


07-08 when gas was climbing, I delivered to a guy who owns one station
in a little mining town. Moved 8k gallon/wk. One load.

I'd pull in and he'd ask "How bad is it Karl?" "Well John, the numbers on my
bill are bigger than the ones on your sign."

He didn't make enough on the last load to buy the one I was delivering.
It was costing him money out of his wallet to sell gas.

I worked out a deal between my wife (who runs a c-store) and him.
She called him every time prices rose, that way he could at least keep
current and break even.

We didn't charge the retailer for 10 days, the same terms we had with the supplier at the terminal. That gave him plenty of time to sell the load at the higher price and pay us, and we both made money. We only had 3-4 retailers on a COD basis like you're describing.

I read somewhere that when prices per barrel spike that oil companies raise prices at a lower rate than the futures increase. This creates a squeeze on their profits that they then get back by lowering prices at the pump more slowly than we would like to recoup their profit losses.

I hate to see the slow crawl downward but it made sense. Anyone that can verify?

Interesting. He paid me on delivery.
We served our stations, only had a couple independent stations
we delt with. A high risk deal, most who we tried to serve ended up
sticking us. One, for well over $100k.

Once they bounce a check,
You are stuck in a catch 22.
Cut them off, they close and you lose.
Let them pay part and keep delivering, hope it works out.
Sometimes, it does.


We paid the suppliers by the next day.
That saved us 1 cent.
To most that sounds like nothing. And it isn't, much.

But you know the math.

8k/load x.01 x 3 loads/day x3 trucks.
$720 per day, free money, just for paying at delivery instead of
waiting a couple days.
Since we moved that daily, once you started the cycle you were
paying the same money everyday anyhow. It was just a matter of
maintaining finances until you were able to get caught up.