Why has U.S. gasoline climbed 9.4% over the past month?
U.S. retail gasoline is 4.603, up 9.4% over the past thirty days. Any operator setting street prices wants to know what drove that and whether the climb has room left in it. The benchmarks give a clearer answer than the pump does.
Crude is the first place to look, and it moved. Brent is 97.93, up 8.2% over the same thirty days, and WTI is 90.85, up 5.9%. The wire backs the direction. Oil traded back above $100 on Brent this month, and OilPrice reported crude climbing after President Trump ruled out easing sanctions on Iran, with Brent at $103.13 and WTI at $89.53 at the time of that writing. Analysts cut China's fourth-quarter crude import forecast by 400,000 barrels a day, and foreign investors pulled $3.2 billion out of Indian markets as the oil rally returned. Crude went up over the month, so the obvious read is that gasoline followed it up. That read holds until you check the wholesale gasoline price itself.
RBOB gasoline futures are the wholesale price retail follows. They are 3.206, down 6.7% over the same thirty days. The wholesale price of gasoline fell while the retail price rose. RBOB is also below its thirty-day high of 3.587, so the futures market has already come off its peak. Retail told the opposite story: at 4.603 it is close to its own thirty-day high of 4.628. One benchmark is near the top of its range and the other has turned down.
A thirty-day change is a photograph of two dates, and the two prices are not on the same part of the curve. Crude ran up earlier in the window on the Iran supply crunch, RBOB ran with it, and retail followed on a delay the way retail always does. Then the front of the market turned. FreightWaves reported crude flows out of the Persian Gulf getting closer to pre-war levels, which pushed oil down, and the DOE/EIA average retail diesel price posted its first decline in four weeks after a three-week run of record highs. Wholesale gasoline turned with it. Retail has not fully caught down yet. So the 9.4% is real, but it is measuring the distance from a month ago to a peak the wholesale market has started to leave.
Diesel shows the same shape, only sharper. Retail diesel is 6.382, up 14.0% over thirty days, while ULSD futures are 4.738, up only 5.4%. Retail ran far ahead of the wholesale it rests on. The diesel retail-to-wholesale spread makes it plain: it is 1.627 now, wider by 0.523 over the thirty days. FreightWaves put the same DOE number at $6.382 a gallon, down 14.7 cents on the week, the first weekly drop in a month. Wholesale diesel is easing and the street price is only starting to follow.
The refining math agrees. The 3:2:1 crack spread is 65.25, down 8.16 over the thirty days. Crude rose and product futures did not keep pace, so the margin between them narrowed. That is consistent with RBOB falling while Brent climbed. Refiners had a narrower month on paper even as the pump looked expensive.
So the honest answer has two parts. Retail gasoline is up 9.4% mostly because crude climbed earlier in the month on the Iran supply crunch, and retail followed that move up on its usual delay. The part the headline number hides is that the wholesale benchmark it should track has already turned down, off its high and down 6.7%, while retail is near its top. The climb is looking backward at a peak the market is walking away from.
For an operator, that points somewhere useful. With retail near its high on both products and wholesale easing, the gap between street price and cost is wide right now, and it is widening measurably on diesel. A marketer holding street prices while replacement cost falls has a good stretch here, and it is earned, because whoever timed inventory into this run took the risk on the way up. It may not last. If RBOB and ULSD keep sliding as Gulf barrels return, retail could follow them down and close the gap. If crude turns back up on another Iran headline, the whole thing could reset. I am confident the retail climb lagged wholesale rather than led it. I am not sure how fast retail gives it back, and the two crude headlines this month point in opposite directions, so I would not call the next thirty days from these numbers.
And that was just the data. See you tomorrow.