How it works

The idea

Wars, blockades and OPEC decisions hit crude oil, gas and carbon futures instantly. Retail prices cannot follow that fast: fuel already in tanks was bought at the old price, refineries and wholesalers adjust their contracts on a schedule, and stations protect their margins. The result is an information window of roughly 5–15 days in which the direction of the next pump-price move is already visible in the markets. The engine covers every country and region we have retail price data for; taxes, margins and adjustment speeds are kept per country.

We deliberately do not read news or social media and do not use sentiment analysis. We let the futures markets do the interpreting and only measure how their price signal travels down the supply chain.

Step 1 — bring the market price to the pump's units

Brent trades in US dollars per barrel; pumps sell local currency per litre. Every country is modelled in its own currency, converted with the latest foreign-exchange reference rate (crossed via the dollar):

C = Brent / 158.987 × (local currency per USD)        // local currency per litre

One barrel is 158.987 litres. For example, in the euro area the local rate is USD→EUR. Scale-dependent settings (default margins, the signal threshold, the confidence width) are defined in euros and converted to each country's currency the same way.

Step 2 — where should the price be?

The equilibrium pump price is what today's wholesale market implies once the refining margin (crack spread), distribution and retail margin, fixed excise duty and VAT are added:

P* = (α·C + crack spread + margin + excise duty) × (1 + VAT)

Step 3 — rockets and feathers

Retail prices shoot up like rockets when costs rise and drift down like feathers when they fall. The current price closes the gap to P* exponentially, at a different speed depending on the direction:

P(t+k) = P(t) + (P* − P(t)) × (1 − e^(−λ·k))

• Prices rising: λ ≈ 0.22 → half of the move is done in about 3.2 days.
• Prices falling: λ ≈ 0.08 → half of the move takes about 8.7 days.

Both speeds are re-tuned every week against what actually happened, and the resulting error is published on the accuracy page.

The signal

• Buy now — the price is expected to be at least about 3 euro cents (in local currency) per litre higher within 3 days.
• Wait — the price is expected to be at least that much lower within 5 days.
• Neutral — anything else.

Shocks

When the converted crude price moves by more than 3% in a day it is recorded as a shock and followed through three stages — wholesale repricing, refinery to pump, and pump prices settling. See the active shocks.

Open API

Everything on this site is also available as a free, read-only JSON API: forecasts per country, region and fuel, active shocks, accuracy metrics and the list of covered countries. No sign-up or key is needed. See the API documentation (interactive reference).

Limits

This is a statistical model of a physical lag, not a prediction of markets themselves. Government price caps, tax changes and stations' local decisions can move prices in ways it cannot see. Treat it as one input, not as financial advice.