Nine of Britain's biggest forecourt chains began fitting a fourth digit to their pump price boards on Friday. Brent crude, the benchmark the world uses to price oil, rose above $100 a barrel for the first time since July as the fighting between the US and Iran spread across the Gulf. The chains call the digit a precaution. Nobody installs a digit they do not plan to use.
When I covered the last breach of $100, I noted the market barely flinched. That was the tell. A market that does not flinch has already given up (see 1929, 1973, 2008, and every holiday I have ever booked). The flinch was hiding in the signage budget.
Consider the plumbing. A three-digit board tops out at 999.9p a litre, about six times today's price. The chains have now bought headroom for £9,999.9 a litre. That is not a hedge, which is a bet that limits your losses. That is a position. The signage trade has gone long on the apocalypse, and the signage trade has never once been wrong about anything it chose to bolt onto a pole.
"The digit is dark for now," a spokesman for the Forecourt Signage Association said on Friday. "It is not a forecast. It is just there. Like a lifeboat is just there."
