I was originally interested in knowing when we might hit $4 gasoline, or what gasoline would cost at $100 oil.

Here's the deal - I keep very close track of average gasoline and oil prices(in the US) as most of you know. In fact I make my own averages out of daily prices. So the numbers are cool.

So it's a simple plot with excel. You match a week's oil price with the price of retail gasoline. Two columns. I use raw numbers and moving averages, I can manipulate them any way I want, and I do, and I found there wasn't much difference in this particular case, so I just stuck with my four-week averages. You can see in the one how the pink correlation, which was one shift variation I used doesn't really differ too much from the blue. In fact, I removed the pink trendline in that case because it almost perfectly overlapped the shown blue one. In other words, the dots may be in different places, the trends are not.

Then I let excel draw what it calls a "trendline" through the datapoints. This is the line in the middle.

I then used the drawing function in Excel to copy that line (twice) and moved those copied lines north and south and extended them to form what looks like the barrel of a gun.

I moved those parallel "outriggers" to just about the outer bounds of where the known points lay. I don't know if they hold the key to the future.

I did one graph with data from Jan 2002 to present and one from Jan 2004 to present.

The best part about these two graphs and why they are two of my favorites is the fact that they work for me.