Y’all do realize that gas prices sinking this low are a sure and certain harbinger of imminent economic collapse ?
Here’s the thing though. Today’s pump price already has future price fluctuations factored in to today’s price, to the best of the abilities of the hundreds of thousands of people in the petroleum industry.
If you were certain to make a killing if only you could buy a bunch of gas today, store it, and use it a year from now, then Exxon would be trying to do the same thing. They’d buy up cheap gas today, store it for a year, and sell it at a high price. Or perhaps pump and refine less oil today, keep it in the ground for a year, and sell it next year.
Of course one reason they don’t is that it would take a lot of infrastructure to store appreciable amounts of gasoline for a year, plus they have existing equipment such that even though it would be more valuable to sell the gas for a higher price next year they’ll have a bunch of gas next year, and if they sell today’s gas today at least they’ll get some money from it.
So everyone in the petroleum industry is trying to guess: Should I sell this load of gasoline today or tomorrow? At what price? Should we refine this crude today? Should we invest in this storage tank? Should we invest in this pipeline? Should we invest in this oil field? And the price you pay at the pump represents millions of cumulative decisions about how valuable gasoline will be today vs how valuable it was yesterday or last year vs how valuable it will be tomorrow or next year.
So the odds that you’d be able to beat the market by buying up cheap gas today and using/selling it next year is fairly slim. Lots of really smart people with access to information you don’t have are trying to do the same thing, and if they could easily make money buying gas now they’d be buying up gasoline and taking it off the market, which would drive gas prices up to the point at which you couldn’t make money buying gas today to sell tomorrow.
On the other hand, that requires efficient rational markets. There’s the old joke about the two economists walking down the street who see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. The first one says, “Hey look, 20 bucks! Let’s pick it up!” The second says, “Nah, don’t bother, if there were really a $20 bill lying there someone would have taken it already”.
Nope, pure coincidence. 
Funny, they said the same thing the last time gas hit US$4.50 a gallon.
I remember doing this with Priceline in the early 00s. They did the name-your-own-price on gas, where local gas stations would look at your offer and either say yes or no to your price. You’d buy X gallons at whatever price you offered (and they accepted). I don’t remember if they sent you a pre-paid debit card or if it was somehow loaded on your own credit card or what.
I loved buying my gas this way. I was bummed when Priceline discontinued the program.
Put your money where your mouth is. If it’s so certain that economic collapse is imminent, why don’t I see taking people all sorts of short positions everywhere to benefit from said collapse?
If you wanted to take physical possession of the underlying asset you’d have to pick up the 42,000 gallons at the port of New York. If you want to use the gasoline in your automobile I don’t know what your arrangement with the Federal and State government would be, the port prices do not include state of federal excise, sales, or road use taxes. That would be up to you to take care of. Here’s a link to someplace to start. I note a big jump jump the April futures.