# How to measure expected price growth rate for oil?

How can someone measure the expected annual price growth rate for oil?

Also, where can I find past annual price growth rate for oil values?

Any help would be appreciated.

## 1 Answer

There is a futures market for crude oil: for example http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/light-sweet-crude.html gives a price now for May 2018 of US$\$49.54$compared with a cash price now of US$\$47.82$

The futures price being higher than the cash price is described as contango and is why there are excess stockpiles of crude oil. In the past the comparison has sometimes been reversed, described as backwardation and associated with low stockpiles. For a graph of this over time, see http://marketrealist.com/2017/02/return-backwardation-mean-crude-oil-prices/ though the relationship is more complicated than described there

For historical oil prices the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has several sets of numbers, such as https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WTISPLC going back to 1946