Time to fix given Red Sea latest?

la531983

Worth saying that wholesale gas prices are currently at their lowest price since early August....

MattMattMattUK

debitcardmayhem said:

GingerTim said:

I think this all depends on your personal appetite for risk.

Moral of the tale, don’t go sailing in the red sea.

Unless you are armed!

Swipe

I switched and fixed on 1st Jan to secure a 13.02p night rate vs 16.22p on SVT with my old supplier. The reason being, I'll use 5000kWh between now and April, but from from May to October I'll only use 4kWh a day and I can exit my fix mid November if rates are cheaper then. Plus I got a £50 switch referral and £50 compensation as my switch didn't go smoothly but is now resolved. Also it's been more than 14 days since my previous supplier's final bill and I still haven't received my credit refund so I can add another £30 compensation to the savings.

Strummer22

la531983 said:

Worth saying that wholesale gas prices are currently at their lowest price since early August....

Yes this a key reason why the price cap is set to fall in April. The supply contracts for April to June are going to be signed and sealed soon if they haven't been already. Any price spikes will affect the price cap in July or later.

No-one can really predict what will happen, but any disruption and increase in prices is likely to be much smaller than we got due to the Ukraine war. With Ukraine a huge amount of instant gas supply (i.e. pipeline) suddenly became unavailable, or at least "gas non grata". It was a huge logistical problem to fill the supply gap with alternative sources. In the current situation the supply is only constrained by routing. You can send ships a different way, which might add 250% to the shipping cost, but shipping makes up only a small % of the total cost so overall it's not as significant.

If conflicts spread and, for example, Arab states decide they don't want to send us LNG any more, that would be a different kettle of fish...

I did fix with Octopus a few months ago, before the war in Israel started. At that point the price cap predictions were up slightly in Jan (turned out to be correct) and a slight fall thereafter. Predictions for April and July are now down substantially so I might end up slightly worse off, but I'm not confident enough on that to consider paying the exit fee. I will revisit in April!  

MultiFuelBurner

The big hike (which to be honest for those on the price cap is still there) has spooked so many customers that they will rush to a fix.

Good for the nerves and budget I agree but all the data is showing us a downward trend in prices so personally if I was in the market for a fix it wouldn't be now. I would review every 3 months and take in all the data available.