Gasoline futures for August delivery are poised to top $2 a gallon next week if they close above $1.925 today, according to a technical analysis by Lind-Waldock & Co. in Chicago. “If you get a close above $1.925, that’s critical resistance,” said Blake Robben, a strategist at Lind-Waldock, a division of MF Global Ltd. “If we breach that, the next target is $2. The August contract is “currently correcting within a steady three-month uptrend,” Robben said in an interview. Futures were “way overextended” when they reached a high of $2.0844 on June 16, the highest intraday price since Oct. 14. Futures, which last topped $2 on June 19, yesterday settled at $1.9016 a gallon on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The $1.925 target represents the high on June 22, when the fuel reached $1.926. “June 22 was a distribution day, where the close of $1.8555 is lower than the open” of $1.9172,” Robben said. “We’ve been closing inside the highs and lows of that day for three days.” Any close above $2, which Robben calls a “significant psychological resistance level,” means prices would next meet resistance at $2.0844, the high of June 16. The next resistance is at $2.3267, the difference between the high of $2.0844 on June 16 and the low on June 24 of $1.8421, added to the June 16 high. Any close below the June 22 low of $1.825 “would be considered a technical breakdown and the next downside target would be the 50-day moving average at $1.70.” Technical traders watch for patterns on daily charts for clues to price direction, and may sell or buy based on those signals.

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