Viva, Ampol both trade red ahead of expected Albo fuel rationing presser

If you’re brave enough to have raised your neck to survey the land of Australia’s finance news ecosystem on Wednesday, you already know that at 7PM AEDT tonight, Albo will be addressing the nation on Australia’s fuel situation.

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What people are widely expecting – and we’ve had more than enough hints from the Canberra apparatus that this will be the case – is that tonight, Albanese will declare Australians will have to ration fuel.

That could look like mandating Work From Home (WFH), it could look like a general appeal to common sensibility, or it could include harsher measures or even fuel top-up limits at servos.

Little is guaranteed at this point, apart from the fact that this is likely to set off another wave of conspiracy nutjobs crying about government control, which is true, I suppose, if you’ve never before considered how society works.

(This Market Link journalist, some ten years ago, when he had less ambition and a little less regard for personal conduct, could and would have told you: “You can always tell when someone hasn’t been arrested.”)

Anyway, you can see the impacts of the looming announcement weighing on two stocks – Ampol (ASX:ALD) and Viva Energy Group (ASX:VEA) – two Australian companies heavily exposed to their servo operations.

(For overseas readers, a ‘servo’ is a service station, for Americans specifically, a gas station, despite the fact we call it petrol here and nobody drives LPG anymore.)

At any rate, at the time of writing, Ampol was down eight-tenths of a percent at $2.55/sh while Viva was red in similar territory. Still, as I said today on The ASX Today, we can see over at Woodside (ASX:WDS) that a significant decline in Brent prices hasn’t rattled sentiment too much; indeed, Brent remains over US$100/bbl.

And as for Ampol, it’s still up over 40% this month alone. That’s on the back of fuel prices, and that they haven’t declined any larger in line with a drop in Brent on Tuesday also suggests – against my thesis – that the market mightn’t be too concerned about what comes out of Albanese’s mouth this evening.

The real question is, if the government wants to ration fuel meaningfully, it will need to enforce consumption limits. That’s the big key here, but without an insider source or crystal ball, we’ll just have to wait.

By the way: per one popular AI dashboard doing the rounds right now – I can’t be too entirely aware of where it’s sourcing data from – we’ve got about 33 days left of diesel.

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