San Francisco Onion Futures Company

The people behind this are a real (if silly) student organization at UChicago and Northwestern campaigning for the legalization of onion futures trading. Sometimes they will aggressively hand out free onions to passerby on campus. It's quite entertaining.

They have a website also: https://onionfutures.org

Are these contract prices really "per onion"? Or are they actually per pound or per kg? Up to $9.39 seems very expensive if it's really the price for a single onion.

I thought maybe they're some sort of special exotic onion variety, but I don't see anything to suggest that.

For those who don’t know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

(which also banned box office receipt futures)

A fun thing is to go on FRED and make a graph with prices from onions and, say, corn to see the differences in volatility.

US Department of Agriculture publishes a national potato & onion report (issued daily!):

https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/fvdidnop.pdf

Readers may wish to skip ahead to page 4, where onions are discussed.

> FAQ

>Is this legal?

>Yes, to the best of our knowledge. 7 U.S. Code § 13-1 prohibits "contract[s] for the sale of [...] onions for future delivery [...] on or subject to the rules of any board of trade in the United States." The San Francisco Onion Futures Company is not a board of trade, defined as an "organized exchange or other trading facility". We sell contracts privately to individual buyers, and do not operate any exchange or secondary market.

Performance art against that law?

Also November onions are an absolute steal compared to the adjacent months!

Since this may be a legal gray area, they should host it on a Tor onion site.

In an onion related note... is the "I sell onions on the internet" guy still around? I believe he was selling Vidalia onions.

Why was the law against onion futures passed in the first place? Couldn’t the same scheme be done with garlic, or sweet potatoes, or turnips or something?

These are 1 onion contracts? Outrageous!

>and for hedging risks associated with weather and market fluctuations

Why don't existing futures cover this? Are onions unique in how sturdy they are?

These onion prices are quite high! The novelty probably drives up prices. Too bad there isn’t a liquid market for onions

How many onions / lbs does a contract represent?

Can we tokenize this or get some prediction markets going on Polymarket?

hell yeah, based