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  • Hacker News
  • It's an onion Michael, how much could it cost, $9.41?
    by padjo
  • 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.

    by Reason077
  • 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

    by mimorigasaka
  • 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.

    by shoo
  • For those unfamiliar, there's an excellent Planet Money episode on how trading onion futures got banned in the 50s.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/10/14/448718171/epis...

    by envoked
  • Since this may be a legal gray area, they should host it on a Tor onion site.
    by haakon
  • > 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!

    by Barbing
  • 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.

    by cwal37

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San Francisco Onion Futures Company · Birbla