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

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.

> 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!

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.

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

Hard to take this seriously when it just lists “onion” as the commodity. The onion we extract from the ground is not the same everywhere. It can be either light or heavy based on the size and density. Light onion rolls more easily than the thicker heavy onion.

The sulfur content also affects the onion quality and price: “sweet” onion has low sulfur content, “sour” onion has high. Sweet onion can be used much more easily than sour onion, which requires more culinary processing to extract the sulfur compounds that make your eyes water.

Onion has been shown to have negative impact on climate, especially on air quality with people in confined spaces, but despite this it continues to be a valuable resource that is processed into many everyday foodstuffs: white, yellow, red, salad, and for specialist applications the highly refined shallot and pearl compounds as well.

Alas it seems likely that geopolitical upheaval will mean onion trading at ever higher prices. Brest Roscoff Intermediate (light, sweet onion) is trading over $8 a bunch (yes, crude onion is traded in weird units!) since the war began.

There’s also a bright future for synthetic. environmentally friendlier onion! Hydroponically grown scallions — so called “green” onion — have some interesting applications in the aerospace industry e.g. in-flight sandwiches and salads.

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.

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?

Looking forward to my 2 onions in November! Anyone have some good recipes?

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

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...

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

I'll take 2000 please.

Someone at the onion needs to see this.

The Future's Bright. The Future's Onion.

These are not forwards, not futures.

I get that it’s a joke, since onion futures are illegal. But isn’t trading all futures regulated?

How many onions / lbs does a contract represent?

These are 1 onion contracts? Outrageous!

This is very good.

>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? You can use derivatives of the weather itself even.

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

Maybe I open a tor store for people trading these onions with one another?

hell yeah, based