> 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!
I believe 10/15 is a huge harvest day for Vidalia(??) Onions so crop will be scarce leading up to the harvest. As my multi-player free farming simulator has shown me. https://farm-mp.frontpageintelligence.ai/
Apparently I cannot join. It says the world is full. Did all of HN join?
I am increasing the number of farms allowed...try in a couple of minutes
This is really neat, but, the wages and other costs are way too ballooned to envision as a simulator parallel to 'real life' farming.
It runs on 250 year epochs so if you join late the costs have inflated quite a bit
Converting one or two fields to BNG use generates a lot of free cash. Grain trading is also a way of winning. As is converting to solar.
November pumpkins is where the money is.
> The San Francisco Onion Futures Company is not a board of trade, defined as an "organized exchange or other trading facility".
I hate to argue but then what would they define this as, if not an organized exchange or other trading facility?
7 USC § 1a(37) defines an "organized exchange" as
> [A] trading facility that— (A) permits trading— (i) by or on behalf of a person that is not an eligible contract participant; or (ii) by persons other than on a principal-to-principal basis; or (B) has adopted (directly or through another nongovernmental entity) rules that— (i) govern the conduct of participants, other than rules that govern the submission of orders or execution of transactions on the trading facility; and (ii) include disciplinary sanctions other than the exclusion of participants from trading.
And 7 USC § 1a(51)(A) defines a "trading facility" as
> [A] person or group of persons that constitutes, maintains, or provides a physical or electronic facility or system in which multiple participants have the ability to execute or trade agreements, contracts, or transactions— (i) by accepting bids or offers made by other participants that are open to multiple participants in the facility or system; or (ii) through the interaction of multiple bids or multiple offers within a system with a pre-determined non-discretionary automated trade matching and execution algorithm.
(7 USC § 1a(51)(B) then follows with some exceptions to that definition.)
In short—an "organized exchange" is defined as a type of "trading facility". To count as a trading facility", whether of the "organized exchange" type or not, you must either accept bids or offers from other participants yourself or else deterministically match and execute those bids and offers.
I think their point is there's no "peer to peer" trading so it's not an exchange. You're always contracting futures with them, so it's more like a vegetables seller than a trading facility.
Exactly right. You're able to privately resell contract keys (and the buyer can then re-issue a new key with their delivery info, voiding the old one), but onionfutures.com doesn't facilitate it.
I mean, it kind of does, though, no? Since it is backing the contract in the first place? Why else would anyone buy those contracts if they didn't know they have value provided by onionfutures.com in the first place? Why can't I just sell a fake key, claim it'll work, and make unlimited money this way if that wasn't the case?
The specific laws do not actually ban the transfer of those contracts (tbf this is very complex and depends on your reading). And yes they do not facilitate the trading of the instruments in the secondary market but they absolutely facilitate the instruments themselves otherwise there cannot be a secondary market without any backers of the instruments.
See FBT's comment below, it's about matching or being on both sides of the trade.
Between CBOE and OCC, that’s (exactly?) how options trading works as well, and I don’t think anyone claims that CBOE is not an exchange.
Broker or dealer. Per the interwebs, a broker acts on behalf of another party, vs a dealer trades for themselves.
As distinguished from an exchange, where the exchange intermediates and becomes a middle party "simultaneously" to both sides.
The market dynamics are pretty different between broker dealers and exchanges. For instance a /ticker/ as a concept makes sense only with an exchange.
The exchanges basically pick up only the contracts or goods with the most volume and standardized & predictable goods.
To trade more exotic or niche things basically you have to find your own counterparty, versus the exchange acts as an "typical" buyer and seller to each side (assuming there is anyone there at all to participate on each side... giving rise to the concept of market makers who undertake to do just that, i.e., to be ready to trade either side at any time in a certain good).
Legal defense is basically "nuh uh"