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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

The point is making money.

For speculators yes. But for a farmer and the consumer of the goods they would rather lock in a margin for their goods and run their business than risk guessing what the price will be at harvest time or consumption time. It’s called hedging.

How many farmers do you imagine are in this thread?

And consumers neither lock in margins nor run a business because consumers buy at retail…

Ok charitably, maybe you use “consumer” in a special sense of businesses that consume raw materials such as owners of onion ring factories. In those cases, future prices (as opposed futures prices) are typically negotiated directly into contracts with producers of those commodities…and how many of those are in this thread?

In the vast majority of cases, futures are traded speculatively and physical delivery of goods and chattles is an extreme exception.

many users of derivatives willingly lose money on them because the purpose of these contracts is to transfer risk to those willing to hold it.

Money is the thing at risk.

Is insurance risking your money?

Yes of course. I’ve paid for car insurance for 30+ years and have never made a single claim. So far, for me, it’s a bad risk.

I’ll keep paying though.

People are willing to lose a small but predictable amount of money to avoid occasionally and unpredictably losing a massive amount of money. The former is a loss they can plan for and absorb. The latter might kill their business.

Traders are often happy to take the other side of that trade because they can trade against many counterparties, collect a small premium from each one, and try to ensure their counterparties won’t all fail in a correlated way.

Yes, it's not about onions.

The thing you’re missing:

Would you rather have net profits of 20, -10, 15, -5, -10, 25, -5 year over year, or profits of 4, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5?

In what sense is “profits” not referring to money?

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I said nothing of the sort.

Your hung up on money, everyone is trying to explain that the exact same money is better when it is predictable versus erratic.

the exact same money

Yes, it is about the money.

You may have liabilities or income that exist outside of financial markets e.g. if I have 500t of wheat due to be harvested I might want to hedge enough to guarantee I can pay my staff - ive locked in the price of wheat, I might make less money as a result but my risk is lower.

Wheat futures trading rarely involves any actual wheat.

And rarely is done by farmers.

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