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Start free trial →Money Stuff: The Podcast · October 2026
Max Abelson asked about a University of Chicago student protest against the Onion Futures Act. Levine explains where the law came from and why movie box office is the only other banned category, in a wider conversation about prediction markets.
Nope. Nope.
Well, I tried. Speaking of sports gambling, can we just talk for a second about the onions?
Oh, yeah. There's a very funny University of Chicago student protest movement against the Onion Futures Act, which is like, there's an Onion Futures Act. In 1955, some guys cornered the Onion Futures, and people got so mad that Congress passed a law saying there's no more Onion Futures trading. And I think at the time, the CFTC, or maybe even the predecessor to this, this is a long time ago, testified and were like, no, you should just let people trade Onion Futures. It's not really a big deal. And Kanye was like, no, never Onion Futures again. And then much, much later, there was a exchange for trading movie box office futures and the movie industry got so mad that they added box office futures to the Onion Futures. So there's two things that are illegal to trade futures on in the United States. They're onions and movie box office receipts.
So wonderful.
And by the way, movie box office receipts are an interesting one because like, you know, who goes to the movies now, right? There's all sorts of like prediction market contracts on performance of movies, but it's like not box office receipts. And so there's like some gray area where it's like, oh…
Well, that's really pushing it. I don't know. I don't know.