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ML Matt Levine Writes Money Stuff, the daily Bloomberg Opinion column on Wall Street, securities law and the stranger corners of financial markets: meme stocks, crypto structu...

“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 then much, much later, there was an 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.”

Money Stuff: The Podcast · October 2026

“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 then much, much later, there was an 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.” — Matt Levine, Money Stuff: The Podcast

Context

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.

Transcript

Money Stuff: The Podcast Around 31:04 into the episode
Speaker 2

Nope. Nope.

Max Abelson

Well, I tried. Speaking of sports gambling, can we just talk for a second about the onions?

Matt Levine

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.

Max Abelson

So wonderful.

Matt Levine

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…

Max Abelson

Well, that's really pushing it. I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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