So I was talking to someone about livestock futures yesterday and I was like “I know you can get cattle futures and pork futures, but what about chicken? why shouldn’t I be able to buy some chicken futures if I want to invest in chicken?”
And I looked it up and it turns out people have tried to start a chicken futures market three different times! This was in the 60s, 80s, and 90s, and every time it failed.
Apparently this is largely because in the cattle industry beef processors buy cattle from farmers, so there’s demand for futures from people who want to hedge against price volatility. But the chicken industry is more vertically integrated, so no one actually needs to hedge with futures.
Also I learned that in 1958 Congress passed a bill banning the sale of onion futures? It is still a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5000, so be careful about that I guess.
(Of course there’s also the question of whether a vegetarian can even buy chicken futures. But my vegan friend bought cattle futures the other day so I think it’s generally considered acceptable.)
(Though now I am imagining animal rights groups campaigning for universities to be short livestock futures and it feels totally plausible. If you personally would like to be short livestock, there is a short livestock ETF that trades on the London Stock Exchange, but it does not seem very liquid and it might be hard to trade it if you are not British, idk. If you would like to be short chickens specifically, I recommend shorting the stock of poultry producers.)
Yeah it was a joke ^_^ I agree with Holden and Will that divestment is kind of silly, so I am making fun of the logic of divestment by taking it even further: if it is virtuous to avoid being long the stock of companies in harmful industries, it must be even more virtuous to be as short as possible.
(Not to strawman divestment advocates–I think the okay argument for divestment is that it’s not about changing the share price or taking capital away from the bad companies, it’s about getting media attention and signaling disapproval of bad stuff. I still think it’s better to get media attention by doing things that actually have some effect–if you’re an environmentalist, you could campaign for your university to go carbon neutral or fund more geoengineering research; if you’re an animal rights activist, you could campaign for your university to buy only cage-free eggs or go meatless on Mondays. In any case, the media attention argument is obviously not relevant to your personal investment decisions.)