On Monday, a group of students from the University of Chicago stood outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—one of the world's largest and most diverse derivatives marketplaces—and called for the repeal of an obscure 1958 law that bans onions as futures products traded on U.S. exchanges.
Attracting an audience with a humorous jingle and amusing signs that included "Onions Deserve a Future," "Honk If You Want Free Onions," "Hot Girls Hedge Onions," and "Free Markets Feed Families," the student group, named For Our Futures, has a simple platform: a repeal of the 1958 Onion Futures Act, which prohibits anyone from trading in onion futures on commodity exchanges. (The law was amended in 2010 to ban motion picture box office receipts from being traded on commodity exchanges.) The viral campaign drew enough attention that Mike Selig—chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a proponent of expanding the list of commodities traded on futures markets—was asked about the law in a media appearance.
American farmers produce about 6.75 billion pounds of onions a year, according to the National Onion Association, an industry trade group. While peers who grow cotton, wheat, corn, and soybeans can hedge against price swings by trading futures contracts, onion farmers have no such recourse under federal law. But, as the Agriculture Department's daily National Potato and Onion Report shows, onion prices are highly volatile and subject to wild swings, making them an ideal market for futures trading.
In its latest report, released Monday, the agency shows that onion prices have roughly doubled since this time last year. If onion futures contracts were legal, farmers could rely on market expectations instead of planting crops based on last year's prices. It would also let buyers potentially cut costs by locking in lower prices to protect against spikes. Trading onion futures contracts would give the industry a useful price-discovery tool, one that the student group aptly notes is "crucial for price stability and for hedging risks associated with weather and market fluctuations."
It's not For Our Futures' first time trying this gambit. The student group staged similar protests at college campuses in April and May, armed with bags of raw onions to entice passersby into signing their petition to legalize onion futures. The students' crusade might be comical, but after a recent Gallup poll found that 57 percent of Americans age 18–34 have a positive image of socialism, it's encouraging to see college-age students stand up for free markets.
A protest over onions sounds absurd, but it's a viral reminder to others in that age cohort of how far governments can go when given the slightest leeway to regulate an industry.
Instead of relying on outdated price points when planning future harvests, American onion producers could use resources like futures contracts that offer real-time market signals. All that would require—as the college kids state—is for federal lawmakers to "let the free market reign supreme."
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be careful when you're behind the wheel this week.
College football is great! Surely you want even more of it, right? We'll get into the problems with a 24-team College Football Playoff (CFP), then talk about the NBA's new betting restrictions, and close with thoughts about President Donald Trump's new government golf course plans. And just in case you don't make it to the end, here's a shortcut to our survey on who you're rooting for in the World Series.
But first, many congratulations to "Gary's 1st Entry" on outlasting everyone else in our NFL Survivor group. There's no prize other than this shoutout, so be sure to print out today's newsletter, highlight this paragraph, and frame it in gold. Perhaps Gary can keep going and challenge Primetime Paulie Rothrock's 13-game winning streak from last season.
Locker Room Links
Both teams in the WNBA Finals left the court for the National Anthem—unclear if this was a protest or just part of the pregame routine. WNBA policy doesn't require teams to be on the court for the anthem, but does require a "dignified posture" if they are.
In the thick of a playoff race, three Zambian women's soccer players are separated from their National Women's Soccer League teams because they played in Uganda, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a three-week restriction on reentry due to Ebola. (There are zero active Ebola cases in Uganda and Zambia.)
This is the kind of excessively nerdy fantasy football content I live for. (Yahoo remains the best fantasy sports system. ESPN's is trash, relying on name recognition to get by.)
I figured out how ESPN calculates fantasy football win percentage, it's bad!
ESPN made a stats 101 error when calculating their win percentage which leads to horribly miscalibrated numbers. ( thread) pic.twitter.com/bDypgjelKj
Saturday was one of the best days of college football ever—or perhaps it could have been, if we thought any of the five top-10 teams who took a loss were now certainly out of playoff contention. Instead, Georgia, Notre Dame, Indiana, Alabama, and Texas are all still very much alive in the championship hunt.
Today was one of the craziest days in college football history:
- First time ever five teams ranked in the top 7 lose in a single week - First time the No. 1-ranked team loses to an unranked team in consecutive weeks since 1990 - First time Texas, Alabama, and Georgia all lose… pic.twitter.com/psVRoM5s5b
With two losses, Alabama and Texas are at least on the edge of the playoff bubble with perhaps no more room for error. But that's only true under this year's CFP format. Next year, the playoff is almost officially set to balloon to 24 teams, making the chaos of a day like Saturday matter even less.
Fans will always celebrate a huge upset or major rivalry win, of course—Tennessee fans don't need playoff stakes as an excuse to get drunk when they beat Alabama. But the joy of a rivalry win in the past was always bigger because of the off-field stakes, too—the first loss for your rival meant they probably wouldn't be national champions, the second meant they'd be out of the Rose Bowl, a third meant you could be proud your team sent them packing for the Alamo Bowl. Winning is great; ruining your rival's season is even better.
With 24 teams in the playoff, the joy is a bit diminished because it will take four or possibly five losses to knock a powerhouse program out of the CFP (Iowa, at 8–4, was ranked 23rd by the committee before last year's playoffs). It'll be a bit like a rivalry win in college basketball—we win, you suck, congrats on getting a slightly worse NCAA Tournament seed.
In the business of sports, more inventory for TV is king, and the powers that be think more teams playing more playoff games will make more money. At Free Agent, we don't begrudge institutions for trying to make more money—we all do the same every day. But it's not clear abandoning conference championship games will be the answer, especially when the Big Ten and SEC championships apparently outdraw many playoff games.
ESPN and the power conferences know fans aren't happy about it—just look at allthechatteronline, and how the crowd at BYU reacted when College GameDay discussed expansion on Saturday (especially when BYU would probably benefit from expansion!). They're betting enough people will watch to make the expansion profitable anyway. The last hope is that fans get loud enough to bully them into abandoning expansion—which only occasionally works, sometimes on things small (putting the trophy logo on the court for the NBA Finals) and large (soccer's European Super League). If any powerhouse considers going independent, that might shock leaders into a rethink too.
Almost every sport I know is adding more: more teams, bigger playoffs, more for TV. As fans, we still eat it up, of course—much to the excitement of the TV executives who are selling commercial time to the people trying to reach us, the viewing public. (The only counterexample is the MLB proposal to cut eight games from the regular season—I'd love to see each sport I follow cut its season by about 25 percent to make regular season games matter more, so I'm interested to see how this goes.)
Perhaps I'm biased because my favorite team, Michigan State, is a dumpster fire—they could expand the playoff to 64 teams and the Spartans still wouldn't deserve a bid. I personally don't have a whole lot at stake in the playoff format now or anytime soon. But as a neutral, the chaos of Saturday might have been viewed with my full attention in the past—instead, this year I just had it on in the background while I played video games.
Sports Are Regulating Bets Without Politicians, Part 3
After last year's major betting scandal, the NBA asked sportsbooks late last week to stop offering certain types of potentially problematic bets. The sportsbooks, which the NBA says handle roughly 99 percent of the U.S. betting market, agreed. No politician or regulation was necessary to solve the problem.
No longer can bettors bet on unders for a bit player who likely won't get more than 12 minutes of playtime. Bettors also can't wager on the opening tip or on players to miss specific shots. Parlays that string together under bets on the same player's statistics are also out (this one seems a bit harsh—if you just want to bet on a certain major player to have an off night, you can bet on stats separately, but not in a big multiplier parlay). Bets on players who have two-way contracts between the NBA and G League were already banned.
This all comes on the heels of similar developments last year in the NFL and MLB. While some people want to ban prop bets altogether, the NFL asked sportsbooks to eliminate bets in four different categories. Sportsbooks largely agreed or weren't offering those bets anyway. MLB, in light of some pitching-related scandals, asked for a $200 limit on pitch-specific bets and to keep them out of parlays—sportsbooks agreed to that too.
As I wrote last year, "Ideally, this is how the regulation of the sports betting industry should go….These approaches are catching the nuances of what works for both the leagues and for sportsbooks without the heavy-handed approaches of politicians who would use an axe to ban all prop bets instead of a scalpel to limit problematic bets."
It's important to note leagues are able to do this because they have commercial partnerships with the sportsbooks. Otherwise, the leagues would have no direct leverage over a sportsbook offering a bet the league doesn't like. Keep that in mind the next time you see people bemoaning a league partnership with a sportsbook or a prediction market.
Trump's Golf Course Plans Have People Teed Off
President Donald Trump has new plans for the National Park Service golf course at East Potomac—again. Last time new plans were announced, the site plan still had its historic miniature golf course, a par-3 course, and the existing road still ringing the property for bicycling, running, etc. Much of the public didn't like that plan anyway—now, none of that remains in the latest plans, just 18 holes of golf and a driving range.
What's really going on here seems quite clear to me: Like so many other things going on in the second Trump administration, this is a scheme to enrich the Trump family. The plan?
Step 2: Use taxpayer dollars to pay for renovation of the course into, allegedly, a championship-level course capable of hosting major golf tournaments (no matter that the area has next to zero parking, is a mile from the nearest Metro station, and only accessible by narrow roads not meant to handle tens of thousands of spectators).
Step 3: Have the federal government sign a sweetheart deal with, who else, the golf division of the Trump Organization to operate the course on extremely favorable and profitable terms.
If you're wondering why the Trump administration is doing something, corruption is usually a good guess.
The arguments for the course don't make much sense. There are plenty of adequate, competitively priced golf courses in the broader Washington, D.C., area. Several of them are already capable of hosting professional golf tournaments. Between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, there were three tournaments at three different courses in the last couple years. The 2030 PGA Championship and 2037 Ryder Cup will happen just over the D.C. line in Bethesda, Maryland.
East Potomac is not the nicest course around, no thanks to the legal limbo it's been in for the past year. But if the National Park Service is going to, for some reason, be in the business of running a golf course, it should be a course that emphasizes and teaches its history instead of the pipe dream of a corrupt madman.
Who Ya Got? 2026 World Series Edition
For the first time in 46 years, we've got a World Series contested by two teams that have never won it before. Brewers against Rays is also a rare instance of the top seeds from each league outlasting the randomness of the MLB playoffs to make the World Series. And before you trot out the tired line that "TV executives must be seething about the small market teams" remember that they care much more about getting a playoff series that goes seven games with close results in each game (What did I say above? Inventory rules all!).
Lidl Portugal has raised €270,000 to support animal welfare organisations across the country through the sale of its special charity shopping bag, known as ‘Pa-tudo’. The supermarket chain will distribute
Low-cost broadband provider Jio Platforms aims for £81bn valuation when it floats on the stock market on Wednesday
India’s second-richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is launching what could be the country’s biggest-ever initial public offering (IPO), despite a stock market downturn.
Mumbai-based Jio Platforms, a telecoms company backed by Meta Platforms and Google, is hoping to raise up to 302bn rupees (£2.4bn) and is targeting a 10.3tn rupees valuation when it floats on the stock market from Wednesday.
European Union governments have agreed a negotiating position on new agricultural market rules intended to take effect under the bloc’s 2028–2034 budget, advancing reforms to support arrangements for farmers while leaving the most contentious financial questions unresolved.
The Council approved its partial negotiating mandate on Monday, 19 October, covering changes to the Common Market Organisation regulation, which governs agricultural markets across the European Union.
The proposals include new arrangements for wine producers, protein crops and oilseeds, revised marketing standards, changes to the EU school food programme and provisions intended to improve preparedness for agricultural market disruptions.
However, the agreement does not settle future funding allocations or the broader structure of agricultural subsidies, which remain under negotiation as EU governments attempt to reconcile farming expenditure with competing demands for defence, industrial investment and regional development.
Agricultural markets under review
The Council’s negotiating position retains much of the European Commission’s original proposal while introducing amendments intended to accommodate national differences in agricultural production.
Under the proposed arrangements, sector-specific interventions would become mandatory in several areas, including beekeeping, fruit and vegetables and, under certain circumstances, wine production.
The Council has also proposed flexibility for countries where particular sectors are absent or relatively undeveloped.
For the wine industry, governments would be able to seek exemptions from certain obligations where national circumstances justify different arrangements.
This would allow the framework to retain common European rules while avoiding requirements that would be inappropriate for member states with little or no domestic wine production.
Sectoral interventions form part of the mechanisms through which the EU supports agricultural markets and producer organisations. They can cover measures intended to improve competitiveness, manage production and strengthen farmers’ commercial position.
New provisions for protein crops
The Council has endorsed the establishment of a separate sector for protein crops and oilseeds, replacing existing provisions covering dried fodder.
The objective is to encourage domestic production and reduce dependence on imported agricultural inputs, particularly crops used in animal feed and food production.
European livestock producers rely on protein-rich feed ingredients, including soyabeans, that are often sourced internationally.
Greater domestic production could reduce exposure to fluctuations in global commodity prices, transport costs and disruptions to international supply chains.
Under the Council’s proposal, member states would be encouraged to recognise producer organisations specialising in protein crops and oilseeds.
Such organisations can help farmers coordinate production, marketing and investment, although the effectiveness of the proposed measures will depend on how they are implemented nationally.
The proposals follow broader EU efforts to improve supply security in sectors extending from agricultural inputs to critical industrial materials.
School food and product labelling
The negotiating mandate also preserves the EU school scheme, which provides support for the distribution of fruit, vegetables and milk to schoolchildren.
Under the proposed framework, the programme would move from a school-year financing cycle to a calendar-year system, with transitional provisions intended to prevent disruption during implementation.
The Council has maintained the Commission’s objective of encouraging healthier eating habits by limiting products containing high levels of free sugars and fats.
The proposal also opens the possibility of additional marketing standards for several agricultural products, including protein crops, beef, pork, sheepmeat, goatmeat and rice.
These standards could provide consumers with more detailed information about product origins, subject to the final legislation.
Such measures would also have implications for producers and food businesses, which would need to comply with any new requirements concerning classification, marketing and labelling.
The Council additionally supports the harmonisation of rules covering industrial hemp, while retaining safeguards concerning seed certification and the permitted level of tetrahydrocannabinol.
Farming subsidies remain contested
The agricultural market agreement forms part of negotiations over the next Common Agricultural Policy, which will operate within the EU’s new seven-year financial framework.
Under the Commission’s proposed budget structure, several funding streams, including agricultural and cohesion programmes, would be brought together within national and regional partnership plans.
The restructuring has encountered opposition from governments and agricultural interests concerned that farming could lose protected access to EU funding.
As EU Today previously reported, 17 member states have called for agricultural and regional development expenditure to be protected against further reductions.
The Council’s latest position addresses how agricultural markets should operate rather than determining the size of the financial support available to them.
A separate debate concerns the conditions for receiving direct farm payments, including the definition of an active farmer and the degree of discretion granted to national governments.
Those questions remain central to the continuing CAP negotiations, which are due to return to the Agriculture and Fisheries Council on 26–27 October.
Negotiations move to Parliament
The Council’s partial mandate now provides a basis for negotiations with the European Parliament on the agricultural market provisions.
The legislation will still require agreement between the institutions, while its financing will depend on the eventual settlement of the 2028–2034 budget.
Governments must also complete negotiations on the wider CAP framework, including direct income support and the distribution of responsibility between Brussels and national administrations.
The market agreement reached on 19 October therefore establishes important elements of the proposed agricultural rules, but leaves unresolved the level of financial support available to European farmers after 2027.
China is on track for a record trade surplus, but is facing increasing pushback from the countries whose economies are being ravaged by its flood of exports.
Login
