Meet the college students trying to reverse an obscure ban on trading onion futures

By Joseph Adinolfi

A group of UChicago students is pushing to 're-peel' the Onion Futures Act of 1958

Students at Monday's "For Our Futures" protest.

In the U.S., investors can legally trade futures contracts tied to all sorts of commodities, from pork bellies to oil to the computing power needed to power artificial-intelligence models.

But not onions.

Congress voted to ban onion trading in the U.S. decades ago, following a notorious market-manipulation scandal that bankrupted investors and farmers across the U.S.

Now, a group of students at the University of Chicago is trying to have the law repealed.

On Monday, dozens of members of the group "For Our Futures" gathered outside of the CME Building in Chicago for a demonstration aiming to enlist the support of CME Group, the U.S. mecca for futures trading, in their campaign to abolish the Onion Futures Act of 1958. Photos and video from the event showed students waving signs and chanting slogans like "58, out of date, let our onions speculate!"

Members of the group acknowledged that American society faces bigger and more pressing issues these days. But the decision to focus on such a niche problem was intended to show that a small but committed group of citizens can still successfully push for policy changes at the federal level.

"We want to show that a small group can in fact get a bad law changed," said Adam Ash, one of the organization's founders, and a third-year student at the University of Chicago.

Ash and other members told MarketWatch that they believed the status quo left American consumers at a disadvantage. Without an active market, prices are probably higher than they would otherwise be, the students said.

"I can't imagine how anybody would be opposed to this," Ash said.

Like many members of the group, Ash is studying economics. But he told MarketWatch that he became interested in the Onion Futures Act of 1958 after reading about it on Wikipedia.

Just as the organizers had hoped, the demonstration caught the attention of users on X and other social-media platforms, where some contrasted the relatively tame demonstration with the more chaotic protests unfolding in Europe.

Others joked that a protest about commodity futures was distinctly on brand for the University of Chicago, the birthplace of the Chicago School of economics. UChicago has produced more Nobel laureates in economics than any other university in the world, and has long been closely associated with the study of economics and finance.

The city of Chicago is also seen as the global hub for derivatives trading. The city is home to both CME Group (CME) and Cboe Global Markets (CBOE) - two major operators of derivatives exchanges. Several major quantitative and proprietary trading firms are based there as well.

Even Michael Selig, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, weighed in, saying "[t]he fight for onion futures continues today in Chicago." The CFTC is the federal agency tasked with regulating derivatives markets, including futures contracts.

Onion futures

Onion futures occupy a special category in the legal framework surrounding financial markets. It is one of only two products explicitly banned from futures trading - the other being box-office receipts for movies.

In a recent article, the Chicago Tribune described the scandal as the "Great Onion Corner of 1955." The financial scheme had immense repercussions. The price of a 50-pound bag of onions swung as high as $2.75 before plummeting as low as 10 cents. Two men walked away with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.

After being stung by the price swings, farmers petitioned Congress, and future U.S. President Gerald Ford - then a congressman from Michigan's onion-growing region - sponsored the Onion Futures Act, which banned onions from futures trading. Congress passed the bill, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into law in August 1958.

MarketWatch asked the White House whether the Trump administration would support the repeal of the act, but didn't hear back immediately. A representative of CME Group also didn't respond to a request for comment.

-Joseph Adinolfi

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10-20-26 0924ET