“Among the first thing one notices, when looking at the contract price arrays, is that the distant months seem to trade at the same price as the nearby, at least in the same crop year”

One of the things that shocked me about the primitive exchange I came across in Binéfar four years ago was that, 300 years after the Japanese started using forward contracts for rice and 150 years after the spread of rail communications through the American West laid the basis for futures trading on the Chicago exchange, here in Spain there were still no comparable arrangements for widely traded agricultural commodities. This interview with Ana Fernández Arimany of the Jaén olive oil futures market, MFAO, is fascinating stuff, particularly as the level of mathematical education in Spain makes it hard to believe that even the grandchildren of the current generation of elderly farmers, obsessed with buying more land and producing as much low-value junk as they can, will be able to understand the underlying concept.

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