Are there any plans to add futures to the game? Or reasons why they aren’t in? Seems like a natural fit
Edit: Ah I suppose the existing contracts system supports it. Are the markets too thin to have them tradeable?
There has been several player led efforts in the past using the existing contract system.
All the pieces are there, it just needs someone able to bring it all together
There are not enough players in the universe to support liquid, highly tradable markets for something like this.
If each CX has a futures market, then that would multiply the number of trading pairs in the game by 2, plus the number of expiration strikes you want. If you want monthly contracts, and you want the next 3 months tradable, that means a 4x number of orderbooks, orders to be placed, etc. There just aren’t enough players in the game to provide healthy markets across all of these different trading pairs. Its better than it used to be, forsure, but I don’t think we’ve achieved critical mass to where we could deploy something like this, not with the current vertical integration incentives.
However, I think the current playerbase could support something like this, if some form of change was made to corp structure which increased incentives for players to trade instead of internalizing production. Details here:
Plus, you’d need some sort of margin system to make it achievable. As you can’t have it operate on a “trust me bro” system without putting up any collateral.
Plus you would need some sort of liquidation engine for handling failure to deliver at the settlement date events, as these would be physical contracts rather than cash settled futures.