Commodity futures made sense to me at FedEx- they would pay money with a supplier for the option to buy gas/oil at X price at Y date in the future. It costs more than just agreeing to pay for it at that price in the future, but if deliveries went way down (or prices) it'd be less costly to "back out".
I wonder if there's a fab time secondary market where Wall Street types are making millions off speculating fab time.
Fun finance fact: "time on a machine that makes a precious commodity" is the first known futures contract, although in _Debt_ David Graeber posits that futures contracts are the original form of currency. The concrete example I'm thinking of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presse...
Hm I don't think a secondary market would work very well, using fab time productively requires lots of knowledge and collaboration with the provider. Compared to resources like grain or oil where it's basically "just come and pick it up when it's there".
There were/are DRAM futures markets based on this hypothesis, historically they never worked very well because DRAM prices (at least for the same size/speed) have moved downwards so consistently over decades. That is until <6 months ago.
I wonder if there's a fab time secondary market where Wall Street types are making millions off speculating fab time.