Exactly. Pit mine sees who's buying what and is worried copper will go down. Datacenter people see who's inking deals and are worried it's gonna go up. They both need to get big fancy loans from their bankers to execute their upcoming projects. The bankers won't like to see unbounded risk on their balance sheets. A futures contract exists to solve this problem.

Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...

Just for context that’s not quite accurate. There certainly is a distinction in the rule versus securities markets, which I know is what you mean.

But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.

Hedging is not insider trading. Insider trading is trading based on material non-public information in breach of a duty or obtained through fraud. In that sense, it's more of a principal-agent problem.

Also -- hedging is generally not done based on material non-public information, but rather to guard against known risks. Joe the farmer sells a bunch of wheat futures when he plants his wheat, not because he thinks the price will go down, but rather because if it does he goes bankrupt and he'd prefer to accept a known rate-of-return now.

It lasts for now, it won’t survive when the political pendulum swings back. “Make hay grifting while the grifters shine.” is the current MO. “Temporary economic strip mining operation.”

I'll leave this here, Donald Trump Jr got a free stake in Kalshi. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/donald-tr...