A price is a market waiting to happen
The moment something is quoted, argued over and revised, there are two sides to it. The only thing usually missing is an instrument.
Manifesto
Weird
assets
Derivatives grew up around a short list: rates, majors, oil, gold, index futures. Everything else kept moving anyway. This is the argument for listing it.
Niche is not the same as unimportant
Memory pricing sets the cost of every device you own. Container rates set the cost of everything in your house. Neither has ever been tradable by a normal person.
Fragmentation is a feature
The assets traditional venues skip are skipped because they are messy: many grades, many regions, no single tape. Messy is where the disagreement lives.
Both directions or it isn't a market
Plenty of these prices can be bought physically. Almost none of them can be sold short by anyone who isn't already inside the industry. That asymmetry is the whole problem.
Perpetual, because the world is
Quarterly expiries are a convention, not a law. The price of electricity does not care what month it is, and neither should the position you hold against it.
Say what the number is
Every market points at a published reference price, in the unit its physical market already speaks. No invented index nobody can check.
Then keep going
Silicon, then energy, then metals, then food, then freight, then the strange edges — skins, parcels, water rights, credits. The list only ends where prices do.
If an asset has a price, it should be possible to trade its _movement_.