DISCUSSING some statistical aspects of future trading on a community exchange, Mr. G. R. White, in a paper read recently before the Royal Statistical Society, remarked that, during the past ten years, ‘future’ trading has spread rapidly and now covers commodities such as coffee, cocoa, sugar, butter, eggs, pepper, vegetable oils, shellac, wool tops, hides, rubber, silk, jute, tin, copper and zinc, in addition to grain and cotton, in which future trading has been an established practice for upwards of seventy years. Supporters of the system claim that, among other things, future trading reduces major fluctuations in prices, and provides a method of price insurance through ‘hedging’. Mr. White, selecting for the purpose of his investigation future trading in hides, controverted this assumption; he concludes that there is no evidence that fluctuations in the price of hides have been reduced since a future exchange was established for this commodity in New York in 1929. In fact, he says the evidence trends in the opposite direction. ‘Hedging’ on the Hide Exchange has only provided imperfect price insurance. He suggests that more attention should be paid to evolving a method of insurance more akin to that evolved for other insurable risks, and taking data of the past fourteen years, he calculates that the premiums necessary to insure over a period of twenty weeks against either a fall or rise in price would not be prohibitive.