| Ron Harvey. Aren't they two different things? Futures contracts with commodities have a public market where the the contract can be exchanged during its life. Both buyer and seller can hedge their positions and or take advantage of changing circumstances. I believe -- but I don't know, so if someone here does know, and I am wrong please correct my erroneous statements -- that there's a fairly standard way of writing contracts for the sale of electronic component parts between buyer and seller where the buyer wishes to protect himself/herself from future shortage of an item that is in temporary shortage. I say temporary, because in the deals I've seen (from the buyer's perspective), the seller alluded, postulated, or advised that the shortage might not go away so readily, while from my company's position we informed and advised the seller that the shortages always did go away and that given our clout, it was to the seller's interest to consider the long range implications of continuing to do business with our large, well-established, well-entrenched multi-faceted business. Sometimes with vendors, this helped us. Sometimes with vendors such as Intel where we took only a small amount of product-- they laughed (I was told). |
