> WONG: However, Gerry says most of the major airlines in the U.S. eventually soured on fuel hedging. One reason - the Wall Street transaction fees to make these hedges got expensive.
> WOODS: Plus, Gerry says the airlines found that they could make money the old-fashioned way by raising prices. Today, none of the major airlines in the U.S. are hedging.
Hedging is one of those things that sounds cool but then when your service is x% more expensive than a competitor and you lose customers you just stop doing it. It's kinda like being on AWS; when everybody has an outage together nobody asks "oh what can be done differently".
> European carriers have hedged about 80 per cent of the fuel they need for this year and typically take out new hedges on a rolling basis to lock in future prices.
Almost every very large company that relies on commodities will have a treasury desk whose sole purpose is to work with future markets, its very common practice. It doesn't matter if one npr article has a anecdote, it exists.
Like if I look up home depot they talk about price volatility and that's the exact opposite of what a hedge produces. I'm honestly starting to doubt if they hedge at all; like why bother using Wall Street as an intermediary and just talk to your suppliers.
> [1] This was another historic quarter for lumber price volatility. During the first few weeks of the second quarter,
prices for both framing and panel lumber reached all-time highs before quickly falling from their peaks. As an
example, during the second quarter, framing lumber peaked at approximately $1,500 per thousand board feet
before falling over $1,000 to approximately $500. While pricing for both framing and panel has come down
from the peaks, the average price during the second quarter was still significantly higher than the same period
last year.
Inflation from core commodity categories positively impacted our average ticket growth by approximately
420 basis points during the second quarter.
Is there a name for the phenomenon of when someone provides a single explanation that is so inconsequential that it ends up being counterproductive because surely they would have given a better explanation if one existed?
If your go-to reasoning for why we need prediction markets is so airlines can have more predictability in their fuel costs, you're inadvertently making a solid argument that we don't actually need prediction markets. And this isn't even getting into the other ways these airlines could satisfy the same need.
That still does not satisfactorily answer the question though, why don't they just sign a purchase order with N month lead time? That still gives a well defined price ahead of time.
The people who need the constant price do that, but creating this contract generates an investment at the same time. The person promising the price is taking a premium to take the risk, they can the sell that risk in a free market.
> WONG: However, Gerry says most of the major airlines in the U.S. eventually soured on fuel hedging. One reason - the Wall Street transaction fees to make these hedges got expensive.
> WOODS: Plus, Gerry says the airlines found that they could make money the old-fashioned way by raising prices. Today, none of the major airlines in the U.S. are hedging.
Hedging is one of those things that sounds cool but then when your service is x% more expensive than a competitor and you lose customers you just stop doing it. It's kinda like being on AWS; when everybody has an outage together nobody asks "oh what can be done differently".
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/nx-s1-5759203/fuel-hedging-on...