A few weeks ago, I saw the movie “Trading Places” for about the 10th time.
I still am confused about how the scheme to cheat the Duke brothers at the
Chicago commodities market worked. Apparently the Duke brothers thought
that the orange crop was going to be less that usual, so they decided to
corner the Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice market. So their buyer bought
all the FCOJ stock he could. Then they found out that they had been duped by
the characters played by Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy, who bought and sold
FCOJ several times during the session, and came out with a fortune. I’ve
never understood how this scheme worked. Can you please explain it?
Welcome to the SDMB, Sandcat!
This question has come up before, in these threads:
Trading sequence from the movie, “Trading Places”
How did the futures swindle work in “Trading Places?”
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Arjuna34
They sell futures (you aren’t required to actually own them first) at a high price, say .50, to the Mortimer brothers’ brokers, who think the price will skyrocket thanks to the false info they had that the crop would be bad.
Then when the report comes out that the crop was fine, the price drops as people try hard to get rid of their futures before the price bottoms out. They buy the futures at this time, for a much lower price than they sold them at. It’s actually quite risky in real life, but they did have insider information, so the risk was minimal.
If they ended up buying the futures at .25, for example, they basically doubled their money. It’s very similar to “shorting” in the stock market.
And since I didn’t preview first, I missed the fact that Arjuna34 has already given you much better info. 
That’s something I’ve always wondered about too. Thanks, Sandcat, for posting the question. And thanks everyone else for answering.
And it didn’t take place at a Chicago commodity exchange, it took place at the (whimper) World Trade Center.
Thanks for your help, I get it now. ( I didn’t know that they were selling before they actually had any; didn’t know you could do that)