If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. Or words to that effect.

This time it's the Sydney futures market, though it could well be a number of other things of interest to my peculiar trade.

Everyone - well, mainly the brokers standing to gain most clearly - recently became enthusiastic about the benefits of using Sydney futures to get the best price for your wool, and the best price protection if you used the stuff at a later stage.

But wool growers were not easily persuaded, and futures market activity only improved slowly. Improvements to make the futures market more attractive were suggested, one of them being to add contracts covering 19 and 23 micron to the original 21 micron category.

Thirty or 40 years ago they tried to widen interest in the earlier futures markets, when it subsided after Bradford traders found they weren't as clever as they'd thought at making easy money out of futures trading.

A crossbred market was started. There were wool categories to supplement top categories.

And all that happened then was that instead of adding to activity and interest, what there was got spread out and weakened.

Many in the trade, big firms whether in wool or further down the processing line, are in favour of futures markets, if they're sufficiently active.

But with wool, you have to bear in mind its immense variety and realise that futures can only be a useful tool (if you're clever) not an exact insurance.

Turnover in these new Sydney sub-divisions is very low, and can't (in my view) help to encourage turnover in the central market, which should be the first objective.

As for how futures traders have fared in recent months, and their expert advisers, that deserves a lot more space.

The provisional verdict is Not So Good.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.