If housing futures work the way they’re supposed to, they will shift risk from those who are less able to bear it (individual homeowners with hefty mortgages) to those who are more willing to (speculators looking for a big upside on their investments). In the process, they will effectively provide a form of house-price insurance. They could have wider benefits, too. If there is a housing bubble, and it does burst, housing futures would soften the blow to the national economy. If enough traders participated in the market, it would become, in the long run, a valuable predictor of housing prices in different cities. That would allow buyers to make more rational decisions about how much they were willing to pay for homes, which would make house prices swing less wildly than they currently do.