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What are you talking about? There is no free lunch. The first two options are nothing less than robbery. Or blackmail, I suppose, which is what he was doing in the first place. If you're going to think like that, you might as well say he should have skipped the formalities and demanded payment for his silence in cold hard cash.
What he did was much closer to letting the merchant keep face and not have excessive losses. Indeed, if all had gone according to plan, they'd both have made a profit. Though of course, the other merchant's share would have been much smaller than normal.
As for option C, it wouldn't have saved Lawrence against what really happened: a collapse of the market. Sure, you could say he could have payed for insurance against that... But that would normally have shrunk the profits. As I said, no free lunch.
Then again, if he'd asked for insurance, what would truly have happened is that he'd have found out about the drop in price then, before it was too late.
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