No Rolex on Mark Ritchie

Mark Ritchie walks swiftly through the glass-walled sky walk over Van Buren Street in the hub of Chicago’s financial district. As he hurries to catch the closing bell in the Chicago Board of Trade, he’s reciting the words of one of his favorite songs:

This man was preaching at me and turning on the charm / Asking me for $20 with $10,000 on his arm / … I almost wrote a check out and then I asked myself … / If he came back tomorrow there’s something I’d like to know / Would Jesus wear a Rolex on his television show?

No one will ever catch Ritchie with a Rolex on his arm, though no doubt he can afford one. On this rare day when he has returned to the Board of Trade to show his visitor where he began his rags-to-riches story, he wears a modest Casio watch. There are no visual clues that this bearded 41-year-old is a successful trader in the world’s largest commodities exchange. He is also a Christian with a sense of mission.

The Dollar And The Scholar

From the visitor’s gallery high above the Grain Room, Ritchie explains the curious combination of high technology and good old-fashioned, shoulder-rubbing trading below. Flanked by towering electronic quote boards and banks of computers and phones, hundreds of men and a handful of women are waving their arms wildly, flashing hand signals, and yelling. If they weren’t standing, facing each other on the shallow steps of the several bowl-shaped “pits,” they could be mistaken for zealous fans at a playoff game.

Amidst this dollar-charged atmosphere, Ritchie has held on to his integrity, his faith, his mission—and his fortune. That combination is unusual. Ritchie himself admits that according to the stereotype, integrity and commodities trading go together like Al Capone and Mother Teresa.

“The church has forgotten that behavior is the bottom line,” says Ritchie. “We’ve turned our faith over to academicians and then we criticize them for giving us a theoretical faith and a theoretical Jesus. Our behavior in the marketplace has just not been credible at all.”

Far from leaving his faith in the books, Ritchie put his seminary career on hold in the late 1970s, concluding that “maybe God could use the dollar more than the scholar.” In 1977, he, his brother, his brother-in-law, and a friend formed a trading partnership called Chicago Research & Trading Group, Ltd. By 1988 CRT had grown to become, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “the world’s largest options-trading company and the envy of the industry.”

Even to an industry outsider, it’s obvious that CRT is unique. The most visible difference is just a half-block from the trading floor—CRTreats, a cozy employee cafeteria with country decor and a sweeping view of the city and Lake Michigan from its thirty-third floor perch. At CRTreats, all the food is on the company tab. A cross-stitch sampler reads, “We make you kindly welcome.” That’s no empty greeting.

Between bites of a roast-beef sandwich, Ritchie energetically launches into a tutorial on the worthiness of commodity trading:

“Paul’s injunction to a thief to stop stealing and to labor with his hands is not taken seriously in the church. If the average person were to finish that verse he’d say, ‘so that the person would be an example to everyone and have a story to tell on the speaking circuit.’ But Paul says be productive so he can have extra; make more than what he needs so he’ll have a tool to help the poor.”

Ritchie’s biggest passion now is to help the poor become independent entrepreneurs themselves. Disappointed with what he saw in most development agencies, Ritchie formed his own about six years ago.

“Ceretech has gained a reputation for being interested in the economic independence of the people,” he says. “We want to leave them. But we want to be able to leave them with what we call appropriate technology. That means no tractors that they can’t repair and can’t get fuel for.”

Relying only on simple, foot-powered machines supplied by Ceretech, about 120 women in the slums of Nairobi have increased their knitting production at three projects administered by local churches. Ceretech understands the cultural differences, so it doesn’t have the women keep the machines at their homes. “Other family members don’t understand what it means to have a capital asset—they would take it and sell it,” Ritchie explains.

“No normal agency can afford to monitor a project that’s less than half-a-million dollars. But we’re committed to small projects that help the little guy.”

Ceretech is no normal agency. Because the organization is financed by Ritchie, it is not looking for cash donors to keep it afloat. “But we can and do use investors on specific projects. We like to see a church invest in a project—that can vary in size from $5,000 to $100,000—and then help it network with the people there.”

No stranger to poverty himself, Ritchie saw the harshness of the Third World as a youth in rural Afghanistan, where for four years his father was an engineer with a missionary’s heart. Then, as newlyweds, Mark and his wife, Nancy, had their share of lean years—times when their only meal was the next pizza that Nancy could bring home from her job as a waitress.

“I would like to take a poor guy and give him an opportunity to create wealth,” Ritchie says. That is more than just the credo for Ceretech; it is his own life story.

Soybeans For Sale

Ritchie is quick to clarify that he does not believe that God blesses him with a corner on the market. In his autobiography, God in the Pits: Confessions of a Commodities Trader, he tells the story of how he lost $200,000 in the gold market in one day. “God’s children are no luckier than anyone else’s children,” he concludes.

Although risky, commodities trading is far from mere gambling. There are principles behind the apparently chaotic practices. “I will buy soybeans when I judge that they’re too low in value. The only way I can buy them is to step up and pay the highest price being paid at any given time. If I didn’t buy them the farmer would have to give them away; the farmer might go broke; the farmer might not be able to grow grain in the future. The point is the farmer has risk that he cannot bear any longer. That’s why the market is dropping the way it is.

“So I say to myself, I have the capital to be able to withstand a price drop—if I don’t, I’m gambling—but if I do have enough capital to cover the drop, the farmer has taken his risk and dumped it on me until I can sell the beans back at a profit. So, sometime down the road—it could be six seconds or six months—the situation reverses. The soybean producer needs beans, and the farmer is out of them, and the price begins to rise. So I come along with some to sell. That is my economic justification for being in business and the way I’ll make profit.”

There is even biblical precedent for this activity. If Joseph had not been there to buy up grain for the pharaoh, it all would have rotted, says Ritchie.

Ritchie no longer trades for CRT, although he is still a partner there. At his 16-acre home in outlying Wauconda, he is spending more time writing and helping Nancy with their five children, ages 14 to three-and-a-half. He just finished writing his second book, Joseph and Mary’s Scrapbook. It explores one of his favorite themes: how ordinary people responded to Jesus.

Unlike some “wealth bashers” in the church, Ritchie has no qualms about making money. A computer at home linked to a satellite dish allows him to continue trading as an independent. To Ritchie, wealth is inherently useful—especially to the poor.

“Let’s suppose that you’re a missionary, and your goal is to teach the poor the gospel. Your understanding of the gospel is a theology of the Atonement. How many times do you recall Jesus having mentioned that to anybody? His reputation was for going around doing good.

“If, Mr. Missionary, you could teach them how to spin yarn from wool so they could make a little income, you could do the good which Jesus did. When you came back to buy their yarn from them, you would have some questions to answer.”

By Laura Sokol Urban, a free-lance writer and editor living in Evanston, Illinois.

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