Leo Melamed

Leo Melamed
Born	Leibel Melamdovich March 20, 1932 Bialystok, Poland
Residence	Chicago, U.S.
Occupation	Attorney, financier
Parent(s)	Isaac Melamdovich

Leo Melamed, born March 20, 1932, is an American attorney, finance executive, and a pioneer of financial futures. He is the chairman emeritus of CME Group (formerly the Chicago Mercantile Exchange).

Melamed was born Leibel Melamdovich to a Jewish family in Bialystok, Poland, in 1932 to Isaac Melamdovich, a mathematics teacher. In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, the family fled to Lithuania to avoid capture by the Nazis. In 1940, the Japanese consul general to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, issued his family a life-saving transit visa, and they made the long trek across Siberia to safe haven in Japan. They crossed the Pacific to the US in the spring of 1941, and the family settled in Chicago.

Melamed, an attorney by profession, became involved in futures trading by accident. In law school he was looking for a law clerk job and answered a want ad from a firm looking for a 'runner', thinking the firm, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, with that many names could be nothing but an established law firm, looking for a clerk to run to court. He worked as a runner in the produce futures markets of the CME throughout law school, learning about the business. He practiced law until 1965 and was elected to the CME board in 1967.

Melamed became chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1969. In 1972, under his leadership, the CME created the International Monetary Market (IMM), the world's first financial futures exchange, and launched currency futures. In the years that followed, Melamed led the CME and IMM in the creation of a number of financial instruments, including futures on US Treasury bills in 1976, Eurodollars in 1981, and stock index futures in 1982.

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