Career Profile: Commodities Trader | Jack Scoville - YouTube

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I'll tell you what, I'm a city kid.

I'm from Evanston which is just the first suburb north of Chicago and grew up, you know,

basically around there and lived around there pretty much all my life.

I've always been interested in markets, though, and you know, how the stock market and the

commodities markets acted, and I went to school in Melbourne, Iowa, at Grinnell College, so

when I was out there every fall, I'd sit there and watch all the corn harvesters roll through

because Melbourne is not a very big town, so that was mostly my view.

In the spring I'd watch them plant and it fascinated me.

Came back to Chicago, decided I was going to get myself into grad school, but I needed

four or five hours a day, so I decided with my likings for the markets to come on down

here and get a runner's job and work on my MBA and when I got my MBA go get a real job,

and here I am over 30 years later still wondering if I should go out and get a real job or not,

so.

I was an economics major and that sort of thing has always fascinated me, and really

I think futures trading is just raw economic brute force in action.

So I think maybe from that point of view understanding how economics works, the theory behind how

economics works can really help you out.

I know a lot of people take specific ag and ag-type courses, thinking that it can help

you down here, and maybe it does.

I've never really taken any of those courses.

I had to learn that sort of thing down here, and I know that, you know, other people say

that there are different types of professions actually, such as, you know, lawyers or engineers,

but they're more analytical or what-have-you, and end up making good traders which could

be true.

I'm an economist instead.

This is a world that I really knew nothing about.

I knew about, you know, stocks and bonds and prices going up and prices going down, but

how it actually came to be, you know, in the grains or down here for example I had no real

idea.

So I ran for several months and then I became a call clerk and I continued to work my way

up mainly as a floor specialist, floor analyst and eventually it came time for me to either

trade for myself or trade for customers, and I chose customers.

It was all pretty much on-the-job training.

I'd sit around the office and listen to people talk about grains.

That's how I started learning about grains, and it's fascinating.

It's fascinating how it all comes together.

Then I was able to start doing some of my own analysis, especially when the options

opened for corn and soybeans.

I was put in charge of that.

So I was a floor specialist in handling trades for special clients and providing analysis

to the entire company.

First of all, you have to be willing to accept risk, but then you have to be able to measure

that risk and those that kind of have a good way to measure that risk have a better chance

of success, and you have to be very, very disciplined.

That hasn't changed.

That was true 30 years ago, it's true today.

I've found that when I stick to my system the way that I was taught to do things and

brought up to do things in this business, when I stick to that, I'm going to make money

for my customers, maybe not every trade, but I will make money for my customers generally

at the end of the year or whatever.

I find that when I start getting carried away with my emotions and what I was trained to

do, that's when I start losing money and make bad trades for my customers.

The main task at least in ag markets is to feed the world, and what we're seeing even

beyond, you know, the immediate cycle of having the funds come in and go out is we're seeing

people with more money—especially in China—but really everywhere else around the world.

People are making a little bit more money, and instead of eating maybe rice or rice and

beans or whatever they used to eat, they're liking a little piece of chicken or pork or

beef with their food right now, and that takes money and that takes time and, you know, agricultural

production.

So I think we're going to see the ag sector generally remain very strong, much stronger

than we saw say 10 or 15 years ago in terms of price because we have to work this through.