Jack Sandner, 79, the longtime Chicago Mercantile Exchange chairman who spanned the future exchange’s evolution from open outcry to electronic trading, died Thursday after suffering a stroke.
As its longest-tenured chairman during the 1980s and 1990s, Sandner oversaw the expansion of the CME from agricultural commodities into new products such as the S&P 500, while steering the futures exchange into the modern era.
“Today is an extremely difficult day for our company and our industry,” CME Group Chairman and CEO Terry Duffy said in a statement Friday. “It is with great sadness that we mourn the loss of Jack Sandner who was among our staunchest leaders, biggest champions and, most importantly, a dear friend to so many.”
Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Sandner had a successful amateur boxing career under the tutelage of former middleweight champ Tony Zale. Sandner, who briefly dropped out of high school, won 58 of 60 fights and a Golden Gloves title before returning to school.
He attended Southern Illinois University and earned a law degree at the University of Notre Dame, where he met his future wife, Carole, a nurse at a South Bend hospital.
While Sandner practiced law, he found his calling after borrowing enough money to buy a seat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1971. He soon became a full-time trader, launching his own firm, and by 1980, Sandner was a power broker at the exchange, elected to his first of many terms as chairman.
Leo Melamed, the former CME Group chairman, who was a longtime business associate, mentor and sometimes rival of Sandner’s as they steered the fortunes of the futures exchange, said their first meeting in the mid-1970s made an impression.
“I was holding an open house at my office in the Merc and invited him,” Melamed said. “He had an argument in my office with a guy and knocked him out.”
The two worked together for years, with disagreements at times over the shift to electronic trading in the 1990s, but they shared a common love of the CME and a commitment to its future that translated into a successful partnership and a long-term friendship, Melamed said.
Sandner kept his hand in the CME for years after stepping down as chairman in 1997, serving as a board member and adviser. Most of CME Group’s floor trading pits were closed in 2015, as open outcry futures dwindled to a fraction of the company’s total futures volume. The CME Group was formed in 2007 when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange merged with its older rival, the Chicago Board of Trade.
He stepped down from the board in 2018.
Sandner raised eight adopted children with his wife in their north suburban Lake Bluff home.
Despite a demanding career, he found time for his children, taking them on international business trips, bringing them to black-tie functions and attending school and sports events.
“There was never a moment that us kids were on an athletic field or at a school function that we didn’t look up and see my father in the stands,” said his son, Chris Sandner.
Sandner is survived by his wife, eight children and seven grandchildren. Services are private, with Sandner to be buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery on the Notre Dame campus.