Raymond M. Leuthold was the first Director of the Office for Futures and Options Research, and the first T.A. Hieronymus Distinguished Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Consequently, it was his responsibility to establish the organization and framework of the Office, set objectives, obtain funding, and recruit graduate students. Dr. Leuthold was a professor at UIUC from 1967 until he retired in 2000 at which time he became Professor Emeritus. He obtained his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics and M.S. in Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his B.S. degree in Agricultural Economics at Montana State University.
He was a visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University’s Food Research Institute, Fulbright Scholar at Institut de Gestion Internationale Agro-Alimentaire in France, Exchange Professor at the University of Abidjan in the Cote d’Ivoire, and visiting Research Scholar at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Dr. Leuthold was internationally recognized as a leading scholar and authority on the use of futures markets to manage risk. He taught and advised thousands of students about agricultural markets, prices, and futures markets. Dr. Leuthold supervised a total of 52 M.S. thesis and Ph.D. dissertations. Nine of these were selected as the most outstanding in the department, and 3 of these received honorable mention in national competition. Many of the students that he advised became recognized scholars at major research universities, institutions, and government agencies around the world. Among the countries included are United States, Canada, India, Cote d’Ivoire, Taiwan, Australia, France, Thailand, and China. Some of the private firms where his students obtained employment as research analysts included the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Cargill Grain, Archer Daniels Midland, Consolidated Grain and Barge, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. In the United States, students became employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the World Bank.
Dr. Leuthold authored over 160 books, monographs, journal articles, bulletins, reports, and proceedings papers. He has coauthored 3 books and was the lead author of the major textbook, The Theory and Practice of Futures Markets, which was used at several universities domestically and abroad. Dr. Leuthold received many prestigious teaching and research awards, as well as the College Funk Award. He was listed for several years in Who’s Who in America as a noteworthy agricultural economics educator.
Dr. Leuthold made pioneering research and scholarly contributions about livestock futures markets, which began trading in the early 1960s. Some of the topics he has studied during his career included economic performance and efficiency of futures contracts, their forward pricing abilities, impact on cash price variability, hedging strategies, impact of government reports and unanticipated information on futures prices, effect of noise traders, new markets in emerging countries, distributions of futures prices and spreads, and models of cash-futures (basis) relationships. Additionally, Dr. Leuthold focused his research on the management of multiple risks simultaneously in the futures markets by firms like cattle feeders and soybean processors who manage both input and output price risks and by foreign countries who export or import agricultural products while simultaneously managing interest rate and currency risks. Dr. Leuthold is also nationally known for advances made in price forecasting procedures and evaluation of these forecasts, usually applied to agricultural commodities.
Dr. Leuthold created two computerized futures and options trading simulators, HedgeSim and TradeSim. Both were designed for education purposes, with HedgeSim on a CD while TradeSim was on the Internet and incorporated live prices. The latter was used by hundreds of students across the country.