Early Career
Ritchie attended Wheaton College, where he studied philosophy. After graduating he worked as a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority. Ritchie later worked as a guard at the Cook County Jail. While there, a friend changed his life by handing him a book on how to strike it rich trading commodities.
In 1970, Ritchie became a programmer for Arthur Andersen. It was at Arthur Anderson where he first met Steve Fossett on a project for Marshall Fields.
In 1976 Ritchie started working the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). Ritchie’s time at the CBOE was short, only two months, but it was here that he programmed the Black-Scholes formula into his Texas Instruments SR-52. This small use of technology led to a huge success on the floor. Ritchie lost interest in trading stock options, and left the CBOE, but before he left, he gave his Texas Instrument calculator, which was programmed with the Black-Scholes formula, to Steve Fosett.
According to Ritchie, “A trader on the floor with the simplest programming calculators in 1976 instantly became a one-eyed man in the land of the blind.” Fossett made a fortune using this calculator and became the single biggest trader on the floor of the CBOE. Fossett later attributed his success as a trader to Ritchie, in his book Chasing the Wind.
Ritchie left the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) in 1976, and returned to trading futures at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). Ritchie continued trading futures when he started Chicago Research and Trading (CRT). CRT returned to the options business when the CBOT started trading options on futures.
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