Founding Partner
Bill Gruzynski is a Founding Partner of The Chicago School of Trading. Bill earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Chemistry from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb Illinois. He has been actively involved in the futures industry since 1974.
Bill began his futures industry career at the Chicago Board of Trade as a runner and then a grain analyst. He later moved to Rosenthal Collins LLC and ran the firm’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange operation until 1980, when he became an independent trader and broker.
Bill held a membership on the International Monetary Market, a division of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) where he traded in gold, T-Bills, Eurodollars and Foreign Currencies. He later held a membership on the Index and Options Market (IOM), a division of the CME, trading in the S&P 500 Stock Index Futures and various commodity options markets. Bill executed trades on behalf of some of the largest hedge funds, commodity trading advisors, and investment institutions in the world.
In the early 1980′s, Bill began a decades long professional relationship with legendary Chicago trader Richard Dennis. Mr. Dennis is most well known for his famous “Turtles” experiment where he trained a small group of people with no previous market experience and turned a majority of them into successful traders. By training his turtles in his trading techniques, Richard Dennis proved that trading can be learned and is not restricted to a select group of ‘born traders’. Bill executed orders for Dennis and his group on the CME and later learned the same Trend Following system that Richard Dennis taught his turtles.
Bill has served on numerous Exchange committees, including: arbitration, business conduct, floor practices, IOM new products, commodity trade reconstruction, pit oversight, as well as various pit committees, including Vice-Chairman of the S&P 500 pit committee and IOM Divisional Vice-Chairman. Bill also served as a director of the Commodity Futures Political Fund.
Bill is the founder of the Emerald Group of Companies which specializes in the financial sector, and includes Emerald Market Systems, a company delivering technological innovations for the financial industry, Emerald Asset Management, and Emerald Strategies LLC that concentrate on alternative investment solutions including hedge funds and managed futures programs for high net worth individuals and institutional investors.
Bill is a Chartered Alternative Investment AnalystSM (CAIASM) a professional designation exclusively for alternative investment specialists. He is a member of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst AssociationSM, which established the industrys first and only specialized educational standards covering real estate, private equity, commodities, hedge funds and managed futures.
Bill is also a senior partner with Hillcrest Partners, a commodity futures and options consulting firm, which consults with clients, regarding their entry into the commodity futures and options markets. Bill also designs and implements commodities and securities markets technical trading systems.
Bill is a member of the Board of Advisors and a lecturer and instructor in the Financial Markets and Trading Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business.
