A Veteran CME trader featured in John Lothian News’ Open Outcry Traders History Project recalls backyard legends, hard lessons from his father and Refco’s Tom Ditmer, and the “hit-and-run” strategy that shaped his S&P futures career.
ELMHURST, IL (JLN) ― February 16, 2026 ― Scott Kohl’s path from awestruck 10‑year‑old visitor to disciplined S&P trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange began with childhood Saturdays on the trading floor and a tough-love ultimatum from his father to finish college before he could pursue life in the pits.
In the first of a four-part Open Outcry Traders History Project interview, Kohl recalled how his father, Ted, then an accountant who would go on to become a Merc leader, first brought him to the exchange and parked him in the visitors’ gallery with retired member Floyd Baker, whom Kohl now calls his first mentor. From that perch above three livestock pits – hogs, pork bellies and cattle – Baker walked the boy through market basics, from reading boards to the infamous onion futures debacle and tales of legendary grain speculators like Marshall Field. “All these guys that were in our backyards on the weekends…they’re all yelling and screaming,” Kohl remembered, saying he was too young to grasp money but old enough to see that “having fun” could be a job.
Kohl grew up in a tight-knit neighborhood and backyard culture populated by men who would become industry icons, including Leo Melamed, Barry Lind, Tom Ditmer, Les Rosenthal and Jack Sandner. He described it as a boys’ club in which competition coexisted with a sense that “everyone did kind of look out for each other,” and where casual conversations offered life lessons he still draws on decades later. Those informal tutorials were reinforced by breakfasts and meetings his politically active father attended as a board of governors member and exchange officer, giving Kohl an unusually early window into how power, risk and markets mixed in Chicago’s futures world.
Despite his early immersion in trading culture, Kohl followed his father to Indiana University, where he met his future wife and studied psychology and economics rather than business. A profitable summer trading after his freshman year nearly derailed his education; he “made quite a bit of money for an 18‑year‑old in 1980” and wanted to quit school to trade full time. Ted Kohl, then a senior exchange officer, shut that down with an ultimatum: he would help his son in three years if he graduated, but if Scott left early he would see to it “no one would ever trade with me in the City of Chicago.” Scott stayed, saying his academic focus reflected a belief – shaped by reading “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” – that markets are ultimately about human behavior, not credentials.
Kohl said that conviction is being tested by the rise of algorithmic and artificial intelligence–driven trading. For most of his career, he argued, success meant understanding how “mass amounts of people are thinking,” whether on a floor or a screen. Today, with machines reading markets and, potentially, making autonomous decisions, he sees a future where a nonhuman intelligence might decide the Dow is worth “90,000, or 10,000,” challenging the trader’s long-held edge rooted in human nature. “It will be the first time that speech that I’ve given a thousand times, that human nature won’t matter,” he said.
Kohl’s own early trading style blended preparation, chart work and what he now recognizes as luck. While in college he bought weekly chart books, hand-drew price charts and traded small, turning “ones and twos” into a five-lot position that was caught on the right side of a pig crop report, generating a large share of the roughly $30,000 he made as a student. The windfalls convinced him he was smarter than he was, he admitted, a lesson that hit home when his first full year trading brought in just $11,000 and “tears in my eyes every night.”
By the time he graduated in 1984, Kohl expected to gravitate toward currencies as livestock contracts aged and the Eurodollar and currency pits drew younger talent. Instead, he arrived just as the S&P 500 futures, launched two summers earlier at the Merc, were emerging as the new “hot ticket.” He likened the S&P’s explosive movement to the way pork bellies once behaved in the meats, saying the index contract’s volatility suited his temperament and “rhythm.” Over the years, he watched peers wash out of multiple markets before finding a product whose pace and personality matched their own, reinforcing his view that traders must abandon “dead horses” and keep searching until they find their fit.
Getting a seat and a start required both connections and a jolt of fear. Kohl left Indiana as his father was struggling through a severe rough patch in the markets, and he was told there was no money available to buy him a membership. For six to eight months, he wore a yellow clerk’s jacket, putting trades into his father’s account, until Mark Milstein, a family friend, lent him an International Monetary Market seat, waiving the roughly $500 monthly lease fee Scott could not afford. The backing that mattered most came from Refco co-founder Tom Ditmer, a prominent Chicago futures figure who agreed to stake the young trader. “Don’t think I won’t take it from you,” Kohl recalled Ditmer telling him after Scott disclosed that his only real equity was a car worth about $10,000 to $12,000. “Don’t think I won’t take it…and give it to my son, and we’ll be in a parade waving to you.” Kohl said he left Ditmer’s office shaking and still thanks him for the harsh warning that forced him to grow up.
Starting with roughly $2,000 in trading capital while living at home, Kohl set a conservative daily goal, which he credits with keeping him alive in the fast-moving S&P. His plan was to make about $200 a day, leave the pit once he hit the target, and gradually build his stake. Colleagues branded him lazy or inattentive when he disappeared from the ring, but he said he never stopped watching the market; he simply stopped taking risks once he had met his daily number. The routine helped him build his account to about $10,000, at which point he lifted his daily goal and, over the first two years, accumulated between $100,000 and $150,000 in capital.
Those early years shaped his enduring view of equity index futures as both a laboratory and a minefield. Kohl believes the S&P taught traders what today’s digital assets and meme stocks are teaching a new generation – that markets can move farther and faster than fundamental models suggest. “If you’re trading equity futures all day long, you are going to step on a grenade,” he said, arguing that the pace and flow virtually guarantee sudden, damaging reversals. His prescription is “hit and run”: identify the period of the day when one trades best, the open, the close, or the quieter middle, exploit that window, then “walk away till tomorrow.”
That approach marked a break with an older floor culture in which time on one’s feet equaled profit. In Eurodollars, T‑bills, and even cattle and hogs, Kohl said, the rule of thumb was that “the longer you stayed in the pit, the more you made money,” as traders slowly scalped buys and sells in relatively orderly flows. The S&P, in his view, was simply “too fast for that,” and while a few could stand in the pit all day and thrive, “most of them can’t.” The lesson, he suggested in this first installment of his profile, is that survival in modern markets depends as much on self-knowledge and discipline as on speed, size or seat location.
