Summary

Ken Stein has been an independent trader and consultant at the Chicago Board of Trade for thirty years, and is a former member of the Kansas City Board of Trade. He trained as a grain merchandiser for Cook Industries, Inc. in Memphis, TN, and was manager of export wheat trading of The Pillsbury Company at its Minneapolis headquarters.

Mr. Stein was a senior market analyst of World Perspectives, Inc., Washington, D.C., whose clients included most U.S., European, and Japanese trading houses, large corporate users, and "state" traders including U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, Canada and Australia. He was a markets editor of Milling & Baking News, the wheat industry's leading publication.

Mark Hawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1953. He received his B.A. in Economics in 1975 from Nottingham University in England. Continuing his education at the University of California Berkeley, he received his MBA the following year.

From 1976 until 1978 he was employed by the Continental Grain Company in London, England where he worked on the soybean and proteins desk. Returning to the United States in 1979, he went to work for the Louis Dreyfus Corporation (LDC), spending a year in Springfield, Illinois where he assumed responsibility for trading the southeast rail corn market. Mr. Hawkins then went on to work at the LDC headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, trading domestic and global feedgrains for the company.