Charles Carey was a founder and partner of HC Technologies, formerly Henning and Carey, a commodity trading firm and clearing member of CME Group. He has served on the CME Group board of directors since 2007 – as vice chairman for three of those years – and he is chairman of the CME Group Foundation. From 2003 to 2007, Carey was chairman of the board of the Chicago Board of Trade, where he had been a member since 1978 trading grains and other commodities.
Carey began his career in 1976 trading small-lot contracts as a member the MidAmerica Commodity Exchange. In the early 1980s, he would sometimes trade in the hog pit on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which is where he met Terrence Duffy, now chairman and chief executive officer of CME Group, establishing a friendship that would play an important role in the transformation of the global futures industry.
As chairman of CBOT, Carey pioneered the first common clearing agreement with Duffy in 2003 with CME clearing CBOT trades a year later. In 2005, Carey led the restructuring of CBOT from a member-run exchange into a for-profit, NYSE-publicly listed company. It was these developments that paved the way for the landmark merger of CME and CBOT in July 2007, creating a single entity offering global derivatives trading across all major asset classes.
Throughout his near-50-year career, Carey, a third-generation member of CBOT, has been instrumental in promoting the expansion of the futures markets and the City of Chicago. He has served as chairman of the Commodity Markets Council since 2010. A former college football player and avid sports fan, he is also president of the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame as well as an active supporter of Misericordia Heart of Mercy.
