Reflections
GOD IN THE PITS---A CHICAGO COMMODITIES BROKER SPEAKS OF FAITH
By Mark Ritchie
Chicago commodities broker Mark Ritchie speaks of faith and folly on the floor of America’s ultimate money pit.
Warnings about unscrupulous people seldom stop the naive from entering the sexy world of high finance. Almost everyone thinks he has the ability to distinguish between the moral and the immoral. That’s why the immoral have such a heyday. Christian people, especially pastors, are uniquely susceptible to this pitfall because they think some supernatural power has delivered them from greed. They also feel that since God is on their side, and “all things work together for good,” that the Almighty has a personal stake in their welfare. Anyway, since they are not at all greedy, all their proceeds will go for good causes. Of course.
One person came into the business with the highest of intentions. He had a sincere Christian faith. He thought Jesus Christ would speak to him through the Holy Spirit about his investments. I tried to explain to my new friend that the Spirit of God truly could guide all genuine believers, but that God had given us a brain and expected us to employ that as well. My friend, however, found it to be much less of a mental strain to move around the floor of the exchange, somehow maneuvered by the Holy Spirit, while he meditated for some inner vibration as to which pit he might enter and establish a position in the market.
“Why do you think God doesn’t want you to use your brain to decipher market activity just like everyone else?” I asked him. “Don’t you think that this God of ours could assist you in your decision making?”
“Your brain is capable of making all sorts of mistakes,” he told me, as if I really needed to be informed. “The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, never makes any mistakes.”
“Did you ever think that your brain might be making a mistake right now?” I asked jokingly. (Well, sort of jokingly).
My friend’s stay in the industry was so short-lived I hardly got to know him. And somebody else had to cover the Holy Spirit’s debits.
When I returned from a trip abroad, our hostages had been held in Iran for a month, causing the price of gold to jump $100 to just under$500 an ounce. Feeling that this trend had to continue as long as political tensions were mounting, I decided I had better sink my teeth into a gold position. So I purchased ten contracts of gold on the International Monetary Market and the price immediately crashed the daily limit. Some bureaucrat someplace came out with an irresponsible statement about the great prospects for peace breaking out in some unknown part of the world. Naturally, all the panic-stricken longs liquidated their position. Twenty grand down the toilet. And for me, $20,000 was a big hit.
But I held the position with the solid conviction that as long as the Iranians were fanning the flames of hatred, the economic stability on the globe could only remain in doubt, bureaucratic optimist notwithstanding. Sure enough, over the coming weeks, the price of gold slowly recovered, and by Christmas I had a nice present, not only my $20,000 loss back, but a profit of at least that much.
Following Christmas, my wife and I reflected back on a year that had been our most successful in the market. Having theoretically committed all our material resources to God, as we knew Christians were supposed to do, we were somewhat frustrated by the fact that we found it difficult to responsibly donate these large quantities of funds. Nevertheless, some sort of offering of thanks was in order. So after Christmas that year, we wrote a check for $10,000 and put it into the offering plate at the church where we had been active for a few years. It never occurred to us that this expression of thanksgiving might give rise to a strange turn of events.
Since the grain market was quiet, I was not going to the trading floor during the holiday season, but instead met a friend early the next morning for breakfast at the Country Kitchen in Highland Park. The days being so short in Chicago this time of year, it was still dark and a thin blanket of snow covered the road. It was coming down pretty hard as I drove the van around the cloverleaf at Central and up over the expressway. Chicago’s WBBM was giving the financial news and the price of gold just before the hour.
As I reached the top of the cloverleaf, I heard the morning gold fix from London, up a whopping $30. I pounded the steering wheel with excitement. No doubt another one of those bureaucrats had been talking about something. I was dumbfounded. While I was sacrificing myself by giving God $10,000, my investment in gold was netting me $30,000 over the weekend.
I had heard all those stories people told about how you can’t outgive God and all that stuff, but this was ridiculous. Could this be what Jesus had in mind when He talked about any one who sacrificed anything receiving back a hundred times as much? Talk about an investment opportunity, a guy could really sink his teeth into this one.
The price of gold continued up another $20 during the week. I had started out by sacrificing $10,000 and ended up with $50,000 in my pocket.
So now I was in a quandary. A week earlier we gave a gift out of thanks for a good year; should we give thanks for a good week? Well, good grief, I thought, what actually did I have to lose? I was $40,000 ahead of where I started out last week. So the next Sunday we wrote out another check for $10,000, figuring we were still $30,000 ahead. The next week the price of gold jumped another $50 and I raked in another tidy $50,000 and I began thinking about the story of the goose that laid the golden egg, about keeping the goose healthy and all.
I was definitely on to something here. Maybe I should start the “Church of the Frustrated Commodities Broker.” The service would amount to nothing but the passing of the plate. Maybe we’d sing the commodity traders’ altered hymn, “What a Trend We Have in Jesus.”
That Sunday we put another $10,000 in the same collection. I don’t recall exactly how much longer this little racket continued, but the price of gold soared to a high of $850.
Just as all good things must come to an end, so all market rallies have a way of drawing to a close. Blinded by the shock of incoming dollars, if not plain old-fashioned greed, many bulls in a market will take leave of their senses until long after it’s too late, simply forgetting or choosing to ignore what everyone knows; that what goes up must come down.
I had taken leave of mine as well. And of all people, I should have known that God is no cosmic genie who manipulates markets. I also knew that preachers who tell people to give so that God will bless them with more always suggest that the money be given to their ministry.
The shape that a market will take when totally dominated by a group of sophisticated, yet panic-stricken investors going belly up is an amazing sight to behold. The day of reckoning occurred on a Tuesday when the market opened locked limit-down. There was really no good way to get out, although if one were not in too great a state of shock one could have sold gold in the cash market and spread his commitment off against his future contracts. Like many others, I preferred to sit and wait, hoping that some miracle would stave off the landslide. It didn’t.
I had lost $200,000 in one short little day.
I could not see how the sun could possibly come up tomorrow. I did not even consider myself to be a lover of money and I thought this must be the end of the world. The foolishness of the suicides that followed the stock market crash of 1929 suddenly didn’t look so foolish. I felt at that moment as if I could make good use of a gun, and I wondered how the real greedy lovers of money must be feeling.
Was this some kind of a setup? God was playing some sort of game with me to get all that money. That settles it, I told myself, that’s the last $10,000 check I’ll ever write to any of His churches. Have I gone through all the grief of this industry only to be led like all the other bulls to the slaughter of a market crash?
To make matters worse, the sun did come up the next morning. I lay there in bed groping for anything that would help relieve the pain. “What, after all, is your life,” I remembered reading. “It is like a vapor which vanishes in a moment.” I wished mine would vanish even if it wasn’t the end of the world. I still knew there was a God even though He seemed to have taken a vacation for a day. “Take the lilies in the field,” I recalled Christ’s words. “They don’t work. Yet Solomon in all his glory was never outfitted like one of them. If God dresses the grass of the field which is here today and gone tomorrow, how much more will He dress you?” At least now I knew what it meant to be here today and gone tomorrow. But even with as big a loss as I had taken in one day, I still had more food and clothing than the vast majority of anyone on earth.
And there was more. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven.” And, “He who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will cry himself and not be answered.” From childhood I had heard that cry. I entered this industry to be one who would make a difference, one who would reach out with the love of God to do as Christ said, to share with him who was needy, to care for the widows and orphans, to provide assistance to the oppressed.
These were lofty ideals to which I had given lip service for years. Now I was reacting with the emotions of a greedy money-monger. If all my money were really at God’s disposal to do with as He wished, why should it bother me so much if He chose to take a couple hundred thousand of it and spread it around to some other investors? What difference did that money really make? I still had my wonderful wife and beautiful boy (and now another on the way). In God’s great eternal plan for history, how much difference was $200,000 going to make?
I reflected on this for a moment. For all the most noble, the most holy, the most sanctified reasons I could think of, for all the most spiritual goals that could be found in the Good Book, I thought, I want that money back! I paused for a moment. Now!
I knew, though, what was really happening. It was simply one of the down periods in the ups and downs of my business, even if it did happen to be the biggest down I had ever experienced. I knew that God allowed the bad and good luck to fall on the just and unjust alike. God’s children are no luckier than anyone else’s children.
I was being comforted not by any mystical feelings, but by truth. Plain, old-fashioned, simple truth. I knew there was a God. I knew I was one of His creatures. I knew He cared about me. And the simple fact of the matter was that the most basic of all prayer requests that He taught us, “Give us this day our daily bread,” had already been answered for me in unthinkable abundance. I was overcome not only by the innumerable blessings with which I was surrounded, but also by the depth of despair to which I had sunk while sitting right in the middle of them.
Networks, Volume Two, Number Four, Fall 1989
From excerpts of God in The Pits, by Mark Ritchie, Macmillan, 1989. Used by permission.
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