After Richard Sandor sold his carbon exchange for almost $600 million in 2010, the Chicago trading legend set out to find another big idea.

He’s good at that.

When he was an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, a half-century ago, Sandor drafted one of the first plans for an all-electronic market, around the time Wall Street was drowning in paper. Then at the Chicago Board of Trade in the 1970s, he was a driving force in extending derivatives beyond corn, soybeans, and other tangible commodities. Now futures let traders hedge or speculate on financial intangibles such as interest rates and the S&P 500. Indeed, the U.S. Treasury bond futures that Sandor got going in 1977 turned into such a valuable franchise that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange paid $11 billion to buy the Board of Trade in 2007.

Read more at Bloomberg