Mark Ditsch is a principal of Ditsch Trading, LLC and is the company’s portfolio manager.
Mr. Ditsch began his career in 1996 with Consolidated Grain and Barge (CGB), a leading US grain and transportation company. After spending some time learning the essentials of cash grain merchandising at a river elevator in southern Illinois, Mr. Ditsch moved to Mandeville, Louisiana to trade the export grain market for one of CGB’s parent companies, Zen-noh Grain Corporation (ZGC). ZGC is one of the largest grain exporting companies in the US. He initially managed the sorghum, corn, and soybean trading for the company and was named the Trading Manager for all commodities in 2006.
In addition to cash and futures trading, he focused much of his time on risk management, logistics, and world supply and demand analysis. This was supplemented with many trips to China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and other key destination markets. These travels were very important in helping to develop key relationships with world grain and soybean users. Mr. Ditsch continues to travel overseas to many of these destinations in order to help maintain these important market relationships.
In 2007, Mark moved to Chicago to work with the LaSalle Group as a futures trader and analyst, focusing his analytical work on the soybean and meal markets. He was approved by the NFA as an Associated Person of Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC in 2007. He began trading futures for his own account, and in 2008 was granted NFA approval to trade discretionary accounts.
Mr. Ditsch took his experience and began his discretionary trading program, Ditsch Trading, LLC, in January 2011. Mark traded discretionary accounts for almost three years before deciding to return to the corporate side of the sector; he joined Noble-Agri as their Global Head of Proprietary Trading. This position helped to hone the trading skills Mr. Ditsch has developed over the year and widened his network giving him more insight to the various ripples throughout all channels of the industry.
During the winter of 2015, Mark returned to the managed capital sector of the industry and with the help of the Nesvick Trading Group reopened Ditsch Trading, LLC.
Mark Ditsch holds a B.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Nebraska and an M.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Illinois. Mr. Ditsch grew up on a crop farm in Western Nebraska and still owns farmland in the area today.