Leo Melamed (born March 20, 1932) is an American attorney, finance executive, and a pioneer of financial futures.

[3] In 1939, following Germany's invasion of Poland and with the outbreak of World War II, his family fled to Lithuania to avoid capture by the Nazis.

[4] In 1940, the Japanese consul general to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, issued his family a life-saving transit visa, and they made the long trek across Siberia to safe haven in Tsuruga, Japan.

Instead, he worked as a runner in the produce futures markets of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange while in law school and learned about the business.

[10] Twenty years after their inception, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Merton Miller, named financial futures "the most significant innovation of the past two decades".

At the close of 1999, the former editor of the Chicago Tribune named Melamed "among the ten most important Chicagoans in business of the 20th Century".