Joel Leonard graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics. He started his career in finance with Merrill Lynch as an account executive. In 1983, Joel became a member of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE). In 1986 he became a member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). In 1993, Joel founded Cornerstone Partners, a derivatives trading firm. Cornerstone Partners was a member of the CBOE, PSE, AMEX, and PHLX for over two decades. Concurrently, in 1997 Joel founded and managed a hedge fund, Advent Fund LLC, which specialized in mergers and acquisition arbitrage.
In 2004 Joel became a partner in Golden Horseshoe LLC. Golden Horseshoe LLC is a real estate company, responsible for the design, financing, development and construction of over $200 million in commercial and industrial real estate projects. Joel serves on several boards of both public companies (Northern States Financial Corporation and Grand Mountain Bancorp) and privately held companies (Recon Dynamics) and has served as a board member on Nemi Northern Energy & Mining Inc, a publicly listed Canadian corporation. Joel is a partner at Great Lakes Grain & Transportation, LLC, a specialty grain merchant and logistics company.