The Andersons Inc. wheat futures lawsuit ended in a $10 million class action settlement reached in May 2026, with The Andersons, Inc. and co-defendant Cargill, Inc. each paying $5 million to resolve claims that they manipulated Chicago Board of Trade soft red winter wheat futures in late 2017. Neither company admitted wrongdoing. The settlement fund goes to traders who held certain long or short positions in December 2017 and March 2018 CBOT wheat futures and options and liquidated them during a two-week window at the end of 2017.
Who Qualifies as a Class Member
Judge Robert W. Gettleman certified the class on May 7, 2025. It covers traders who purchased long positions in CBOT December 2017 or March 2018 soft red winter wheat futures, long positions in call options on March 2018 SRW futures, or short positions in put options on March 2018 SRW futures, and who liquidated those positions through offsetting transactions between November 30 and December 14, 2017. The court found the class had at least hundreds of members.
The certification order rejected the defendants’ argument that the class was overbroad because roughly 34 percent of members were “net-gainers” who benefited from the alleged manipulation. The court held that proof of a net loss is not a required element of a Commodity Exchange Act claim.
A settlement website at 2017cbotwheatfuturesclassaction.com and a help line were set up for class members. The opt-out deadline was February 3, 2026.
What The Andersons Was Accused of Doing
The case, filed July 10, 2020, in the Northern District of Illinois by veteran futures trader Richard Dennis, alleged that The Andersons and Cargill, both operators of grain warehouses in Ohio, worked together to move CBOT soft red winter wheat prices for their own profit heading into the December 2017 delivery period.
Plaintiffs described two connected steps. In the weeks before the December 2017 delivery deadline, The Andersons sold large volumes of wheat to flour mills around Toledo, Ohio, which the complaint said was intended to reduce demand for physical wheat and weaken cash-market prices. Then, on November 29, 2017, The Andersons registered 2,000 shipping certificates for delivery of December 2017 SRW wheat, representing 10 million bushels. According to the complaint, the registration was a false signal that the company planned to dump physical wheat on the market. The actual goal, plaintiffs alleged, was to push down the December futures price and widen the spread between the December 2017 and March 2018 contracts.
At the time of the registration, The Andersons held more than 60 percent of the short open interest in the December 2017 SRW contract. The company had placed bids in front-month spreads at prices well outside existing ranges, anticipating that the market’s reaction to the registration would move spreads far enough to fill those orders. Between December 4 and December 22, 2017, The Andersons repurchased 1,330 of the 2,000 certificates at prices lower than those at which they had been registered.
The CME Fines That Came First
Exchange discipline reached both companies before the civil case was filed. On June 26, 2020, the Chicago Board of Trade fined The Andersons $2 million over the November and December 2017 wheat trading. The exchange’s Business Conduct Committee found violations of rules governing just and equitable principles of trade, acts detrimental to the exchange, and dishonorable or uncommercial conduct. The Andersons settled without admitting or denying the violations and publicly stated it did not believe it engaged in any wrongdoing.
On September 23, 2020, the CBOT fined Cargill $500,000, finding the company had participated in a joint marketing arrangement to execute the same spread-widening strategy. Cargill also settled without admitting or denying the violations.
How the Case Survived to Settlement
Two rulings shaped the path to settlement: the expert-evidence decision in October 2024 and class certification in May 2025.
The plaintiffs’ economic case rested on Dr. Craig Pirrong, a University of Houston professor with roughly 30 years of experience studying price manipulation in commodity futures. Pirrong ran an event study with regression analysis to estimate what wheat futures prices would have been without the alleged manipulation, treating the difference as “price artificiality,” and built a linear programming model to estimate class-wide damages. Defendants argued his results on several trading days did not reach the conventional 5 percent statistical significance threshold. The court largely rejected the challenge, holding that reliability questions went to the weight of the evidence and could be tested on cross-examination. A small portion of the defendants’ motion was granted; the rest of Pirrong’s testimony stayed in. The court also denied the plaintiffs’ motion to exclude the defendants’ expert, Professor Justin McCrary.
At class certification, the court approved Richard Dennis and Port 22 LLC as class representatives but rejected a third proposed representative, Michael Glass. Glass had settled with the CME in 2019 over allegations that he engaged in “spoof trading” in the same March 2018 SRW wheat contracts at issue in the lawsuit. Although he neither admitted nor denied the violations, the CBOT Business Conduct Panel had found they occurred. Judge Gettleman ruled that this history “severely undermined” his credibility on a central issue and created an antagonistic relationship with other class members. Port 22 had its own regulatory history: a 2015 CME fine of $55,000 for operating an automated system that disseminated aberrant prices in Eurodollar futures spreads for eight months after being notified of the problem. That history did not disqualify it as a representative.
What the Settlement Does and Does Not Resolve
The $10 million payment resolves the civil class action claims. It is separate from the earlier CME disciplinary fines, which the companies paid to the exchange rather than to traders. Neither the exchange settlements nor the class settlement includes any admission of wrongdoing by The Andersons or Cargill.