By John Goff

If you think your education cost a bloody fortune, read on. When investment house Sakura Dellsher Inc. (SDI) opened its doors in January for the spring semester of its trader trainee program, some students had ponied up a little more than your average B-school tuition to secure a seat in the class. Just how much more? Around $10 million.

Do not adjust your sets. The $10 million tuition is all part of SDI's attempt to woo institutional clients to its managed funds operation-and then educate them about the trading of synthetics. The idea blossomed back in 1993, when legendary Leo Melamed, chairman of the then-newly created Sakura Dellsher and chairman emeritus of the Merc, set out to create a premiere futures firm. Education, he determined, was critical to the success of his Chicago-based investment house. Melamed believed educating clients would make them more profitable traders, thus assuring SDI of some repeat business.

But during the course of designing the school, notes William Marcus, senior vice president of sales, "We started getting a lot of questions from prospective students concerning managed funds." So Melamed hired Joong Won Suh away from Dean Witter Reynolds to fashion a program that would provide the students with a comprehensive understanding of the derivatives markets as well as a hands-on lesson in managed funds. "Leo said he wanted something radically different," says Suh.

What Suh came up with fits that description. When a client agrees to put $10 million into the managed fund program, Sakura Dellsher admits up to four of the client's employees into either a trader trainee program or systems development program. The trader trainee program runs a full six months, while the systems development program runs a year. "We want to develop a long-term relationship with our clients, not just have them here for a few weeks and then leave," says Suh. "We want to bring them along slowly, carefully."

They'd better. Unlike most other programs, traders-in-training at Sakura Dellsher don't play with Monopoly money. Of the $10 million in tuition, a certain percentage is allocated to the students for actual market trading. "Our teaching is based on reality, not theory," says Marcus. "It's definitely more effective than mock trading." More painful, too. According to Suh, some of the trainees end up losing money. "Their sponsoring com-panies don't seem to mind, though," he says. "They consider the loss a tuition of sorts."

So far, the bulk of the program's students have come from Asia. That's not surprising, given that Dellsher was acquired by The Sakura Bank of Japan in 1993. Moreover, the futures and options market is just now starting to get off the ground in much of Asia. In late December, for instance, officials at the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange cut the ribbon on a futures exchange. "There's a tremendous yearning for this kind of teaching in emerging markets in Asia," says Marcus.

Of course, life sometimes teaches lessons of its own. The recent government shutdown touched off by the budget impasse closed parts of the State Department, catching many of SDI's Asian (and Latin American) students without visas to enter the US Apparently, the course on country risk comes later in the year.