Students' Interest Rates Predicted to Soar as UW Business School Opens West Coast's First Nasdaq Student Trading Room

The market is looking bullish in Balmer Hall, thanks to the School's new Nasdaq trading room, which opened on October 7.

Capturing 100 percent of the market share of college campus trading rooms in the western United States, the UW Business School provides a high-tech trading room to MBA students, enabling them to make simulated trades using real-time information. The room is, in part, the result of a $250,000 grant from the Nasdaq Stock Market Educational Foundation.

Roughly a dozen colleges in the United States have mock trading rooms.  

Although the terminals won't allow students to complete valid transactions, the trading room does let students use real-time data to manage their portfolios. The room features a display board running real-time stock quotes and other data on a continuous feed, as well as 12 trading stations and two television monitors. Each station is equipped as a trading desk would be in a Wall Street firm - complete with dual computer screens providing real-time financial market data from Reuters.

The center includes a ticker tape showing stock prices and a wallboard displaying data from Nasdaq, Dow Jones & Co., and the New York Stock Exchange, plus interest rates and currency and bond prices. The UW Nasdaq trading room replicates real-world trading environments and will function as a classroom and a laboratory facility. Students will be able to research securities and have access to all the data Wall Street analysts have, including live coverage of financial markets from CNBC and CNNfn.

"Learning how to be a good trader takes practice, and now our students will learn which strategies work best while they assume the role of a market maker in a dealer market, buying and selling securities to make a trading profit," said Jefferson Duarte, a UW assistant professor of finance and former Wall Street bond trader. "The trading room will certainly add a realistic dimension to the classes we teach about risk management and futures and options."