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Students in Bentley's trading room can see data feeds while they work. screen that's flashing real-time data. You can have the stock ticker that runs the length of the ceiling," says Keith Brown, professor of finance, and president and CEO of the MBA Investment Fund at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. "But in some sense, that's almost like creating a Hollywood set. The real issue is whether all those facilities are being used by the students. You have to think about what you're trying to deliver—not only in con- tent, but in how you can deliver content to students." For some schools, it's easy to decide to build a high-tech center complete with a trading floor. For instance, Baruch College of the City University of New York serves the finan- cial services market of New York; therefore, administrators wanted a way to equip graduates with real-life forecasting skills. McCombs School built its trading floor partly in sup- port of an existing program, the MBA Investment Fund, in which students learn to manage real money. Other schools might find they don't need a trading floor at all. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsyl - vania—which opened one of the first educational trading floors in 1991—has essentially dismantled the physical space set aside for the trading floor. However, the school contin- ues to utilize trading technology and data feeds while stu- dents use laptops and Internet technology to participate in market simulations. breadth and depth, says Patrick Gregory, an assistant profes- sor of finance at the McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. He's also managing director of the Hughey Center for Financial Services, which houses the school's trading room. "If you don't have technology that's applicable within multiple dis- ciplines, you're never going to run the room at capacity," he 24 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 Figuring Out the Floor Each school that sets up a trading room probably will take a different approach to designing the floor and acquiring tech- nology. In general, administrators must determine how many computers they need, how to lay out the floor plan, and which suppliers and products to work with—which may include Reuters, Bloomberg, Bridge, NASDAQ, Dow-Jones, Thomson Financial, Trans-Lux, Crystal Ball, and others. What's most important is offering technology with says. "You need to have historical data that can be analyzed and interpreted, combined with real-time data, so that the room can be used by someone taking an economics course, a finance course, or an accounting course." When considering actual floor design, some schools, like Bentley, choose a layout that mimics that of a true trading floor. Others, like Baruch, make theirs look more like a tra- ditional classroom. "In a real trading room, desks are clustered together to allow people to interact with each other closely," says Bruce Weber, associate professor and director of the Subotnick Financial Services Center at Baruch's Zicklin School of Business. "But we have real trading-room furniture set up as a classroom, in a typical horseshoe shape, with the instructor up front. Every desk has a computer equipped with real mar- ket data software. There are also projection screens on the wall so students can see what the professor is doing and fol- low on their own computers." Baruch officials decided early on to avoid software that would make the students' lives too easy. "You can subscribe to data and software packages that do a complete analysis of fixed income instruments or bond markets, show you the important details, and set up the graphs," says Weber. "But we wanted the students to get their hands dirty developing software, applications, and spreadsheets. Students might cre- ate a spreadsheet with live market data which examines, let's say, whether an option pricing model is an accurate predictor of real market prices or whether the arbitrage opportunities that could exist when a stock trades in multiple markets do in fact exist. They learn to track pricing relationships over time so they can set up a spreadsheet that will record prices on a minute-by-minute or tick-by-tick basis. They can find out if these pricing relationships hold at any given point in time or, over the course of the day, how far the price deviates from its theoretical value. There's software that can do those computations for you, but we want the students to work with the raw data and create their own models and analyses." At Carnegie Mellon, the data feeds have been de-empha- sized. The school now relies on technology available over the Internet that can be accessed by any student with a laptop, says Sanjay Srivastava, professor of economics and finance and alumni professor at the school's Graduate School of