Trading Room

One of only a select number of such facilities nationwide, the Trading Room in the Hughey Center for Financial Services brings world financial markets to the Bentley campus. The facility combines state-of-the-art technology and real-time data to offer you a firsthand look at the intricacies of risk management, asset valuation and other financial concepts. The Trading Room is open to students in all majors and is a requirement in some General Business core classes.

Features

The state-of-the-art features in the Trading Room include:

  • Leading professional software including Bloomberg, Bond Tutor, CAPM Tutor, Crystal Ball Pro, DataStream Advance, FactSet, Financial Trading System, Matlab (Matrix Laboratory), Mergent Horizon, Morningstar Direct, Option Tutor, Portfolio Analysis, S&P Compustat, SPSS, William O'Neill Direct Access, and Worldscope
  • 60 Hewlett-Packard XW4600 workstations, each with a dual 19" HP flat-panel display
  • Five Bloomberg terminals
  • 16 NEC 42" LCD screens
  • Three ticker tapes displaying market information, news headlines, and real-time data
  • An Enterasys Matrix switch, which provides network connectivity to the floor
  • 10 IBM servers that offer file and application serving, as well as research and development support

Courses

The Trading Room is integrated into nearly 50 undergraduate and graduate courses as both a teaching and research center. Some sample undergraduate courses that feature the Trading Room as part of their curriculum include:

GB 101 World of Business

During this introductory course to the business environment, students begin using MultexNet/Reuters Knowledge and Thomson One to critically analyze a firm on both the financial and industry levels. Students perform research on historical financial documents, various ratios, and performance relative to the industry through MultexNet/Reuters Knowledge is used to obtain historical financial documents, various ratios, and performance relative to the industry. Thomson One provides students with access to analyst reports, consensus recommendations and earnings per share estimates.

FI 301 Financial Markets I

This course is the first core class for Bentley Finance majors. During this course, students keep an ongoing journal on recent events that have affected equity, fixed-income, and foreign exchange markets, and use Bloomberg to create weekly summaries. Students also use Reuters Kobra or FactSet to download weekly closing prices for selected equities, indexes, government treasuries, and foreign exchange rates. They also must compute weekly returns and graphically display each instrument's performance, relating the results to their market summaries.

MA 335 Discrete Option Pricing

This Mathematical Sciences elective course integrates software to help students learn about the science of option pricing. Option Tutor software provides a resource for students in creating spreadsheets to calculate option prices. Students also are exposed to the Option Analytics feature on Bloomberg, which allows them to actively change different inputs for an option and instantly see how that change affects the price.

Corporate Resources

Many of the world's top companies regularly turn to the state-of-the-art resources found in the Trading Room. For the corporate community, the Trading Room provides employee training in areas such as trading, back-office functions, marketing and technology. Executives at a growing number of Boston-area companies, including John Hancock Financial Services and ArrowPoint Communications, also have used the Trading Room as home base for tracking an IPO when their respective companies went public.