College of Business turns heads, preps students with on-campus stock ticker
Andrew Glass |
Enclosed behind glass, the Capital Markets Lab is easy to spot as the red stock symbols crawl by and announce that this place is about more than learning business theory – it’s about practicing business, even before students have their degree in hand.
“The information provided by the software programs in the Capital Markets Lab is almost identical to the software that any broker or money manager would use on Wall Street,” said Jeff Jewell, associate professor of business administration, who used the lab to teach equity investing this past fall.
“The tools and software offered in our new lab are going to allow students to take their analysis and knowledge to the next level. This software is allowing us to train and prepare our students for the real marketplace they will face upon graduation,” he said.
Jewell submitted a proposal to set up the lab in a 2006 internal grant process, Lipscomb 2010, designed to fund improvements and upgrades in specific fields of study. The business college was awarded up to $100,000 to create the lab.
Five flat-screen TVs line the walls, covering the latest news coverage of world business and trade, 20 computer workstations are installed with a variety of business specific software programs, and, of course, the live-feed stock ticker, informing classes of the current conditions of the U.S. Stock Exchange.
The lab doubles as both a classroom and a place for independent study for upper-level finance, accounting and business policy students, who have special key fobs to grant them entrance to the lab’s resources.
One example of the many software programs available to students is Stockval, a comprehensive software program detailing over 7,000 businesses from around the globe. It allows professors and students to research companies’ financial histories, documenting more than 25 years of records, balances, daily stock prices, and dividends. The program allows students to analyze the financial situations of businesses over time.
Jewell believes the software programs to be essential to students’ knowledge of the marketplace. “Finance is such a current, event-driven trend,” he said. “It’s important for students to understand the daily financial changes that companies experience.”
Students are also using @Risk, a statistical program that runs thousands of tests on different situations such as stock price activity, investments and exchange rates for companies over a given period of time. The program simulates reality and predicts the future outcome based on the entries provided by students.
“The @Risk software is an extremely valuable tool in an uncertain situation that helps give the student an idea of what could happen,” Jewell said.
Capital Markets Labs, complete with the real-world computers and stock tickers, have been a popular trend at many other universities in the past five to seven years, Jewell said. “It’s a new thing in the world of finance departments,” he said.
“Demand for on-campus trading labs is growing rapidly. Four years ago, Rise Vision had worked with approximately 25 business schools to help them build trading labs. Today, we have worked with more than 125 business schools to install technology such as LED tickers that scroll real-time stock information and LCD flat-panel displays that highlight business and international news,” said Ryan J. Cahoy, of Rise Vision, Inc., the company that created Lipscomb’s stock ticker.
“Our list of customers is growing every day,” Cahoy said. “Trading labs immerse students into the business environment, and provide professors with numerous real-life learning situations. They help bring a business school into a new tier of professionalism that is supported by faculty, students, alumni and administration.”