We’ve all seen it in the movies or on TV: the fast-paced, adrenaline-charged world of buying and selling stocks on the trading floor. But seeing it on screen and understanding what’s actually going on are two very different things.
Lucky for you, you can now get that Wall Street experience without leaving the country. Actually, without even leaving Western Australia.
The Rosemarie Nathanson Financial Markets Trading Room is UWA’s state-of-the-art stock exchange simulator, giving business students access to all the equipment and experiences they need to become experts at buying low and selling high. The room can be adapted to teaching, trading and experimental modes, and even beat other top universities to take out Education Project of the Year at the 2018 AV Awards in London.
Channelling information in real time from the world’s major stock exchanges and more than 400 world markets, the facility is the biggest of its kind in Australia, and combines more than 35 million financial instruments, from stocks and bonds to currencies, derivatives and commodities. That’s around four million gigabytes of market data. And you know those big ticker machines that display the index and commodities info to traders? At eleven metres long, there’s no missing the one that’s set up here.
Professor Andrew Caminschi from the UWA Business School said classroom lessons come to life thanks to the data viewed as live on the financial terminals.
“This is an advanced facility that uses industry standard tools you would find in a real hedge fund or trading desk. It brings together hardware, software and services from financial providers, all in the one place. What used to take weeks of painstaking manual data collecting can now be done in a couple of keystrokes.”
So if you’re thinking of a business degree and you’re maybe looking at a university that doesn’t have this kind of opportunity to learn…well, you should probably be thinking of trading places.
You can find out more about – and even take a 3D walkthrough of the facility – at the Rosemarie Nathanson Financial Markets Trading Room website.
