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Friday, January 2, 2009
Inside Education & Training
Bentley students learn hands-on investing from school's trading lab
By Brendan Lynch
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Money, in the form of colored light, flows all over the walls and desktops of the Bentley University Hughey Center for Financial Services.
Nearly $150,000 worth of equipment glows and hums behind the glass walls of the center’s trading room: 16 LCD flatscreen televisions, four Bloomberg computer stations, three stock tickers and one world clock. In addition, there are 57 PCs. Students can access professional financial software, including Oracle Corp. Crystal Ball Pro, Thomson Financial DataStream Advance, Thomson Reuters First Call and Morningstar Library Edition.
The lab is training students for careers in finance, economics and accounting — lately against a bleak backdrop of recession and bank failure.
The lab was built in 1997 as a virtual version of a traditional trading floor, but even then the relevance of a physical trading floor was fading, due to the emergence of the Internet, according to the trading room’s managing director, Richard Gibble. After a move to the Smith Technology Center in 2001, the space has been repurposed as a financial markets laboratory used to complement about 45 classes, from General Business 101 to Finance 380, and for faculty research projects.
Gibble plans to host an investing competition — with a grand prize of $2,500 to $5,000 — Saturdays in February. Students from several schools will be given an investment scenario— the team who does the best job managing its assets over three rounds wins.
Other than Gibble, the lab is staffed by students. Two of them, junior student manager Brice Soucy and sophomore trading room assistant Daniel Delrosario, said they spend more than 40 hours a week in the lab between work and their studies.
Soucy and Delrosario keep the room running, Gibble said. “They’re at least as important as I am.”
Gibble said the student staff, who wear suits and ties when working, have a great deal of discretion on the job, conducting classes on the lab’s financial software, running in-depth roundtables on financial topics and helping other students with questions. The students are chosen from 40 or 50 resumes after three rounds of interviews, Gibble said.
The students also use the lab to research their decisions investing actual cash — a portion of Bentley’s endowment — as the Bentley Investment Group, which has grown to about $600,000 from $250,000 in 1997. After the financial crisis began in the fall, the group pulled its money out of the market to put it into cash. Today, it’s 70 percent reinvested — and down, but not down 40 percent like the broader market, Gibble said.
“They’re doing OK,” he said.
A few hours before a recent onsite interview, General Dynamics Corp. announced its Electric Boat subsidiary had landed $286 million from the U.S. Navy for work on nuclear submarines — good news for the student investors.
“We bought it,” Delrosario said. “That was my pick.”
The students said more people tend to drop in when there’s a major market upheaval, such as the collapse of Lehman Bros. One of the building’s janitors drops in daily to check the price of oil.
“Now that (expletive) is hitting the fan, people want to talk about it,” Soucy said.
College, like the trading room, may be the place to be during the recession.
“I’m happy to be graduating two years from now,” Delrosario said.
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