Teaching and Research Activities
Integrating the Trading Room resources into the graduate and undergraduate curricula is the single most important goal of the Hughey Center. Over the past three years, we have tripled the number of courses integrating the facility. Currently, the Trading Room is integrated into 48 graduate and undergraduate courses as both a teaching and research center.
Some of these courses include as many as 26 sections per semester, exposing more than 800 students per course to the financial technologies that they will use as working professionals. Provided below is a brief description of how the Trading Room is used in a cross-section of graduate and undergraduate courses.
Undergraduate
GB 101 World of Business
Technologies used: FactSet, Morningstar , and S&P Net Advantage
Description: As an introductory course into the business environment, GB 101 classes have a class session in the Trading Room where they become acclimated with both MultexNet/Reuters Knowledge and Thomson One. Students are then assigned a course project where they must critically analyze a company on both firm and industry levels. MultexNet/Reuters Knowledge is used to obtain historical financial documents, various ratios, and performance relative to the industry. While Thomson One gives the students access analyst reports, consensus recommendations and earnings per share estimates. For the freshman class, this project serves as a good introduction to projects that are highly interwoven with the technology in the Trading Room.
FI 310 Financial Markets I
Technologies used: Reuters Kobra, Factset, & Bloomberg
Description: For students who choose to be Finance majors this will be their first core focused class. All students are required to take mini-classes for the above mentioned technologies as well as a few others. The course project requires them to keep an ongoing journal on the recent events that have affected equity, fixed income, and foreign exchange markets. Students use the news function in Bloomberg to write up weekly summaries. Also embedded in this project is becoming familiar with the process of downloading historical prices. Students use either Reuters Kobra or Factset to download weekly closing prices for selected equities, indexes, government treasuries, and foreign exchange rates. The students must compute weekly returns and display the different instrument’s performance graphically and relate the performance to the market summaries they wrote. This project opens the door to wide array of projects they will face in completing their Finance degree.
MA 335 Discrete Option Pricing
Technologies used: Option Tutor and Bloomberg
Description: This mathematics elective course integrates software to help students better understand the science of option pricing. Students use the Option Tutor as a resource when creating their own spreadsheet to calculate option prices. After initially creating a simple worksheet, students are then exposed to the Option Analytics feature on Bloomberg. This tool allows students to actively change different inputs for an option and instantly see how that change would affect the price of the option. The experience in this class is very unique to any other mathematics class and gives students a better understanding of their finance courses as well.
Graduate
FI 710 Enterprise Risk Management
Technologies used: Crystal Ball Professional
Students are required to complete the Crystal Ball mini class in preparation for the course. Then, the students are asked to complete a case study that involves a multinational company, which is exposed to foreign currency risk. The case study includes historical information on the various exchange rates, relevant information on put option contracts that can be used to hedge the fluctuations in future earnings resulting from exchange rate movement. The students construct a model that first forecasts the future foreign exchange rates, and then determines the optimal combination of put contracts to hedge the exposure. The model integrates Excel, Crystal Ball 2000, and OptQuest, and facilitates the sttive environment where research methods and data acquisition skills are shared among faculty, staff, and students. The students construct a model that first forecasts the future foreign exchange rates, and then determines the optimal combination of put contracts to hedge the exposure. The model integrates Excel, Crystal Ball 2000, and OptQuest, and facilitates the students understanding of how these tools can be used in the decision-making process.
Provided below is a complete list of courses that integrate the resources of the Trading Room:
Accounting
AC 260 - Financial Statement Analysis
AC 763 - Assurance Services: Business Risk Assessment
Business Fundamentals
BF 501 - Statistics
BF 502 – Economic Environment of the Firm
BF 506 - Accounting for Decision-Making
BF 507 – Finance Statement Analysis for Decision-Making
Economics
EC 621 - Business and Economic Forecasting
Finance
FI 310 - Financial Markets I
FI 312 – Advanced Investments
FI 318 – Real Estate Investment Analysis
FI 320 - Financial Markets II
FI 327 - Insurance and Risk Management
FI 330 - Seminar in Equity Trading
FI 331 - Capital Markets
FI 340 - Introduction to Professional Financial Planning
FI 351 - International Finance
FI 380 – Advanced Managerial Finance
FI 398 - Advanced Topics in Financial Planning
FI 390 – Bentley Investment Group
FI 401 – Directed Study in Finance
FI 402 – Seminar in Finance
FI 411 – Research Seminar in Finance
FI 625 - Corporate Finance: Theory, Tools and Concepts+
FI 635 - Fixed Income Valuation and Strategies
FI 640 - Equity Valuation
FI 645 - Derivatives
FI 685 - Financial Strategy
FI 710 - Enterprise Risk Management
FI 735 – Mergers and Acquisitions
FI 745 – Real Estate Investment Analysis
FI 751 - International Financial Management
Financial Planning
FP 600 - Professional Financial Planning Practice
FP 601 - Investments and Capital Accumulation
FP 610 – Benefits, Compensation, and Retirement
FP 700 – Investment Vehicles
FP 710 – Portfolio Management
General Business
GB 101 - The World of Business
GB 201 - Financial Reporting and Analysis
GB 202 - Accounting Information for Decision-Making
GB 301 - Integrated Business Functions
Management
GR 601 - Competing in a Global Market: Analysis of the Business Environment
PDS 500 - Professional Development Series
Mathematics
MA 249 - Case Studies in Mathematics
MA 335 - Financial Calculus and Derivative Pricing
MA 799 – Modern Data Mining
Statistics
ST 241 – Business Statistics
ST 242 - Applied Business Statistics
ST 625 – Quantitative Analysis for Business and Finance
RESEARCH Top of Page
In addition to supporting classroom instruction, the Trading Room is instrumental in providing faculty with timely, accurate information used in support of scholarly activities across campus.
With all that the Hughey Center for Financial Services has to offer it is a great place for faculty and students alike to perform in-depth research of topics ranging from arbitrage to executive compensation. Faculty and students have the ability to research and analyze just about any financial instrument, spanning from stocks and bonds to derivatives and foreign currency, just as if they worked for an elite financial institution. To better understand the research conducted to date, please visit the Faculty Research Database.
