Smeal And FTS To Host Global Trading Competition
Smeal And FTS To Host Global Trading Competition
UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (March 27, 2006)—Penn State's Smeal College of Business and Financial Trading System (FTS) welcome students from around the world to participate in this year's Global Trading Competition, held April 21 and 22 on the Internet.
Competitors will analyze case situations involving financial markets such as fixed-income securities, equities, options, and forward contracts, and then make markets and trade securities over a fixed trading period on the same Internet-based FTS platform employed by business education programs around the world. The interactive markets will allow traders to experience how their bids, asks, and trades impact other traders' behavior and market prices.
"The competition will allow students to experience some of the challenges of real-world trading," said competition organizer David Haushalter, clinical assistant professor of finance at Smeal. "To succeed, they will need to quickly analyze uncertain situations and make trading decisions. And because the competition is Web-based, students will get to test these skills against their peers from around the globe."
The competition is open to all students who will be enrolled in an accredited academic institution at the time of the event. Upon registering online, contestants can download trading software from FTS and begin practicing for the competition.
Smeal and FTS first collaborated for the Global Trading Competition in 2003. More than 140 undergraduates and graduates representing 42 universities in eight countries participated in that event.
The award-winning Financial Trading System is a real-time trading and analytics system for financial education. It forms the backbone of educational trading rooms and represents one of the most significant innovations in business school education in the last decade. FTS creates a learning environment that integrates advanced trading-room technology, hi-tech educational infrastructure, and state-of-the-art knowledge.
Smeal's Trading Room, one of many to utilize FTS technology, replicates a real-world trading experience and functions as a classroom and a laboratory. Televisions offer access to live coverage of CNBC, CNN, and other financial and news networks. Real-time tickers and stock boards provide students with the latest financial information, including live Bloomberg and Reuters data feeds. And each of the 54 workstations in the Trading Room is equipped with the software needed for simulated trading, deal capture, settlement, analytics, pricing, portfolio management, derivatives pricing, and other finance-related challenges.
Complete competition details and registration information are available at www.smeal.psu.edu/gtc/index.html.
REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu.
Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the Center for Digital Transformation, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.
