Software Details

The Trading Room offers a variety of financial products that can be useful in many types of research and analysis. We, the Trading Room staff, encourage anyone and everyone to come in and take advantage of the following software. You may come in and teach yourself using the tutorials that are provided on every computer, or get assistance from one of the staff. Below you will find details about each of these programs.

Bloomberg Professional

Bloomberg Professional is an interactive information network that allows users to find virtually any financial information that they desire. It has been coined by Trading Room interns as "the Ferrari of information networks." It provides extremely in-depth financial data for all types of securities. For instance, students can delve into products like mortgage-backed securities and find information regarding their composition. Furthermore, it gives students and faculty the ability to perform in-depth analysis such as correlation analysis, theoretical pricing models, and potential arbitrage pricing discrepancies on various financial products. Bloomberg easily facilitates the monitoring of different global financial market data and news and provides a vast array of current and historical financial statement data. Detailed information on risk analysis and financial solvency can also be found for most securities. The Penn State Trading Room houses two Bloomberg machines, one of which can be used to download financial data.

Reuters Station

Reuters Station is available on any desktop in the Trading Room, and is used as a monitor for all the different global markets, from equities to currencies to international bonds. Users can set up several different "workspaces," each of which contains user-selected analytics screens such as news monitors, charts, and data monitors. The user can easily switch between the screens, meaning a large amount of data is available to a user. Reuters Station's charting tool, Athena, is very powerful and enables the performance of detailed technical analysis.

TradeStation

TradeStation Pro is a direct-access trading platform. It provides quick and easy access to real-time NASDAQ level 2 quotes and specialists' posted prices. Charting is quickly performed, and adding technical analysis to a graph takes only seconds. As easy as TradeStation Pro is to use, it provides users with extremely powerful tools to develop trading strategies and back test them. TradeStation Pro also allows data exportation into Excel.

FTS

The Financial Trading System (FTS), developed by John O'Brien at Carnegie Mellon University, allows teachers and students to run real-time trading "cases" that teach specific concepts and strategies. Teachers can also modify some of the setting for preconstructed cases to adapt them to their class, allowing them to tailor the cases for certain lectures or class material. In addition, FTS provides a platform for multiple universities to run trading simulations together, having several hundred students trading at once. During trading, the FTS software allows market participants to post a bid and ask price (market maker) or be a price taker from the other market participants. In many of these simulations, it is up to the trading crowd to discover the actual prices for the case they are working on. FTS is the platform used for the Penn State Global Trading Competition.