High finance of Wall Street comes to business college

Contact: Mark Schwerin
Photo of the Greenleaf Trust Trading Room.

The Greenleaf Trading Room is located on the first floor of Schneider Hall.

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—A little bit of Wall Street has found a home in the Western Michigan University Haworth College of Business, and students are in on the action.

A major gift to the University was used to create the Greenleaf Trust Trading Room, located in the main corridor of Schneider Hall. The trading room lets students experience the excitement of a Wall Street trading floor, complete with stock prices scrolling across an electronic ticker, Bloomberg and Morningstar terminals with real-time market data and world news updates.

Students take part in hands-on learning using the hardware and software commonly used by finance professionals to analyze the latest stock quotes, build investment portfolios, compare currency exchange rates and scrutinize company fundamentals.
The trading floor officially opened Oct. 27, 2014.

Student-managed investments

Many classes will call the Greenleaf Trust Trading Room home, including the Student Managed Investment Fund, which has served as a large cap manager of a portion of WMU Foundation Funds since 2009. The fund is managed by a select group of business students and has more than doubled in the last five years, reaching a current value of $1 million.

"This space transforms what we are able to do with our students in terms of teaching about the financial markets," says Dr. Devrim Yaman, chair of the Department of Finance and Commercial Law. "And with the U.S. Department of Labor predicting employment in investment and related fields will expand 25 percent by 2020, it is critical that we fully educate our students in the wide range of financial assets available for trade and the globalization of securities markets."

To read more, visit the summer 2015 issue of the Haworth College of Business Magazine or the winter 2015 issue of the WMU Magazine.