UNC provides students a new way to learn markets

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Students at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School have a leg up on some of their competition. To raise the visibility of its finance programs, the school has invested $1.2 million in a capital markets trading lab.Installed last month, the lab is designed like a stock market trading floor. It's partially enclosed in glass, so passersby can see in. A red and green ticker streams stock prices. At the front of the room, two 3-foot-by-4-foot flat screens hang, showing stock and bond prices and other securities information in real time.Students learn to analyze and trade stocks and bonds using the same software that powers Wall Street and other major trading arenas."In prior years we had to read about what happens in the merger and acquisition case," said Gregory W. Brown, an associate professor of finance who was instrumental in getting the lab set up."What we can do now is take the same tools that investment bankers use to look at the ... merger and acquisition. If the deal gets announced that morning, we can look at all the information relating to the deal in real time. We can look at the companies side by side and do a comparable analysis. It's pretty cool."About a dozen universities use such trading floors in their classrooms, including Cornell, Fordham, Kent State and Michigan State, said Suraj Sharma, account manager for Thomson Reuters, the international news company that developed the lab.But no other school, said Sharma, has embedded it into the curriculum as thoroughly as Kenan-Flagler."They have built their curriculum around the product and data," he said. "Other (schools) are more casual users."Students are expected to learn how to manage securities the same way that professional investors do, including balancing fund stocks and bonds, employing strategies for managing hedge funds and options, and researching companies before making initial investments."We don't dummy it down for the students," Sharma said. "This is the same exact product that is used on Wall Street, U.K. and China."That's a key selling point for students.Mark Zhen, 31, an exchange student from China, is confident that the program will help him land a good job in marketing."We are immersed in the real business world," Zhen said. That allows him, he said, to bring more to a job than just a degree."It's like the live fire exercise that they do in the military where they shoot real ammunition over your head," said Hal Eddins, an investor with Capital Investment group in Raleigh, N.C. "This is definitely becoming more critical; over 50 percent of what we do is electronic driven.(E-mail Vicki Lee Parker at vicki.parker(at)newsobserver.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)