Trading Room

Prominently located in the new Williams College of Business building, the trading room is a world-class facility providing instant access to real-world financial information and analytical tools used by professionals for trading, portfolio management, credit analysis, industry and company analysis, and risk management. The room houses 40 dual-panel computer workstations offering real-time access to financial information, including datasets and data feeds from:

• Bloomberg
• FactSet
• Value Line
• Morningstar

The Trading Room: Q&A with Shelly Webb

Shelly Webb is finance chair and professor of finance for the Williams College of Business. She has been a faculty member in Xavier University’s Department of Finance since 1992. She teaches both MBA and undergraduate courses in corporate finance, international finance, and international business. Webb received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include managerial finance, international finance and business case writing.

Q: How will the trading room change or enhance the learning environment?

A: Students and faculty will have access to real-time financial data to use in the classroom. The space will be set up in such a way that it will encourage a very collaborative learning experience.

Q: What are its short- and long-term benefits to students?

A: Short-term, we will see an immediate impact in fall 2010 as we will have a number of classes using the facility on a regular basis. Long-term, students will be better prepared to use real data for decision making in their careers.

Q: How common is it for a University to have a facility like this?

A: A number of universities have similar facilities, but what makes Xavier unique is that we will make sure that as many students as possible have access to the facility both in the classroom and outside the classroom. I was at X-Experience Days this past weekend, and a parent said that they’d seen such facilities at other schools they’d visited, and that it was often limited for use by a small group of 15 students or so. I told her that at Xavier, any student who would like to have a real-time experience will be able to do so in some fashion or another.