Smith Students Excel Thanks to Wall Street Workstations

Many business schools give their students access to professional platforms in the classroom but the access given by the Robert H. Smith School of Business stands apart as a leader in reality-based learning. The school boasts 60 Bloomberg-licensed workstations (among the most at any U.S. business school) that Smith professors to integrate the services into a variety of courses from equity analysis to supply chain management. In the past three years, about 1,500 students and faculty members have engaged in coursework and research on the workstations.

In recognition of the school’s innovation in workstation technologies and usage, Bloomberg Professional Services invited Smith finance lecturer Joseph Perfetti to its New York headquarters in to demonstrate his courses at the Bloomberg for Education Symposium.

At the New York Symposium, Perfetti demonstrated how financial information can be brought to the classroom in front of business academics from across the world. About 400 Smith students access the Bloomberg platform each Perfetti’s undergraduate and graduate-level courses where, working in teams, students in equity analysis courses simulate real-world trading from a $1 million portfolio using a Bloomberg product called Stock-Trak. Using dummy funds in a real life scenario, students write and submit analyses for each trade and compete for Stock-Trak points. At semester’s end, a higher share of points translates to a higher grade.

“With Bloomberg I can show students the components of cost of capital in real time, show them how Marriott compares against peers and link to real-work economic data that will influence the understanding of risk,” Perfetti said. “It is very powerful for students to walk out of the lab with custom data sets which they can manipulate into analyses that can be immediately applied.”

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