With a new equities trading floor set to open in October, Iona College”™s Hagan School of Business is ready to bring Wall Street to Main Street.
The $1 million project was funded by Iona alumni Robert LaPenta and Patrick Lynch, who graduated in 1967 and 1959 respectively, and makes Iona the only college in Westchester County to boast a real-time trading floor.
The business school”™s dean, Vincent Calluzzo, called the trading floor “a quantum leap forward” for both undergraduate and graduate students that will better enable them to compete for the diminishing but much-sought jobs in the financial sector upon graduating.
With the volume of equities trading from this past summer surging to all-time highs for many U.S. and foreign exchanges, Calluzzo said that the demand for stock-trading services isn”™t going away anytime soon.
“Whether the market goes up or down, you still need someone to do the trades,” he said. “As the volume grows, people need to be there.”
Once completed, the floor will be equipped with 12 Bloomberg Professional consoles and will also draw on data and analysis from Morningstar Direct and Standard & Poor”™s Research Insight, among other sources.
With a number of alumni working for companies such as Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc., Merrill Lynch and Co. Inc. and American Express Co., Calluzzo believes those relationships will be strengthened in the coming years with the Hagan School”™s trading-floor capabilities.
“I expect closer ties with a lot of the investment banking companies. I think this is a quantum leap forward for our students to be prepared for the business world. ”¦There aren”™t as many jobs, but for the people who get them the awards are phenomenal.”
The school is looking to hire a staff member to manage the trading floor, and Calluzzo said that he hopes to add several professors throughout the fall, possibly in the finance department.
Within the next year, the school plans to add an additional MBA concentration with an emphasis on trading and also hopes to incorporate a post-baccalaureate certificate on finance and trading and a master”™s degree in quantitative finance.
Additionally, Calluzzo said that once the trading floor is up and running, the business school will have weekend workshops in financial education open to the public. Classes for Iona”™s undergraduate and graduate students began the week of Aug. 22.
“The bottom line is, like in ”˜Field of Dreams,”™ if I build it I know they will come,” Calluzzo said of his hopes that the trading floor will draw academics and high-caliber students to the business school along with research grants and additional funding.
Funding for the trading floor will come from the college”™s general fund for the first two years, he said. The school also has applications pending for grant money, including an application for a $1 million grant from NASDAQ.
“This should be able to generate a couple million dollars a year” after the first year or two, he said.
All of the Hagan School”™s 1,100 undergraduate students will have a chance to experience the trading floor technology and Calluzzo estimated that a quarter of the school”™s MBA students will work to develop financial portfolios and become accustomed with the systems in place.
“We”™re going to give them the background they need to get the entry-level job, but we really need to train them to take the next step, to be problem-solvers,” he said.
“Without the trading floor you”™re basically doing theoretical stuff. (The trading floor) offers the opportunity to move from the theoretical to the practical.” He added that undergraduates would be able to walk into job interviews and show potential employers that they developed a real financial portfolio.
