QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY in Belfast is set to create a virtual Wall Street with the launch of the city’s first financial trading room.
The university intends to capture the atmosphere of trading rooms from New York to London at its Management School in Riddel Hall.
It aims to give students the opportunity to experience a busy stock exchange by dealing in equities, bonds, foreign exchange and derivative instruments.
Prof Donal McKillop of Queen’s University Management School said the objective was to create an interactive environment where students learned to trade financial instruments and manage financial portfolios using live prices and the latest investment and trading technology.
“They will have the opportunity to think and learn on their feet, building up the skills needed in the high-pressure world of the trading room,” he said.
Queen’s Management School said the trading room will also enable it to create new bespoke postgraduate programmes in computational finance.
The university hopes the new facility will also make Northern Ireland a “more interesting proposition” for international businesses which will be able to see for themselves that there is a pool of graduates available to them who can blend “theory with practice”.
The development of the trading room on the university campus has been funded by Newry-based specialist financial software company First Derivatives.
It has also received support from the regional economic development agency, Invest NI.
First Derivatives chief executive Brian Conlon believes the new trading room could become a platform “for closer engagement between the company and Queen’s students and staff”.
The Newry company currently operates one of the largest graduate training programmes in Northern Ireland and on average employs up to 30 Queen’s graduates each year.
