The trading centres offer a variety of specialized trading courses designed to provide students with hands-on experience and practical skills in financial markets, portfolio management, and investment strategies.
The experimental course attempts to develop practical skills in trading financial securities with a focus on risk management and return enhancement through role playing. Market microstructure knowledge provides students guidance in implementing their trading strategies. Students are able to trade money market instruments, bonds, equities, indices, ETFs, currencies, commodities and their corresponding options; focusing on trading strategies that minimize market exposure through risk measurement. A fictional account is created and will be evaluated at the end of the course. Students are divided into subgroups that act as individual investment/trading firms. Lectures, supervised trading and trading cases are conducted during class time at the Allen H. Gould Trading Floor. Students are expected to justifying their trading positions/decisions using due diligence and market microstructure. Students are responsible for trading their portfolio a maximum of four hours per week.
This cross listed experimental course focuses on risk management and return enhancement through role playing. The course deals comprehensively with the increased importance played by risk and uncertainty in today’s financial markets. Students are expected to justifying their trading positions/decisions using due diligence and market microstructure. Market microstructure knowledge provides students guidance in implementing their trading strategies. Pedagogically, students are assigned securities and their corresponding options to trade subject to financial markets outlook and their expectations. Students are divided into subgroups that act as individual investment/trading firms. Students will supply market reports with buy, hold, and sell recommendations. The reports must include the students’ outlook and form the basis for the individual’s reasoning for trading the securities. Classes, trading sessions and supervised trading cases are conducted at the Horizon Exchange Traded Funds Investment Decision Centre (HIDC).
The group seminars and workshops are designed to introduce participants to financial markets and familiarize them with key industry tools. These sessions are regularly updated to reflect the latest changes in software and data feeds. To ensure they remain cost-effective, seminars are offered to groups of 20 participants.
Certain seminars, such as those covering Thomson Reuters Eikon and Bloomberg, are offered weekly. Additional sessions can be scheduled upon request for groups of 20, and seminars can also be customized to focus on specific topics or products.
For DeGroote business students, the Thomson Reuters Eikon and Bloomberg seminars are covered by tuition. Other students pay a flat rate of $25 per seminar, while members of the general public are charged $50 per seminar. Please note that additional fees may apply for other seminars or workshops.
These seminars can also be tailored as workshops for courses offered by the DeGroote School of Business.
To schedule or learn more about available sessions, please contact Dr. John Siam at siam@mcmaster.ca.
Virtual seminars are held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7:30–8:30 PM, rotating each week between Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.
Through the course of the term an expert supervisor will show students the ins and outs of the Bloomberg terminal. During the duration of the sessions students can expect everything from mapping gold mines around the world to finding the breakdown of products by geography and segment. Individuals will also be introduced to the Bloomberg University and how they can receive their professional Bloomberg designation. The Bloomberg terminal has become the must have in any finance position and is widely used in the industry.
Through the overseeing of an expert, students will be introduced to the basic topics of Thomson Reuters-Eikon. Such topics include the basics of charting to full in depth analysis of financial statements down to the suppliers and producers. Individuals will also be introduced to the Eikon certification test and how they can receive their professional designation. Thomson Reuters-Eikon is heavily used in the industry.
This is an interactive workshop which provides a comprehensive look at North American financial markets in just five hours. Any group of ten people or more can book a session. We especially encourage high school and college students to attend.
A Day at the Trading Centre includes…
Participants learn to read the “signs” of the market. You’ll use the same program that many professional traders use all around the world: Thomson Reuters Eikon. You’ll be able to see tick by tick price changes in stock markets as well as real-time headlines and stories. Coordinators will show you how to access and understand relevant information.
Become a pro at using Thomson Reuters Graphics. Usng Eikon, you can display real-time and historical price information along with analysis in a clear graphic format. Enhance your trading expertise by learning how to spot trends and pinpoint buying and selling opportunities.
Through Eikon, you have access to:
Our seminar coordinators will guide you through this powerful platform in this fun, relevant, and interactive session.
Dig deeper with the most complete powerhouse of information: Bloomberg. The Bloomberg system provides:
Learn how to use Bloomberg’s unique navigation system to access the information you need.
Trade like the pros with Real Time FTS Trader. The Real Time FTS Trader system helps you learn how real world financial markets work through actual trading experience. The system gives you the opportunity to manage stocks, bonds, currencies, futures and options using real-time price data. The Real Time FTS Trader also gives you access to a variety of performance-based reports, calculators, real-time data and other support resources. It puts you in control with a level of support that is only found in the highest end trading rooms.
This seminar teaches you about the trading centre’s tools and capabilities. The focus is on familiarizing you with live data retrieval for:
Thomson Reuters Eikon is a powerful display and analytics platform with access to:
Using the platform, this seminar provides comprehensive coverage of the global equities markets with real-time price movements (North American Exchanges) for some 165,000 equities quoted on over 140 exchanges. We can also access facts and figures from a database of over 30,000 companies. The software also provides the ability to view full company annual financial reports and to access worldwide index constituents and weightings.
The Thomson Reuters Eikon software performs tasks such as cross-border sector comparisons, and tracks the performance of stocks across the world’s financial markets. You can view company fundamentals without losing sight of events that are happening in the markets.
This seminar uses Thomson Reuters Eikon. The system lets you search, display and export bond details and histories from the Reuters Global Fixed Income database. It also provides many different bond models including:
The seminar also presents a list of basic functions for searching and displaying real data through Thomson Reuters Eikon.
Using the Thomson Reuters Eikon software, this seminar covers searching, displaying, and exporting money market and F/X details and histories from the Reuters Global money market and F/X database. The seminar also presents a list of basic functions for searching and displaying real data through Thomson Reuters Eikon.
This seminar introduces Bloomberg Professional, an integral tool for understanding the global financial market. In an easy to use, point-and-click database system, Bloomberg provides the ability to retrieve real-time data such as stock quotes, price graphs and market-related news from over 8000 contributors. You will learn how to use the system to find information from different financial market sectors, focusing mainly on equities and the different indices.
This seminar introduces technical analysis. Technical analysis is the art of predicting future price behaviour from an asset’s trading history. Technical analysts view the range of data studied by fundamental analysts as too massive and unmanageable to pinpoint security price movements with any real precision. Instead, they focus on the “technical” aspects of the stock market itself.
This seminar gives you the opportunity to trade in a closed market – that is, against other students. In this simulation, you’ll be given a cash/security position and the freedom to set your own bid/ask prices and “tips” about what the value of the security will be in the next period. Participants quickly learn about the uncertainty and competition of trading in a fun and educational way.
Maximize your profits. In this seminar, you will be given one million dollars to trade against the market, and will learn when and how to buy and sell shares. Learn what it feels like to be a day trader at a stock exchange as you watch stock prices rise and fall, along with your profits if you’re not careful. This seminar gives students the experience of trading securities in real-time. Participants experience the ups and downs of the market much as real traders do, with the exception that they do not lose any of their own money. The simulated trading is done using FTS Real Trader.
Exchange traded options provide opportunities (options) to meet almost any strategic goal, from managing risk to enhancing leverage. Unfortunately, options can also be risky. Therefore, before trading options it’s essential to understand them and the strategies designed to limit risk and enhance return.
This seminar outlines advanced options strategies that traders, sophisticated investors and institutional portfolio managers use to protect the value of their portfolios and enhance return. Call option holders can:
Traders and investors can hedge the value of their portfolios through put ownership in anticipation of a drop in stock prices.
This seminar outlines fundamental analysis, focusing on the approaches used to find the intrinsic value of a security. Fundamental analysis is based on the notion that the expected stream of future benefits to the shareholder solely determines the true value of a share, otherwise known as its intrinsic value. More specifically, the intrinsic value is the price an investor is willing to pay for a security if all relevant information regarding its anticipated future benefits is both available and properly analyzed.
Students who are interested in working at the trading centres are encouraged to take the VIP seminar. (Students who take the initiative to learn about the tools and software available to them before they start the volunteer internship program will be given priority.)This seminar is an hour-long orientation that introduces you to the following:
