Hunched in the glow of their computer screens, two dozen men and women pore intently over the data before them, filling the air with the steady rattle of fingers on keyboards. Red and blue lights flicker on high-tech telephones at each station as the traders speak in hurried tones into their handsets. Some pause pensively as breaking news from Europe flashes onto a wall-mounted electronic panel nearby. It's another day at the MIT Sloan School of Management. A special teaching station will connect the instructor's computer to an overhead projector.
Plans also call for using the facility to support a variety of continuing education programs.
At the same time, the trading room will be a major research facility. For example, the late Fischer Black, an applied mathematician by training, joined with colleagues Myron Scholes and Robert Merton at Sloan in the early 1970s to develop a technique for putting an accurate price on financial options. The trading room is an ideal place for us to collaborate with experts from all over campus, as well as from industry, to lay the groundwork for the next generation of sophisticated financial tools. Understanding market behavior without a trading room is like trying to study nuclear physics without an accelerator, or cell biology without a microscope- you've got to have the right tools for the job.