Finance and Commodities Trading Lab

Facilitate Dynamic Learning

Western Illinois University is excited to transform a highly visible classroom into a state-of-the-art financial trading laboratory. This innovative new space will provide students with real-time experience in traditional investments, commodity markets, merchandising, futures, and options.

This new space will bring a real-world reality to concepts taught in the classroom, provide a training platform and teaching facility for trading, dynamic simulations, and technical analysis tools needed by today's investment professionals, including:

• Multi-monitor student workstation computers
• Collaborative workspace configuration with dynamic live ticker
• Financial Informatics: Live and Historical Data Feeds (i.e., Bloomberg, CQG, Thomson Reuters, Firstcall, Datastream, Morningstar, and others)
• Large format presentation monitors, faculty workstation/control panel, and full remote classroom capability

Your Western Challenge gift will help provide this technology and enhanced training to enable students to understand financial and commodity trading concepts and create solutions for real-world situations, especially in the use of industry investment and trading platforms.

The new lab will help Western build on the successes obtained by our students with previously limited resources and meet the needs of the future workforce.