Adelphi University recreates trading floor

Transforming the classroom into the real world and demystifying Wall Street has been a mission of sorts for James Riley Jr., an Adelphi University adjunct professor. His latest project: bringing to the school a trading floor, complete with a digital stock ticker running across the wall and Bloomberg terminals providing real-time information.

"Everything I do is live," said Riley of Garden City.

On Wednesday, Adelphi University dedicated the trading room floor to Riley, a retired Goldman Sachs & Co. partner and managing director. Riley donated the bulk of the money to create the mock trading room classroom, with the university funding the remainder of the costs.

The James Riley Jr. Trading Room, which cost a little more than $100,000, was completed in October and it has been full of students ever since it opened, said Adelphi business  school dean Rakesh Gupta.

Students majoring in math and history, as well as finance majors, have been tapping into the voluminous live and historical data now available, he said.

They use the mock trading floor for exercises in real-time financial decision-making and, in one class, research real investments. Students also will be able to earn certificates in Bloomberg software to boost their resumes, he said.

"In the financial industry, the Bloomberg terminals are used by 90 percent of the finance professionals," Gupta said. "If students can take that skill to their job interviews, they are one step ahead of their competition.

The trading room is just one more tool for professors to provide their students with real-life experiences that often are more messy than textbook theories.

In 2008 Riley, whose late mother Kathryn Riley earned her master's degree from Adelphi, donated $100,000 to create a student-managed investment fund that serves as an endowment for the university.

In his current class, "Life in the Financial Markets," Riley aims to immerse his students in the experiences of the financial world with live phone conversations with financial executives working in the industry describing their day-to-day work. He pushes them to get onto Twitter, subscribe to The Economist and now, the Bloomberg terminals.

"We saw how gold went from $1,336 in January to $1,508 a few seconds ago," said John Lim, 22, a finance major from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He later added, "We have access to the immediate resources they [professionals] are using."