Class is in session -- trade!
Dowling College students Cesar Invencion, left, and Michael Hendershot sit at computers where they do stock trading as professional on Wall Street do. Watching the students on a tour of the newly equipped classroom at the Oakdale college are, from left, Terry Townsend, Linda Ardito, and Matthew Cordaro. (May 10, 2010) Credit: Howard Schnapp
The biggest names in corporate America -- AT&T, Cisco, Boeing -- all flashed by on an electric ticker, and shares of all were up. The crowd watching the ticker cheered.
This must be Wall Street, right?
No, the scene was in Oakdale, at Dowling College, which on Monday unveiled to the public its new Financial Markets Trading Center -- the same day stocks soared, after their dizzying, historic, intraday fall of 1,000 points last Thursday.
"That's great," said Matthew Cordaro, dean of Dowling's Townsend School of Business, as he saw stocks rise on the ticker and guests swarm into the financial center.
The new facility at Dowling's Racanelli Center gives the impression of a trading room, replete with flat-screen televisions, LCD screens that display business news and financial information, and the all-important stock tickers.
About 20 students can use the facility, which was financed with private contributions the school did not wish to detail. The students will learn how stock trades are made, and they will be able to track the performance of their investments, Cordaro said.
Cordaro, a former top Long Island Lighting Co. executive who came up with the idea for the trading center, said it is a natural for Dowling, which has a large MBA program.
"We are very happy this day has come," Cordaro told a gathering. In a reference to last Thursday's stock plunge, he said, "Who knows, maybe the trading center will train a student well enough that he or she doesn't push the wrong button" and send stocks plummeting. There has been speculation that the markets' one-day fall may have come about as a result of a trader having put a thumb on the wrong computer key.
Along with the center unveiling, Dowling announced it has received a $190,000 federal grant, secured by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), to make available more business ethics courses.
"There's total hostility against Wall Street these days," Cordaro said. "Greed has taken over." The students, he said, want to confront, and change, the wrongdoing.
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