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The virtual trading floor at Baruch College's Subotnick Financial Services Center was transformed: suddenly, what was once a purely educational facility became an actual trading floor—a temporary home and place of business for some 30 displaced Wall Street commodities brokers.
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The Subotnick Financial Services Center/Bert W. and Sandra Wasserman Trading Floor transformed from virtual to real to accommodate brokers displaced by the attack on the WTC. REFCO Vice President Jeffrey Bauml ('75) temporarily relocated his staff to the center.
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REFCO Vice President Jeffrey Bauml ('75) gathered his wits after the World Trade Center tragedy and focused on the urgent matter of finding a home for employees who could no longer use their World Financial Center offices. He remembered that Baruch College had opened a financial services center just 18 months earlier, and he sought help there.
Gruntal & Co., one of the Subotnick Center's original founding partners, also asked if Baruch could accommodate a few of their people.
Bruce Weber, director of the Subotnick Center, immediately went into action. "We had to scramble," Weber says. "Somehow we got 20 extra phone lines in here—traders can't function without their phones. We also had to get permission to turn this place from a simulated trading environment into an actual trading room."
Understanding the urgency of the need, Reuters, which supplies the Subotnick Center with live data feeds from exchanges all over the world, agreed. "Not only did Reuters agree to let us trade, they arranged immediate access to the London International Financial Futures Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, which we previously lacked," Weber says.
So how did the traders fare in their temporary quarters at Baruch College? "We didn't miss a beat," says Bauml. "The only things I didn't have were my knickknacks and family photos. But we had everything else we needed. Subotnick is truly a state-of-the-art facility. Their 'can-do' spirit is terrific."
Sidney Lirtzman, vice president and dean of Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business, is not surprised. As the moving force behind the creation of the Subotnick Center, he knew it was fully equipped. From the brightly lit Daktronics ticker display to the 40 Compaq AP workstations to its real-time market data feeds, the Subotnick Center has quickly become a centerpiece of education for Baruch's many hundreds of finance and accountancy students.
Frank Rodriguez, a 30-year-old REFCO trader from the Bronx, was happy to be relocated to East 25th Street, home of Baruch College's Information and Technology Building, which houses the Subotnick Center. "If we weren't there we'd have been in Chicago," says Rodriguez, who's been with REFCO for four-and-a-half years. (Chicago is the main headquarters of REFCO.) "And who wants to be separated from his family at a time like that?"
In more normal times, the Subotnick Financial Services Center/Bert W. and Sandra Wasserman Trading Floor is used to give Baruch's MBA candidates and advanced undergraduate business majors experience with instant financial decision-making in simulated trading situations. Some of the students stayed around to watch the traders in action. "They learned a lot," says Weber.
—Zane Berzins
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