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The Subotnick Center—a simulated trading environment in Baruch's Information and Technology Building—is state of the art, and that became really clear a year after it opened, in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The Wasserman Trading Floor morphed from virtual to actual for some 30 displaced Wall Street commodities brokers who could no longer use their World Financial Center offices.
Baruch administrators and staff hustled to make the simulated environment real. "It took a lot of work," says Richard Holowczak, the center's director. "The major data feeds were already coming in. We had to add phone lines, but that was done pretty easily. But the traders also needed access to their trading applications, their Web-based interfaces, in order to work."
The traders—mostly from REFCO, whose vice president, Jeffrey Bauml, is an alumnus—were able to take advantage of the fact that the center was created to give Baruch students a real taste of what a genuine trading environment is like. The center is "about as real as
you can get, unless you're putting money down," says Holowczak with a laugh. "We
have industrial-strength software tools used at banks and corporations. A guy at Goldman Sachs doesn't see this stuff any faster."
The center, which boasts a brightly lit Daktronics ticker display and 40 high-end workstations, is used both by students, who
can take noncredit workshops or for-credit classes, and by corporations, for employee training sessions. But sometimes the student and corporate worlds intersect in ways that both find beneficial. Recently, a dozen traders from the New York Board of Trade created a simulated trading pit in a seminar room at the center. "We're the first school they've visited," says Holowczak. "Everyone had so much fun. The traders were screaming out prices, and about 60 or 70 students participated. They got an absolute sense of how that market works."
Ultimately, that's exactly the idea behind the center. "The overall goal," says Holowczak, "is to give the students a real idea of what it's like in the real world. Yes, technology plays a big role in that, but we try to give them that sense any way we can."
Above: The Subotnick Financial Services Center consists of the Bert W.
and Sandra Wasserman Trading Floor, a fully equipped, simulated trading facility
with live price quotes and 42 professional workstations; a 60-seat seminar room; and
a 25-seat development lab. The center is used both by students, who can take noncredit
workshops or for-credit classes, and by corporations, for employee training sessions.
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