New Heidtke Trading Room gives students Wall Street experiences
Tennessee Tech University students studying finance now are as well equipped to analyze and react to these situations as traders at any Wall Street investment firm.
Thanks to a major donation by Nashville investment manager L.O. “Buzz” Heidtke and others, Tennessee Tech University students studying finance in the College of Business now have their own trading room to simulate the activities of a real-life investment firm. From Cookeville, students have access to the same research, analysis and information tools to buy and sell stocks as any top-notch Wall Street investment firm.
“The Heidtke Trading Room and our student-managed investment funds place TTU’s College of Business shoulder-to-shoulder with the top business schools in the nation in its ability to provide students a quality education in finance with real-world experiences,” said College of Business Dean James Jordan-Wagner.
Inside the new $150,000 Heidtke Trading Room, students manage three investment funds using the latest technology available. Finance professors utilize the latest teaching tools along with real-time market data to teach class. Students can view the rise and fall of stock exchanges worldwide, commodities, currencies, individual funds or sets of funds, and market newsfeeds from a wall of high definition television screens. A real-time stock ticker streams quotes at one end of the room on a 20-minute delay.
The three funds managed by students currently total $400,000. What’s unusual about the funds TTU students manage is the differing investment approaches required to manage them, said Bob Wood, the college’s associate dean and the Heidtke Professor of Finance.
The trading room opened for student use recently and will be pressed into full classroom service for the first time in the Fall 2010 semester.
Heidtke, a 1965 graduate of the college who also endowed a $100,000 investment fund managed by students, said the tools available to students interested in finance today are far superior to those available when he was a student. And that’s for good reason, he says, since the demands of an education in finance are more rigorous than ever.
“You have to really be up on how all the markets work and it just means so much more if you have the experience of managing a fund and have professors who have managed funds. When I went to school, I had never even heard of a commodity,” Heidtke said. “I want new recruits who come the TTU College of Business to see that we’re on top of things.”
Along with 25 other universities, TTU participates in the TVA Investment Challenge, which invests in large cap companies. The Heidtke Investment Fund consists of micro-cap stocks of small, often thinly traded firms. The Tommy Lynn Fund – named for well-known former Cookeville business leader Tommy Lynn – invests in mutual funds using an asset-allocation model.
“A down market is a great time to learn,” Wood said. “It’s been more difficult to find companies that will hold up in this type of environment, but it’s been a great learning experience because typically when we teach finance, everything’s always positive and the market’s always going up.”
The best-performing stocks for TTU’s student-managed funds over the last couple of years were Netflix, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Apple, Wood said.
The Heidtke Trading Room will be dedicated at 10 a.m. April 16 inside Johnson Hall, 1105 N. Peachtree Ave., Cookeville. In addition to university officials, Heidtke along with donors SunTrust Bank as well as Jim and Sharon Birdwell will be present. Jim Birdwell of Gainesboro is retired from Jackson Bank & Trust.
The Heidtke Trading Room is one of several classrooms in Johnson Hall that has or will be renovated due to the generosity of TTU donors and alumni, said Cheryl Montgomery, development director for the College of Business.
