Department of Computer Science

CoMPLEX PhD student wins Postgraduate Taught Prize

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Virtual Trading Floor

The Virtual Trading Floor recreates the excitement of a trading floor in an investment bank and provides invaluable hands-on experience in a dynamic environment. Real-time data feeds from major exchanges are displayed on terminals and wall screens, and industry-standard software packages are used to provide the best possible introduction to Investment Banking IT. Up to 30 workstations accommodate students either singly or in pairs.

Financial Computing is a highly practical topic, where theory learnt in lectures needs to be grounded in practical work ranging from software engineering to real-time data manipulation.

Student benefits

Interact:

with market data - e.g. using Reuters 3000 Xtra.

Explore:

financial instruments;
middleware and message-passing in Investment Banking IT systems.

Experience:

liquidity, volatility and the role of market intermediaries;
transactions and settlement;
team interaction and consensus dynamics;
support technology for project management, systems development and analysis.

Practice:

trading in both an order-driven market and a quote-driven market - e.g. using a trading simulation program TraderEx;
pricing and modeling of risk and return: option pricing; excess volatility; market efficiency - e.g. using OptSim, TraderEx;
analysing real-time and historical data - e.g. using Reuters 3000 Xtra, Power Plus Pro and Datastream;
risk assessment and management: loss functions, trading decision functions, risk distributions; cost of volatility; correlation;
manipulation of time series data, autoregression, ARCH and GARCH - e.g. using Matlab, Mathematica, Gauss, Strata.

Build:

investment portfolios.

Measure:

portfolio risk;
correlation risk.

Develop and Execute:

financial IT software in teams;
a financial information database;
a software test plan.

Experiment:

with asset markets: rational expectations models; sequential trade; auction markets.

The Virtual Trading Floor's market data feeds are provided by Thomson Reuters using Reuters 3000 Xtra, and Power Plus Pro for spreadsheet analytics. UCL is gratefully for this important collaboration, and also the donation of the "trader-spec" PCs by Hewlett Packard and the funding of other laboratory equipment and infrastructure by our four sponsor banks.

Creating the Virtual Trading Floor

The following visual blog shows the stages in creating the new Virtual Trading Floor:

April 2007 - under construction. First we demolish the end wall:

And then we erect a new glass wall:

May 2007 - the desks are put back in place and with some older screens (new screens will come later), and new air conditioning is installed:

June 2007 - Reuters provide a splash of colour!:

July 2007 - looking better, with artwork on the walls and the Reuters logo added to the glass wall and the orange end wall, just in time for the GECCO 2007 Conference (though the new screens are not yet in place):

September 2007 - with just one day to go before the new students arrive, the lab is finally starting to come together. The new PCs and screens are all in place, the projector and screen and plasma display are all installed. The software is still being debugged, but we are hopeful for tomorrow!

November 2007 - at the Launch Event on the 20th November. The virtual trading floor has been in use since September, but this is the formal launch with press attendance. The following pictures show some of the current students receiving tuition in how to use the Reuters 3000 Xtra software.

A resource for Financial Services in London

UCL aims to use the Virtual Trading Floor to run additional training courses to support London banks and other Financial Services organisations when they are not used by our students. For example: