Sloan Trading Lab

MIT Sloan School of Management opened a fully equipped, state-of-the-art trading room in 1996, the first ever built on a university campus. The Sloan Trading Lab is identical in every detail to the best trading rooms in financial capitals around the world providing MIT Sloan students with hands-on experience in trading and finance. The room consists of an electronic tickertape which carries price information from multiple markets, covering all 300,000 financial instruments worldwide; two Trans-Lux DataWall panels, which display late-breaking news and other financial information fed from Reuters; and 23 trading stations.

While the Sloan trading room accurately reflects today's financial markets, it is also intended to be a research facility with the potential to play a central role in shaping innovations in the practice of finance. As with other research centers at MIT, cross-disciplinary collaboration is being encouraged. Possible avenues of research, some already under way, include projects to develop novel visualization techniques for representing complex portfolios; studies on the psychology of financial markets and how human behavior influences trading decisions; and computational techniques that incorporate artificial intelligence and neural-network theory in order to evaluate and learn, at a very sophisticated level, from past market experience.