New Commodity Trading Room at NDSU

The newly constructed Commodity Trading Room and Financial Laboratory at Barry Hall focus on teaching students concepts of agribusiness.

The realm of agribusiness and concepts of commodities involve trading, managing logistics, managing facilities and managing risk, as it pertains to agriculture, William Wilson said.

Commodities deal with energy, agriculture and minerals, to name a few, said Wilson, a university distinguished professor of agribusiness and applied economics. The CTR will focus on agriculture and agribusiness.

Wilson said that the amount of risk in agribusiness has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Transaction sizes are getting bigger and prices are greater than ever before.

“We’re trying to manage that risk so we don’t have as much variability in returns and profits,” Wilson said.

In the CTR there are 32 workstations. 12 of them are considered live Bloomberg terminals while 20 are live DTN terminals. Bloomberg is common in the financial world while DTN is used in the commodities markets.

Many universities around the nation are integrating trading rooms into their curriculum. The CTR is based off of a similar one at Tulane University in New Orleans, according to a press release.

These terminals contain live market information and state of the art technology, Wilson said, which is better than anything else you’d be able to find on campus.

At the moment, the CTR is only for student use and is currently being used in two classes and next spring it will be used in three classes. It will function as a laboratory to go along with lecture classes, much like a science lecture and lab course.

Wilson said that companies have expressed interest in using the room for employee outreach training programs, and that the CTR was already used for two one-week sessions for foreign grain buyers and that there was a positive response from that.

“I think it’s another message of the university that we’re trying to be state of the art in terms of our bringing technology and training to the students in this field,” Wilson said.

He also said that employers are looking for graduates who have better training with these types of technologies and that the CTR helps with that.

The CTR will have a grand opening in the spring of 2013.

For more information about the CTR, visit http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/agecon/news-1/commodity-trading-room-report/view.