In 2023, the IBKR Student Trading Lab, a valuable resource for college professors and high school teachers worldwide offered by Interactive Brokers, has had impressive growth, with professor accounts increasing by 53% and the number of participating schools growing by 73%.
Steve Sanders, EVP of Marketing and Product Development at Interactive Brokers, said that the IBKR Student Trading Lab was launched “years ago”.
“We sponsored a college trading competition to help foster an interest in investing,” he said.
“However, we quickly realized that in order to empower the next generation of traders, we needed to provide resources to educators that could be used during the academic year alongside their course curriculums,” he added.
According to Sanders, the IBKR Student Trading Lab, which launched in 2009, has experienced significant growth and now includes over 26,300 student accounts at 875 educational institutions worldwide.
“As a broker catering to self-directed individual and institutional investors, we are deeply committed to fostering financial education for all, including high school and college students,” he told Traders Magazine.
Commenting on this year’s growth, Sanders said: “This past year, we launched a new registration process that makes it easier for educators to sign up for accounts.”
“In our paper trading accounts, which simulate live market conditions and are included in the IBKR Student Trading Lab program, we also introduced PortfolioAnalyst, our popular analytic and reporting tool, as well as oversees trading in addition to US products,” he added.
The IBKR Student Trading Lab offers a straightforward registration process, allowing professors to leverage Interactive Brokers’ Client Portal trading platform to manage their accounts and monitor student accounts.
In addition, users can access PortfolioAnalyst, Global Trader, and IBKR Mobile app.
Additionally, the program provides students with the following:
- Access to a paper trading account with $1,000,000 in paper trading equity, offering a true-to-life trading experience.
- The ability to trade global stocks, options, ETFs, bonds, futures, currencies, and more from a single, unified platform.
- Access to PortfolioAnalyst for risk assessment, performance tracking against benchmarks, portfolio management, and advanced reporting with GIPS®-verified returns.
- Free access to a rich source of financial education materials, including webinars, podcasts, and training courses through IBKR Campus.
Dr. George Namur, associate professor and director of the MSc Finance program at University College London’s School of Management, said that his students “tend to check the platform all the time”.
“They want to see how their investments are panning out. On volatile days, they check them probably a little bit more often than normal, but they are engaged, and they want to see how everything moves at the same time. It adds this level of reality to the experience that cannot be communicated simply by lecturing them.”
Dr. Namur, who teaches a course ‘Hedge Fund Strategies’, further said: “I would say hedge fund strategies would not be the same if it were not for the use of IBKR’s TWS platform in class.”
“We are not the only university that has a course on hedge funds, but we are the only one, as far as I know, that actually incorporates the real-life portfolio management as part of the curriculum; and because we use IBKR, students develop a feeling for things that no amount of lecturing would explain,” he added.
Dr. Karen Kunz, associate professor in West Virginia University’s public administration department, who teaches in the public administration department, said that probably 50% of her students leave her class and open up brokerage accounts. “They’re still in grad school, but they’ve got the bug,” she said.
“I can’t tell you how many of them have come back to me and said, ‘I have a retirement account in addition to my 401k now that I’m working, because I learned how to do this.’ And a lot of them will go into public service jobs, where they’ve got to negotiate pensions, or they’ve got to write up investment fund guidelines. And it’s because of this experience that they can do that,” she added.
“We are equipping students with the knowledge and tools they need to navigate the world of finance. The Student Trading Lab is an invaluable resource for educators, and we’re thrilled to offer it for free, empowering professors and teachers to educate the future generation of investors,” concluded Sanders.
