UISES and Bridge in the UIUC Finance Undergraduate Curriculum

Brief Look at our Curriculum Freshman discovery courses Basic Corporate (Fin 254) –Required of all Commerce students Financial Market and Institutions (Fin 300) –Required of all Finance majors Upper-level courses: –Fin 361 (Investments) –many others...

Finance 199 Only a few freshmen take it They have little background in Finance

Finance 300 All majors take this course It’s a prerequisite for all upper-level Finance courses Gives students a common body of knowledge in Finance avoids duplication in upper level courses

Finance 361 Since Fin 300 is a prerequisite, I can assume they have had UISES As of next year, I will be able to assume they know Bridge as well

Bridge Information system widely in use by financial community One of top three (Bridge, Reuters, Bloomberg) Financial data on companies, equities, fixed income securities, derivatives,… Extensive, integrated business news coverage

Bridge University Program Applied in March, 1997 Accepted in July, 1997 Installed in early 1998-early 1999 Training and integration is ongoing...

What Bridge Covers Equities: 1.3 million global securities –Press releases, earnings forecasts, current and historical balance sheet data…all integrated –Delayed current quotes + Time series data –Spreadsheet links available (cf. Bloomberg) Fixed Income: over 1 million available –analytics and characteristics also available –easily downloaded

What Bridge Covers FX (real time and historical) Foreign bonds and money markets Derivatives (exchange traded AND OTC…) Energy, metals, commodities… Macroeconomic data from 31 countries In short, we haven’t found anything we can’t get on Bridge except hot coffee...

Bridge: What it Costs Either LOTS or a small amount or it’s unavailable...

Using Bridge Created for institutional users Archaic, arcane commands We created a manual: Student oriented, not trader oriented Based on specific problem sets

Integrating Bridge and UISES Finance 199: UISES, no Bridge Finance 300: both UISES and Bridge Finance 361: UISES only until next year