What Teachers Are Saying

I provide students with tools to develop their own trading strategies and invite them to the IBKR trading lab through my educator account, where I can track their performance. At the end of the semester, students in the top 10% based on performance receive bonus points and present their strategies to the class. The results have been fascinating; one student, for instance, achieved a YTD return of 35%, significantly outperforming the S&P 500's 18% return over the same period.

I assign trading projects for my investments class and run a trading competition every semester for Investment Club across the university. Students can trade stocks, ETFs, futures, and options with some risk limit on each position. Students really enjoy real time market access and professional analytical tools afforded by the IB platform.

Students in my classes use the TWS to implement trading strategies they learn in class. They also use some of the analytics (volatility lab) to identify opportunities. The accounts are particularly a great tool to help them learn about practical aspects of implementing these strategies, transactions costs, slippage, and how they vary across assets and time.

Integrating Interactive Brokers' simulation program into our class has given students hands-on experience with market dynamics, portfolio rebalancing, risk management, and trading strategies. The paper trading competition enhances real-world decision-making by allowing students to explore asset allocation and security selection in a risk-free environment while building confidence in professional trading tools.

I offer three courses - Investment Management (FIN 627), Derivatives (FIN 628) and Wealth Management (FIN 658) – that have team-based class projects in which students manage portfolios of Equities, Derivatives, and Executive Concentrated Stock, respectively, and they implement their analyses in Interactive Brokers paper trading accounts. Student experience over several semesters has shown that they really learn the skills a lot better by working as teams, and the IBKR paper trading account is for them an invaluable tool for getting insights on how securities are traded in the market and portfolios are managed. Also, using the research and education IBKR offers adds another element to their experience, which they are motivated to explore not only within the course. Several students tell me they find it very useful even after they graduate and find jobs in Finance. What is more, these courses are precursors to my most important course, Asset Allocation Practicum (FIN 678), in which students manage Stevens Endowment assets in a live currency account (no paper trading). What enables them to hit the ground running is their prior exposure to the IBKR paper trading platform.

We have been using the IBKR student trading laboratory to run an active derivatives trading strategies for over a decade. Our students find the platform to be extremely powerful, and often continue to use it to trade options after the class is over. We also appreciate that the IBKR platform provides the necessary tools for detailed reporting.

What we are doing in class is getting familiar with the TWS, and heaving a strong focus on Python where we use the ib_async module to connect via the API to TWS. In the end we set-up headless servers where we run TWS and let an algorithm run to trade securities.

STL enabled me to create the Duke FinTech Trading Competition (https://fintechtradingcompetition.com), a professional-grade trading experience that brings together hundreds of students each year from all over the world. Especially valuable is the fact that the tools, instruments, and data feed services that STL provides are the same resources used by professional traders every day, which is terrific exposure for our students. I also make use of STL tools in my Duke FinTech courses to teach and illustrate market concepts, and to provide a platform for use in algorithmic trading via the Python API.

The Interactive Brokers simulated trading program is an excellent method to provide students with experiential learning. Unlike other systems, IB has a full range of instruments that permits building complex trading strategies. For over a decade, students in derivatives, portfolio management and wealth management classes have used the system to create portfolios. Building actual portfolios is their favorite part of the class.

We are using IB to bridge the gap between theory and practice, particularly in the area of optimal portfolio choice. The students work in groups to complete an exciting coursework assignment where they actively buy and sell assets while maintaining a pre-specified portfolio target. It’s a fantastic way to immerse them in the world of real-time trading and portfolio management! Students just love it!

IB is a very important platform for us to enable a real-life trading experiences for our international students. Students are supposed to acquire and manage asset portfolios and thanks to the TWS they are equipped with all necessary tools to analyse and monitor the portfolio performance. By this, they get a chance to enter the world of trading in a very real but still very comprehensive way.

As a Finance Professor, I use Interactive Brokers to give students an opportunity to use a realistic brokerage platform with a wealth of fundamental and technical information about the securities they trade. I utilize Interactive Brokers for my personal trading, both for investment and retirement accounts, and I can attest that the students' experience using the paper trading account feature tracks almost precisely my experience with live trading. The paper trading platform is so realistic that it will, realistically, restrict students from taking certain positions in companies which would violate S.E.C. rules, not to mention properly simulating gains and losses on leveraged trading. The account statements, which I have students submit at the end of the class, are also incredibly detailed and realistic, helping me to track student investments precisely. This is very important, since I want their experience to be as authentic as possible so they can use their portfolio returns over the semester as a precise estimator of what they can expect to earn if managing their personal investment account long-term. Students then construct a financial planning spreadsheet, starting at college graduation, that contains both an investment plan and a consumption plan to become millionaires by the time they reach their fifties. The returns they earn in their Interactive Brokers paper trading account function as the prospective rate of return for their investments many years into the future. At the end of the term, I have them turn in their spreadsheet and their Interactive Brokers account statement, which will confirm that they made a variety of investments, which must include long positions, short positions, bonds, and derivatives to satisfy the requirements of the class. I actually personally know board member Larry Harris, as he was one of my graduate school professors at USC, and I am happy to have the opportunity to use the platform to get both college and high school students started on their trading journey.

Experience with Interactive Brokers real-time simulated trading really helps bring to life important concepts, and pen and paperwork students do in the class.

I am really appreciative of the IBKR Education offering because it allows academics such as myself to offer the experiential learning opportunity to students without consideration for costs or heavy investment in resources.

I like using IB to: - plot (virtual) securities for showing potential arbitrage opportunities, like 1500 BRK b and BRK a and to easily setup an Algo to exploit mispricings. - Show which (option) strategy is best to best exploit differences in forecasted and market expectations in the future probability distribution. If I remember correctly the tool is called “Probability Lab”.

We use the Interactive Brokers Student Trading Lab in our school's investment club. Every semester we will recruit new members in our club and they will register the new account. We find it is interesting to have this investment simulation which stimulate student's learning motivation about the financial market and economic system.