What Teachers Are Saying

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.

For each asset class there is a dedicated 2 week period - during the first week, the students take the role of portfolio managers, so they look for an investment theme - for example - they say "Medium term bullish on natgaz" - they defend this with a paper providing arguments. Then on the following week - they turn from PMs to traders ... They log in into their IB accounts and they execute their investment themes. It is super fun, educational, and students love it.

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.

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.

Using Interactive Brokers trading app in our BUS3600 Advanced Financial Analysis course has transformed the way students engage with market dynamics. The Curiosity element we incorporate in the learning process not only fosters real-time decision-making skills but also highlights the importance of leveraging robust trading tools for informed analysis. It's one thing to learn theory; it's another to apply it in a simulated environment where every decision carries weight.

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.