Professors from financial markets programs at Carthage College, University of Illinois MSFE, Northwestern, and UCLA joined financial industry leaders from RCM Alternatives, RCM-X, Rapunzl, McBride Trading, Polaris 7, and QTS Capital Management in publishing an open letter to the financial industry calling for greater participation amongst exchanges, trading platforms, and trading firms in bridging the gap between academia and real-world trading.
“The automation and computerization of the field brings with it a need for quick, easy, and free access to real market data to learn new and innovative ways to model financial transactions utilizing that data. Billion-dollar hedge funds can afford to pay full price for access to the data which fuels their trading models, but, too often, non-profit university programs can not,” the open letter states.
Ehud Peleg, professor at UCLA’s Anderson School was cited as stating that “learning to practice data analysis without data is meaningless…few if any education institutions can pay the fees to get good data access.”