IB Student Trading Lab

 

 

Interactive Brokers Group, a worldwide leader in market-making and broker-dealer services, invites college professors, high school teachers and their students to participate in The IB Student Trading Lab.

The IB Student Trading Lab is a partnership between IB and an instructor. The program enables professors and teachers to use IB’s TWS PaperTrader, a simulation of our online professional trading platform, in their classroom.

We believe that through this partnership, students will gain an in-depth understanding of developing and applying trading strategies, improve their risk-management skills, and obtain hands-on experience in trading and hedging.

Interactive Brokers is sponsoring this program to highlight the growing need for students in the fields of financial engineering/computational finance/financial mathematics.

 

The TWS PaperTrader account allows student traders to use the full range of IB trading facilities in a simulated environment using real market conditions. They can trade forex, US stocks, options, futures, futures options and bonds. While working within the test environment, students can:

• Use powerful TWS features such as order types and algos - without risk.
• Learn market dynamics covering exchanges and new products.
• Simulate and test their own trading strategies.
• Test applications through the TWS Application Program Interface (APIs).
• Utilize various statements and reports to manage and evaluate their account portfolio.

Students can also trade in their PaperTrading account from their iPhones with IB's state-of-the-art iTWS application. The iTWS app supports order entry and management, and account balance monitoring.

All students will start with USD 1,000,000 of paper trading Equity with Loan Value, and this equity will reflect their trading activity as if the trades had executed in the real market.

Cash equity can be reset at any time through the student's Account Management.

This program is open to all college and high school professors within and outside the US, but requires the sponsoring instructor to apply for the student accounts and supervise the project within the guidelines of the lab. For details, please see the Application Process section below.

 

Step 1: Application Process

IB now offers PaperTrading accounts that expire December 31, 2010 or May 31, 2011. Please follow the steps below:

1. The college or high school instructor, who is supervising this project, must submit the initial registration form. For each participating student you must provide first name, last name and email address.
2. IB will send personalized email invitation to the professor and to each student.
3. All participants will then need to follow the instructions to complete the registration form. Students must record the username and password received during registration as we will not able to retrieve this information.
4. For applications completed before 4pm, the PaperTrading account will be activated after 4pm the following business day.

 

Step 2: Trading Access

• Participants can trade via 3 different portals:
  • Browser-based TWS
  • iTWS for the iPhone
  • Application Programming Interface (APIs)
• Participants can use most IB order types, trade most US contracts and Forex products available through the TWS, and experiment with almost every aspect of the platform. Please see the Student Information Resource Center below for links to reference and educational materials.

 

Step 3: Account Management

• Participants can utilize the following Account Management functions:
  • Account cash equity reset. Students are encouraged to check with their instructor before utilizing this feature. All cash resets will appear on the user's statement.
  • Report management functionality
    • Generate Activity Statements - in a HTML/Web or PDF format. Statements can be daily or cover a custom range of dates
    • Create Activity Flex Reports to build customized statements with specific fields, field order and activity period. The format is XML or TEXT (with 3 text separator options - Pipe, Comma or Tab)
    • Use Trade Confirms Flex Templates which allow the user to create customized Trade Confirmation reports by choosing specific fields, field order, and time period. The format is XML or TEXT (with 3 text separator options - Pipe, Comma or Tab)
  • Password change. You must make a note of your username and password as it cannot be reset or retrieved by IB.

 

Contact Information

If you have any questions regarding this program, or issues with the application or the PaperTrading account set-up, you may email us at ibstudenttradinglab@interactivebrokers.com. Your inquiry will be answered in a timely manner. Please do not contact Customer Service.