UWA trading room wins big

The University of Western Australia’s new trading room has been named as the education project of the year at the annual AV Awards in London, beating out entries from the University of California and the Qatar National Library.

The AV Awards recognise excellence in the audio visual industry and UWA’s entry was one of more than 700 competing projects from 82 countries. 

The UWA Rosemarie Nathanson financial markets trading room was completed in September last year and gives students access to over 400 global markets.

The facility also provides more than 4 million gigabytes of historical market data, from exchanges such as the ASX, NYSE, LSE and the CME.

The audio visual component of the trading room was completed by Perth company 3D Audio Visual.

3DAV has won a number of awards for its AV integration for learning and training facilities in WA, including M-Block at Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre in 2014 and the CTEC in Crawley back in 2000. 

The space caters for three different room modes: trading, teaching and experiment.

The different modes transform the room’s AV and lighting setup to match the desired mode requirements.

The facility also has an 11-metre live stock market ticker to display index and commodity information outside the room.

UWA Business School professor Andrew Caminschi highlighted the quality of the trading room.

“This is an advanced facility which uses industry standard tools you would find in a real hedge fund or trading desk to really give students a cutting-edge experience,” he said.

“It brings together hardware, software and services from financial providers all in the one place.

“Our trading room beat entries from UCLA’s Hass Business School and the Qatar National Library to take out the award.

"We are so proud to offer such a truly world-class facility to students at the UWA Business School.

“To share the stage with other category winners, such as Bloomberg, Adobe and Westfield, illustrates the global pedigree we are in.”