About the Program
The Barker Capital Management and Trading Program is named after Mr. Rotchford L. Barker, an outstanding and successful commodity trader at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) for thirty years, a past member of the Board of Directors at the CBOT, and a businessman familiar with corporate boards. The Barker Bulls and Bears Trading Room was completed in the fall of 2002 as part of the new, privately-funded facility housing the College of Business and Economics. Officially, the program admitted its first students beginning with the fall of 2004.
The program mission is to: [1] introduce students to trading, risk management strategies and quantitative modeling, [2] introduce students to markets for securities, options, futures, commodities, and other derivatives, [3] promote interdisciplinary cooperation across the land grant elements of the university (e.g., agriculture, natural resources, mining) and the disciplines of mathematics, statistics, business, finance and economics, [4] promote understanding of government policies, industry, human behavior and globalization as they relate to markets, and [5] create job and career opportunities. The focus of the Barker program is on risk and money management. The approach is founded on the beliefs that: [1] Trading and capital management strategies cannot be fully appreciated, understood and embraced without experiencing the actual risk-reward element found in trading real markets; and [2] Because of inter-market relationships and other synergies, the scope of study should be broad enough to consider all types of trading strategies for all types of financial instruments and/or derivatives.
The resulting program design consists of a first semester of study using the trading floor as a laboratory. With evidence of progress, students are encouraged and groomed in the second semester to reach a level of development permitting an application for funded trading. In the application process, students are evaluated and coached on the basis of personal discipline, treatment of risk, psychological factors and money management. In addition, students are exposed to funded trading of derivative strategies in groups led by program faculty. This is the only program in the country that we are aware of which permits student/faculty exposure to and experience with funded trading of derivative strategies.
A second track in the Barker program involves students in the study of asset allocation, and, within asset classes, research on the performance of money managers, private equity firms and hedge funds. Students review, evaluate and compare alternative investment strategies; recommendations are then developed for investing program resources not involved in trading.
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