New Mendoza Trading Room provides a showcase for finance training

The Mendoza Trading Room (Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

The Mendoza Trading Room is hard to miss. Located in the highly visible northeast corner of the atrium of the University of Notre Dame’s  Mendoza College of Business, the new facility features a glass-front entry, wall-to-wall video board and racetrack-style stock tickers reminiscent of Wall Street.

The Trading Room, opened at the start of the 2025-26 academic year, is a 1,200-square-foot space designed to provide students with an industry-inspired, hands-on lab experience in financial markets and investment strategies.

Patty Brady, the Cusumano Family Managing Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing (NDIGI), said the new facility will provide a “showcase space” and “differentiator” for current and prospective students interested in finance, the University’s largest major.

Mendoza Trading Room (Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

“It’s front and center in Mendoza, and just signals that this is a center for excellence in training, if you want to go into investment management or financial services,” she said. “It’s designed to be innovative, representative of the types of spaces they’ll be working in when they get to industry.”

Brady, who spent 17 years with the Notre Dame Investment Office’s public equity team before joining NDIGI in 2021, noted that many peer universities do not have an undergraduate business school. This difference allows Notre Dame to attract top students to the Mendoza model: “Grow the Good in Business.”

The Trading Room is part of an ambitious development plan at Mendoza called “Building the Good in Business.” The expansion also includes a new Mendoza Behavioral Lab on the lower level and a significant 28,000-square-foot North Addition scheduled to open in fall 2026.

The Trading Room features 24 collaborative workstations that have industry-leading information platforms for business research, such as Bloomberg terminals, FactSet and Capital IQ. A soft-seating area provides space for faculty and students to interact and collaborate.

The majority of the new facility’s use will be outside the classroom for project-based learning, industry guest speakers and co-curricular collaboration, said Brady. She foresees opportunities ranging from the annual NDIGI Women’s Investing Summit to trading simulations after company earnings releases or Federal Reserve announcements.

“Traders are reacting in the markets, and students can watch in real time, and this space will be much better than a classroom for that type of learning,” she said. “I’m excited to see how students are using this innovative space that we’ve created to emphasize the competitive advantage that we have at Mendoza in training the next generation of investors.”

One class that intends to use the Trading Room regularly is Applied Investment Management (AIM). Shane Corwin, the AIM Alumni Collegiate Professor of Finance, said the variation of space in the Trading Room will create new opportunities for collaboration.

“It’s going to be a highlight space for prospective students and alumni to come by and directly see the work our students are doing,” Corwin said.

AIM started in 1995 as a collaboration between John Affleck-Graves and Frank Reilly in Mendoza Finance Department and Scott Malpass in the Notre Dame Investment Office. Each semester since, this limited-enrollment class of 25 undergraduate and MBA students manages an actual portfolio of publicly-traded stocks. The six-credit course demands extra effort to conduct company analysis, build financial models from original research, pitch recommendations and collaboratively choose stocks to buy, sell and hold.

Mendoza Trading Room (Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

Corwin said AIM investments have been consistently successful, outpacing the benchmark S&P 500 by an average of 2 percent per year to build a portfolio of about $30 million. Last year, Mendoza announced that AIM was endowing a faculty position.

“The students have always understood that they’re managing Notre Dame’s money, and they take that very seriously,” Corwin said. “But to know that they’re contributing directly to the college and to the faculty position is really impactful for them. It’s a testament to the 30-year success of the program.”

Corwin said the course’s focus on collaborative culture and ethics has created a strong and interconnected alumni network. Jim Parsons, a member of the inaugural AIM class, along with his wife gave the gift to establish NDIGI.

Until several years ago, the centerpiece of the Potenziani Family Atrium was the New York Stock Exchange trading post (in use from 1929-1981) that for decades recalled the world of finance past. Now, the Trading Room’s stock tickers will point toward the future.

“The trading post was a symbol of face-to-face trading on the exchange floor,” Corwin said. “Now, when technology is built into every aspect of what the industry does, I think having a state-of-the-art trading room signals that we want to make sure we’re at the forefront, and that students are being prepared for what they’re going to step into when they leave our campus.”