Having a 5 hour long break between classes leaves a lot of free time for virtually anything. As me and my group of friends wandered around the campus we eventually ended up in the library’s first floor. On the right-hand side of the turnstiles, past a card swipe, was the Baruch stock trading floor which was currently hosting a workshop called “Bloomberg”. Bloomberg is a sort of stock-trading organizer/search bar/ multi-tool that allows the user to sell, buy, or check stocks. The advisor, after everyone settled in, started with the basics of booting up Bloomberg and explained to us what stocks are. Basically, stocks are the ownership and capital of a company. Depending on the market and how well the company does, they may rise or fall and the end-objective of playing the stock market is to buy at the lows and sell at the highs. You effectively become a cartoonish monopoly man albeit without a monocle. We were taught how to search for and monitor stocks in Bloomberg whilst also learning the many shortcuts and such to speed up the process. However, the keyboard we used was modified with keys specific to stock trading and even a few physical variations. The advisor then showed us how to monitor company performances which would give us indications on whether or not to buy and sell stocks. The workshop was incredibly confusing at times but had piqued some interest in me. I intend to major in finance and my first look more or less in the financial field had yielded a sort of competition to me. While everyone would love to be a “wolf of wall street” and get away with a 2008-esque financial crisis the technical aspects of finance, exposed to me by Bloomberg, has pushed me more into the financial field.
