The FTS Teaching Philosophy

I am often asked: what is the difference between FTS and other systems?  I think the essential difference is that we focus squarely on the practical application of concepts that are taught, and this guides the development of our products as well.  For example, consider a stock trading simulation where students manage a portfolio and trade at prices coming from exchanges.  The typical simulation out there lets you buy/sell any stock and you can see what happened to your portfolio.   In my view, this is a cheap way out for the professor; they provide a “practical” dimension to the course without being involved in the trading and also leave the student to figure out how what is taught in the curriculum applies in practice.   

The FTS approach is quite different.  I like to see the application of what is taught in the course.  So we have a series of exercises and analytics built in to the system: for example, students can learn how to apply mean variance efficiency to create an efficient portfolio and learn about rebalancing in addition to reporting on what happened.  This does put a bit more work on the professor since you have be able to do the practical part as well, but it also integrates what is commonly taught with the simulation.   Another example is stock valuation: we like our students to perform a fundamental valuation so they know why they may want to buy or not buy a stock.  Our teaching exercise and the built in analytical support system lets the students learn valuation techniques by working through financial statements, and also see the market consequences of their decisions.  In this exercise, I prefer that everyone focus on a few stocks; otherwise there is no way for me to follow their analysis.   In fact, combining valuation with the stock simulation is so popular that we developed Valuation Tutor, www.valuationtutor.com, which is a complete textbook, software, and dataset package that lets students work through financial statement analysis and valuation techniques and compare ratios and calculated values across a large set of companies.

The bottom line is that we focus on teaching the “how and why” of the investment decision, not simply the “what happened” part. The teaching guide to our real time simulation now has over 25 projects and exercises that link directly to concepts and techniques taught in investments, corporate finance, options and futures, risk management, and accounting valuation courses.  You can see the contents at http://www.ftsmodules.com/public/modules/ftsrt/textbook/rt_contents_nolink.htm