Wolf of Tamiami Trail: USFSM gets Bloomberg Terminals so students can learn finance like they are on Wall Street.

There was an unusually high number of millionaires moseying about at University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee on Thursday.

Titans of wealth management, fiduciary lawyers and market analysts convened at the small Sarasota school for the school’s Financial Literacy Day — a day for lectures about fiscal literacy and discussion on the market’s future.

When the industry leaders left, they left behind a wealth of information — and not just in the metaphorical sense.

Twelve Bloomberg Terminals, machines considered the gold standard of the financial industry, providers of real-time market analysis and loads of data you can’t find on Google, now sit in a second-floor computer lab in the campus’s main building.

David Kotok and Cumberland Advisors of Sarasota donated the terminals, which are available for students attending any of the schools in the C4 Consortium — USF Sarasota-Manatee, Ringling College of Art and Design, State College of Florida, New College of Florida FSU/The Ringling and Eckerd College.

The terminals — which are recognizable from their role in any movie about Wall Street — flash charts, pie graphs, lines and squiggles across the screen with all sorts of undecipherable but potentially valuable information. Administrators plan for students to become certified in using the Bloomberg program, a certification which James Curran, dean of the college of business, says will set them apart from other graduates competing for jobs.

Curran mentioned just one of the Bloomberg program’s capabilities — the ability to track supply chains. A student interested in a certain product can pick a company making that product and see the all the suppliers the manufacturer uses and all the customers they sell to.

That real-time glimpse at the supply chain can help students have a real-world understanding of how markets work, rather than relying on abstract discussions, Curran said.

“(The terminals) allow us to take a theoretical concept we’ve been talking about and turn it into something that they can actually experience,” Curran said.

And State College of Florida President Carol Probstfeld said the machines would help the consortium of schools work toward the state legislature’s goal of more hands-on experience.

“It will help them in their business careers as they move forward, and I know part of the goal of the state is to have students be as well prepared as they can be when they actually go out into the real world,” Probstfeld said.

This story was originally published March 30, 2017 at 7:47 PM with the headline "Wolf of Tamiami Trail: USFSM gets Bloomberg Terminals so students can learn finance like they are on Wall Street.."