This April, CTV has launched its first ever business report, aimed toward Columbia's business-savvy students. To get a sense of the business culture at Columbia, check out a typical Friday afternoon at the Business School, where students are busy absorbing, analyzing, and acting on financial news. In order to shape our CTV report based on student's needs, we interviewed both Antoine Gara, a Journalism School student concentrating on business journalism as well as Osifo Akhuemonkhan, MBA 2011 candidate. 

To get an interview with Antoine from the J-School, we had to pull his attention away from the Business School's Bloomberg terminal. He says,  "I'm most interested in hearing where the stock market is, and then where bonds are and currencies." Antoine is making the transition into business journalism after having worked on Wall Street himself - at Lehman Brothers. 

Osifo, MBA 2011, studies mergers and acquisitions, and hopes to head to Wall Street post-graduation.  Here he adds the why behind student's need for financial news: "We take that information and we process it and kind of add what we know about the markets and make informed decisions for investing or making predictions about general macro economic trends."

With that, CTV's Jennifer Parker set out to provide actionable information by reporting live from the New York Stock exchange.

Here is the transcript:  Welcome to the New York Stock Exchange on this Friday, April 1st. It's the first day of the second quarter, and mood is pretty positive today, because we're looking at the best Q1 for US stocks in 13 years. We have not had a first this good since 1998 with the S & P 500 rising 5.4% since January 1st, the Dow Jones up 6.4% and the Nasdaq rising 4.8%. With tensions in the Middle East driving oil prices higher, energy stocks were the quarter's best performing sector. The biggest movers were ExxonMobil and Chevron, both posting double-digit returns. 

The big economic indicator this week was Wednesday's ADP Employment Report, which showed monthly payroll numbers increased by 201,000 jobs. The good news was reinforced this morning with the release of the government's non-farm payroll number, better than expected at 216,000 and an unemployment rate down to 8.8%. Bullish news.

In M & A, the Healthcare sector was rocked this week when Canadian company Valeant Pharmaceuticals announced an offer to buy Cephalon, which produces sleeping pills and pain killers. The deal is worth approximately $5.7 billion. 

Last but not least - BlackRock's in the news again. The mutual fund giant had as strong week as it anticipates joining the S&P500 index after the close of trading today. Joining the index means all the Exchange Traded Funds that track the S&P will now have to include Blackrock in their funds. This, of course, is boosting demand for the stock. 

That's this week's market report. Check us out again in the week's ahead, and don't hesitate to share your feedback at info@ctvnewsonline.com.