ITHACA, N.Y. -- A student team from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management was the first-place winner April 2 in the second MBA Stock Pitch Challenge. The team from Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, which hosted the competition, came in second.

The two winning teams competed for two days against teams from nine other top U.S. business schools and were judged by a blue-ribbon panel of Wall Street stock analysis experts on the buy and sell sides. The Kellogg team won a cash prize of $3,000, and the Johnson School team won $1,500.

The competition for aspiring stock analysts took place under the auspices of the Johnson School's Parker Center for Investment Research, a hands-on teaching center for financial analysis at the school, and it was co-sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), FactSet, StockVal and Jack Ferraro '70, for whom the winners' trophy is named. Criteria for winning included accuracy, reliability and depth of financial analysis; knowledge of industry and company in stock selections; and presentation skills.

The teams, each made up of three MBA students, were assigned a specific stock and two specific industries from which they were to pick a stock and decide whether to recommend it as a long (buy), neutral (hold) or short (sell) candidate. They had just one evening to do extensive research, without outside help. In the real world, such analysis often takes two weeks or longer for a single stock. In addition the teams were given only five minutes to argue for or against investing in the stocks, plus 10 minutes to answer tough questions in the first round and 15 in the second, final round, much tighter time frames than in the real world.

Members of the Kellogg winning team were Phil Gresh, Sean O'Riordan and Andrew Sergeant. Members of the second-place team from the Johnson School were Joe Stein, Adam Weisel and Jason Tauber. All the Cornell team members are portfolio managers of the Cayuga Fund, a student-managed long/short hedge fund housed at the Johnson School, and were picked by their peers for their analysis skills and track records. Other competing teams came from MBA programs at Indiana University (Kelley), New York University (Stern), Duke University (Fuqua), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan), University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), University of Rochester (Simon), University of Virginia (Darden) and University of Michigan.

The judges were: Edmund Debler, portfolio manager, Millennium Partners; Andrew J. Galligan Jr., CFA, director, portfolio manager and analyst (technology and Internet sectors), TimesSquare Capital Management; John Geissinger, chief investment officer, Bear Stearns Asset Management; Judah S. Kraushaar, former sell-side analyst, Merrill Lynch, and a No. 1-ranked Institutional Investor money center bank analyst; Todd Richter, J.D., C.I.C., managing director and head of health-care strategic transaction development, Banc of America Securities, LLC.; L. George Rieger, chief investment strategist and co-founder, Hamlin Capital Management, LLC; Steven Tish, portfolio manager (health-care industry), Millennium Partners; and Peter A. Wright, founder, P.A.W. Partners, one of the largest U.S. hedge funds.