ITHACA, N.Y. -- Students from 11 top-tier U.S. business schools will compete in the second MBA Stock Pitch Challenge next Thursday and Friday, April 1 and 2, at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

The competition will showcase the stock picking and presentation skills of MBA students who hope to be hired as stock analysts after they graduate. The first-place team will receive a $3,000 award and the second-place team an award of $1,500.

The competing teams will conduct their research on Thursday at the school's Parker Center for Investment Research in Sage Hall in the middle of Cornell's campus. The center is a state-of-the-art teaching facility that replicates a Wall Street trading floor and allows students to work with real-time data and the analytical software used by professional fund managers. Final-round presentations on Friday are in B9 Sage Hall at 2 p.m. and are free and open to the public.

"The Johnson School is hosting the competition because we believe the real-time, experiential focus that stock pitching represents is part of the future of investment management education at business schools," said Charles Lee, the Johnson School professor and expert on stock

valuation who directs the Parker Center. "The new breed of investment analyst must be independent and able to provide strong analysis to back selections, with a full understanding that success comes from the performance of the equity."

In addition to the Johnson School, competing teams are from business schools at Indiana University (Kelley), New York University (Stern), Duke University (Fuqua), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan), Northwestern University (Kellogg), University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), University of Rochester (Simon), University of Virginia (Darden) and University of Michigan.

NYU took the top prize and the Johnson School placed second last year, the first year of the competition, which also took place at the school's Parker Center at Cornell.The teams, each made up of three MBA students, will be assigned a work station and printer in the Parker Center and trained Thursday morning on a variety of analytical tools used by financial institutions and institutional investment firms, among them FactSet, an online investment research service, and Reuters StockVal, an equity analysis and portfolio management tool. On Thursday afternoon they will be given a specific stock and two specific industries from which they are to pick a stock. They will need to decide whether to recommend the assigned stock as a long (buy), neutral (hold) or short (sell) candidate, and the stocks from the assigned industries as either long or short candidates. They have just one evening, until midnight on Thursday, to do extensive research on their stocks and are not permitted to accept outside help.

In the real world, such analysis often takes two weeks or longer for a single stock. In addition when they present on Friday to a blue-ribbon panel of judges, the teams are allotted 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. The four highest-scoring teams will get to advance to the final round Friday afternoon, and the winning and second-place teams will be announced immediately afterward and posted on this Web site, which also will provide details on the competition: http://www.mbastockpitch.com/ .

"Stock analysis and presentation are vital skills for research analysts, and the Johnson School is pleased to provide the forum for the next generation of investment professionals to showcase their talent," said Lee.

The judges for the competition are expert analysts and investment managers from both the buy and sell sides of Wall Street equity research. They are: 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.