Yale School of Management Students Win CNBC Fast Money MBA Challenge; School Rings NASDAQ Closing Bell, NYSE Opening Bell

New Haven, Conn., August 23, 2007 — It’s been a busy 24 hours for students at the Yale School of Management. A team of MBA students won the first ever CNBC Fast Money MBA Challenge and rang the Closing Bell of the NASDAQ, and Dean Joel M. Podolny presided over the Opening Bell of the New York Stock Exchange in honor of the arrival of the Class of 2009.

Bob Doherty, Koichi Kurisu, Jeff Levi, and Krishnan Vishwanathan from the Class of 2008 defeated students from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in the championship round of the CNBC Fast Money MBA Challenge, which aired live from the NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square on August 22.

The new game show, billed as “the varsity sport of the financial mind,” pitted 32 MBA students from eight top business schools against each other in a single-elimination tournament. The game play of each episode included answering financial trivia questions in the categories of “Capital Gains,” “Build the Bank,” “Name That Ticker,” “Hostile Takeover,” and “The $100,000 Question.”

The other schools in the competition were the University of Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, MIT, NYU, and UCLA.

In the championship round, the Yale SOM team beat Texas in the game play, which earned them $110,000 to invest in a mock portfolio of five stocks. Texas, as runner up, received $100,000 — a crucial 10% difference in investment capital. The portfolios were monitored from July 16 through the market close on August 22. The Yale SOM students’ investments outperformed Texas’ in the turbulent market of the last few weeks, winning them the title of MBA Challenge Champions.

The Yale SOM team, which includes alternates Lisa Howie and Michael McLaughlin, will share the $200,000 grand prize awarded by TD Ameritrade. The prize money will be used toward education expenses.

The Yale SOM and Texas teams appeared on CNBC throughout the day of the finale and presided over the NASDAQ Closing Bell with MBA Challenge host Dylan Ratigan.

On August 23, Dean Joel M. Podolny rang the Opening Bell of the NYSE to celebrate the arrival of the Yale School of Management Class of 2009 and to kick off a day of orientation activities in New York City.

The first-year students had lunch at the Yale Club of New York City with Yale SOM alumna Ranji Nagaswami ’86, senior managing director and CIO of AllianceBernstein. Following lunch, groups of students divided up and headed out across Manhattan to meet with company officers at Citigroup, Deloitte, ArcLight Capital, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Standard & Poor’s, Governor’s Island Preservation & Education Corporation, and the Sesame Workshop. Following the company visits, students gathered downtown for a gala reception at the New York Stock Exchange in the evening.