Every other rep in Reps & Certification ends in something written. The interview does not. In an equity-research or buy-side process, somewhere between the second and the final round, someone will say "pitch me a stock" and then sit back, and what happens next is the whole assessment. The good news is that you already own the content, because the one-page memo of M8.04 and the eight-line teardown output carry every fact the pitch needs. What has to be built is the conversion, and it is a different skill from writing, because it runs from memory, in sequence, against an interruption.
What do you say, and what will you be asked?
The spoken form has five parts and they go in this order. The claim, stated as a recommendation with a number: what to do, at what price, over what horizon, for what return. The variant perception, which is the sentence that earns the whole pitch: what the market believes, what you believe instead, and where the two differ in a way that is measurable. Why now, meaning why this is mispriced today rather than permanently boring, which is usually a catalyst, a disclosure, a forced seller or a misread cycle. Three supports, one economic, one financial and one on the moat or the management, each with a figure attached. And the falsifier, the observable event that would tell you the thesis is wrong, which you volunteer rather than wait to be asked. Two minutes at a normal speaking rate is roughly 250 to 300 words, so the whole thing is a page of speech and not a page of prose.
Then the questions come, and there are only about six of them in any interview anywhere. What does the market believe and why is it wrong? What has to be true for your number to work? What kills this? Who is on the other side of the trade and what do they know? What would you pay, and what would you sell it at? And what did you get wrong the last time you were confident? Prepare answers to those six and you have prepared for most of the room. The one that separates candidates is the fourth, because a pitch with no named counterparty is a pitch that has not steelmanned itself.
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How is a stock pitch scored?
Score a rep out of 10 on five criteria, two points each, exactly as the teardown rubric works. Claim: is there a recommendation with a price, a horizon and a return, in the first fifteen seconds? Variant perception: is the difference from consensus stated and quantified, rather than asserted as "the market is short-term"? Support: are the three supports numbered, sourced and non-overlapping? Falsifier: is a specific, dated, observable disconfirmer offered without prompting? Delivery: did it run from memory inside two minutes, and did it survive one interruption without losing the thread? Eight of ten is the working bar, and the criterion that fails most often is the falsifier, because a candidate who has just spent two minutes advocating finds it unnatural to hand the interviewer a weapon. It is the criterion that most impresses the people who count.
How do you practise a stock pitch?
Run the rep like any other rep in the deliberate-practice loop: record it, transcribe the first thirty seconds, and check whether the claim actually arrived in that window or whether the first thirty seconds were history and context. E11.06 ยง4.13 runs the same discipline from the canon's side as Peter Lynch's two-minute drill, with its own pre-registered sell criteria attached; M10.03 owns the written form and the action-title deck that a longer version of this becomes. The pitch is the memo read aloud, and if the memo is sound the pitch is a delivery problem. If the pitch keeps collapsing under the fourth question, the problem was never delivery.