Morgan Stanley analysts will once again be prepping their acceptance speech after the US bank held off the challenge of rivals Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS to win the award for Extel's best research house for the second year in a row.

Since the turn of the millennium, only UBS - for a dozen years - and then BAML in 2013 and 2014, had been named the top brokerage for equity and equity-linked research, before Morgan Stanley cracked their stranglehold in 2015, and the US bank has repeated the feat this year.