2025 Sohn New York Conference Roundup: Here Are Some of the Best Ideas and Commentary

The 2025 Sohn New York Conference is a wrap, having brought a long list of very interesting stock picks. Here are some of the best ideas from this year’s conference. All the speaker summaries contain a link to a more in-depth article for each individual speaker.

Gain premium access to NY Sohn's top ideas—save 20% with code CONFERENCE20.

The Next Wave

Joseph Talia, VictoryArc Holdings

VictoryArc’s Joseph Talia pitched the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TLV:TASE), which he thinks could be a triple-bagger in the next five years. He explained that the company is in the early stages of shifting from non-profit to for-profit. It’s market capitalization is small at $1 billion, but it’s growing, and the stock has limited coverage with only one firm following it.

Talia noted that TASE has a monopolistic opportunity as it dominates the Israeli capital markets. As such, he sees it as a capital markets toll road. Talia likes stock exchanges because they are capital efficient, and he likes Israel’s stock exchange because it’s a royalty on the nation’s growth.

Connie Lee, Felis Advantage

Connie Lee, formerly of Tiger Global, suggested nCino (NASDAQ:NCNO), which she said is a leading cloud platform for bank lending and mortgage origination workflows. She noted that it’s trading at a steep discount to its peers.

Further, Lee said it has limited sensitivity to recessions and inflation with over 90% of revenue being recurring. nCino has adopted AI data to train its models and has an estimated $580 million in revenue for this year. Only 20% of potential clients have adopted it, and it has a roughly 60% RFP win rate. While loan officers have significantly decreased, nCino has continued to rise, albeit at a slower pace.

The company grew 440% between 2019 and 2021. Billings surged 22% year over year in the last quarters, and nCino enjoyed the fastest rate of billings and backlogs in the last seven quarters. Lee sees high upside with protected downside.

Alexandra Engler, Arene Capital

Formerly at Diameter Capital, Alexandra Engler pitched Celanese (NYSE:CE). She said the company’s earnings underperformed after a transformative acquisition, and it cut guidance and its dividend after the fourth quarter.

Engler believes investors are too focused on earnings revisions and the levered balance sheet but expects the negative news flow to end soon. She sees positives coming from Celanese’s aceteles division, a critical input in methanol that she expects to drive earnings higher.

The company is a low-cost producer of acetic acid, a product whose price she predicts will inflect higher in the coming years. Engler thinks the drag from the recent acquisition has troughed and now sees a runway with additional value levers.

For the acetic acid business, Celanese has access to cheap natural gas, which enables it to pay less on a cost curve. A significant price input is methanol prices, which are variable and have the most volatility. Methanol prices have spiked over the last 18 months amid supply outages. Engler thinks Methanol demand will outstrip supply, estimating a 12 million metric-ton shortage in the coming years.

Higher methanol will result in a 30% increase in U.S. acetic acid prices by 2028, according to Engler. She expects that increase to boost CE’s EBITDA by 50% between 2024 and 2028.

Engler saw 53% upside to $79 from $51 on the day of the conference.

Short-selling panel

Victor Bonilla, Jehoshaphat Research

Jehoshaphat Research's Victor Bonilla suggested