2025 Sohn New York Conference: This Short Seller And Journalist Finds Shorting ‘Fun’

The 2025 Sohn New York Conference is tomorrow, bringing with it many amazing stock ideas and some excellent commentary. Victor Bonilla of Carrollwood Capital Management is participating in the Next Wave portion of the 2025 Sohn New York Conference on May 14, which he said is an exciting honor.

"I don't think many people would disagree with the statement that this [The Sohn Investment Conference] is the most prestigious stock ideas conference in the world," he told Hedge Fund Alpha in an email interview. "I also think getting to share a stage with Jim [Chanos] is a whole additional honor. When I was invited to attend, I didn't need much convincing."

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Money manager + journalist

Bonilla is more than a money manager. He's also a journalist. He's been the chief investment officer of the short-biased Carrollwood Capital for about three years. Before founding Carrollwood, he served as a portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein on the AB Arya Partners multi-manager platform, where he ran a short-biased strategy. Bonilla also worked as an analyst for various hedge funds before that.

"I've been shorting stocks for 17 years, and somewhere along that path, I decided I wanted to just focus on that as a specialization," he added.

Bonilla's journalism work is tied to his work as a money manager because he publishes the most interesting ideas Carrollwood generates in its research process, educating readers on how to duplicate the research.

"I publish online under the pen name 'Jehoshaphat Research' and have been doing that for about four years, but I've been doing this sort of financial journalism work in some way or another for decades," Bonilla explained. "I started publishing stock ideas on SumZero in the 2000s. That was just for fun, but looking back, I wish I had actually shorted every stock I published on because all but one of them worked."

Getting started

He was about to start business school and thought perhaps he should have been traveling the world or doing something else. However, a recession was occurring, so he spent his summer at home reading about stocks and going to the gym. During this time, Bonilla found that writing about stocks was "just another fun thing to do" in addition to studying them for himself.

He published his short thesis for Prospect Capital (NASDAQ:PSEC) on SumZero, winning a small award for Top Weekly Idea on the site. Bonilla also found that to be fun and decided to post another thesis because people liked what he had to say.

"So I put another one up, and another, and did that for years," he said. "Eventually I had racked up tons of these top-idea awards, and my short ideas had outperformed every other author's on the site in aggregate. And this journalism part was just as fun for me as the investing part."

A deep dilemma

Bonilla's interest in investing started at a young age. He read about stocks and business when he was a kid, also delving into opinion articles on topics like politics and culture. He teetered between wanting a career in money management and journalism, "either making lots of money or sharing my ideas with the world."

"I thought everybody had to pick one career," Bonilla said. "I decided to go into money management and plan a career around that, but eventually, I found my way into opinion journalism anyway. I write about stocks, but I'm also showing lots of people how to analyze companies, accounting, management teams, etc., the way a professional does it. Our reports are free, and if a college kid reads every report I've ever written, he or she can learn how to be a good short seller."

He gets lots of pride from both being among the short sellers with the best track records and giving less-experienced investors who want to teach themselves the chance to do the same thing.

"The ultimate liberal art"

Bonilla describes investing as "the ultimate liberal art," as it includes psychology, history, accounting, game theory, science, philosophy and everything else. He loves investing because of this diversity and chose it because he couldn't pick a single field to work in.

"The other reason I love this field is that it's such a level playing field," Bonilla added. "In fact, it's the opposite of most fields; the less money you have, the more opportunities you have to outperform. And credentials mean absolutely, literally nothing. I have degrees from good schools, but those have very little to do with my investing process. My work is heavily focused on accounting, but I'm not a CPA. I dig up dirt on companies and investigate and write about them for a living, but I didn't go to journalism school."

Recalling what his high school wrestling coach used to say about it being the fairest sport in the world because of the weight classes, he said, "You don't have to be big to be a good wrestler, and you don't have to come from the right family or school to be a good investor."

Investing with mom

Bonilla has been interested in stocks since he was 13 years old. His mother was a small investor, and they kept their first computer in his room because he wanted to play video games on it. However, Bonilla's mother also used it to research stocks on AOL in his room, so he started asking her about it.

"Pretty soon it was something we were doing together," he said. "It also seemed a lot easier than the way my dad made money, going to his office every day. I was wrong about that part. Everybody was making money in stocks because it was the dotcom boom."

When he was a teenager, Bonilla wanted to be a mutual fund manager because he saw these managers in the money magazines, and they got to think about stocks all day. He had never heard of a hedge fund and didn't know any fund managers growing up, but he knew he wanted to do something like this.

Mother's advice

His mother gave him advice early on about when it was time to establish his own fund, although he knew for more than two decades that he wanted to launch his own fund.

"As far as timing, my mom told me when I was earlier in my career that once people started asking me to manage their money, it might be time to start a fund," Bonilla explained. "People started asking me to do that at some point during my career as an analyst, and I started making plans to launch a fund for years before I actually launched. I just followed mom's advice on that."

He went to AllianceBernstein to be a portfolio manager because he knew that it would make launching his own fund easier one day.

"By the time I was ready to launch a fund, I had done the dress rehearsals so many times, I just followed the roadmap, and it actually wasn't that hard," Bonilla added. "But I had been planning to do some form of this for 25 years."

Winning on almost every short