Our biggest Sohn Hearts & Minds Conference yet took over the Sydney Opera House this year, a fitting backdrop for a milestone moment. With support from The Australian Ballet, we stepped into a larger theatre, welcomed almost 1,000 delegates representing more than $1 trillion in capital, and delivered one of our most dynamic programs to date.
If last year felt like stocks, dividends and rock & roll, SH&M 2025 shifted toward geopolitics, megatrends and a distinctly Australian strain of optimism. Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers opened by positioning “Australia Inc.” as a rare global stabiliser: back-to-back surpluses, a AAA credit rating, low unemployment and business investment with real momentum.
In what feels a little like Groundhog Day, the spectre of US President Donald Trump once again loomed large over the presentations from the fund managers and even ex-Prime Minister Julia Gillard. As geopolitical trade tensions escalate, markets dislocate and tech becomes hot again, the best place to invest is in the home of the free and the Trump. As you’ll read, it was difficult to get away from the guy.
The Conference’s headline act, Anthony Scaramucci, Skybridge Capital, also has a direct link to the 45th and 47th US President, having been his press secretary for a handful of eventful days. With characteristic candour, he broke down power cycles, the media engine and the dangers of ego. His investing lesson from the experience? “Don’t let your ego or pride drive your decision-making,” he said.
In perfect timing, the US Government shutdown ended immediately prior to the event kicking off, much to the relief of the myriad of US stock pickers and guests who headlined this year’s event, clearing the runway for a slate of ideas.
At an investment conference in 2025 it would be fair to expect that AI would have featured heavily, and to some extent you would be right. However, this year’s conference kicked off with what Peter Rutter cleverly pointed out is a new and better form of the letters of the year – American Industrialisation. And the first two stock picks of the day played heavily into that theme.
Eric Wong of Stillpoint Investments (NYC) came out of the gate with Hong Kong listed Morimatsu International Holdings (HK:2155), which he described as a ‘factory of factories’. Morimatsu prefabricates and ships entire factories or production lines anywhere in the world. Their US customer base has been exponentially increasing as American manufacturers respond to Trump’s tariffs (you will be reading those two words a lot) by scrambling to build local production capacity.
This was immediately followed by London-based fund manager Peter Rutter, Lifecycle Investment Partners (UK) who pitched another US heavy industrials theme – Steel Dynamics (NASDAQ:STLD), the second largest steel maker in the US. Trump’s tariffs (*refer above) are providing tailwinds for Steel Dynamics as non-tariffed inventories of steel and aluminium deplete down and US production will have to inevitably and rapidly increase.
In a change of pace, Qiao Ma from Munro Partners (AUS) pitched a left fielder – TKO Inc (NYSE:TKO), a sports and entertainment company with a global audience and a roster of events that play year-round. Qiao described TKO – the owner of Trump’s favourite sport, UFC – as the perfect product for streaming services, which ensures that broadcasting rights have high appeal to multiple potential acquirers. She specifically called out TKO’s vertically integrated business model which ensures it controls all aspects from talent management, merchandise, travel and production.
Ben Hensman, Square Peg described his pick – Monday.com (NASDAQ:MNDY) – as the control tower for cross-functional work, allowing users to build their own workflow platforms, including collaboration and data management tools. He compared Monday.com to the industry giant, ServiceNow, but Monday.com offers the chance to access its competitor earlier in its journey and with 10% of the revenue, making it a cheaper alternative.
Emerson Moore, Ampfield Management (USA) talked about the excitement of bricks and mortar retail, which is certainly a saying that hasn’t been uttered for quite some time. Still, he talked up the low-cost but high-growth investment opportunity that is Puuilo (PUUILO.HE), a Finnish listed Bunnings meets IKEA.
Nick Griffin, Munro Partners, closed the morning with a rapid-fire run through of mandates and megatrends with Lord Michael Hintze, Deltroit Asset Management (UK) and Ajay Rajadhyaksha, Barclays (USA). The conversation shifted into geopolitical speed-reading. Lord Hintze laid out the framework investors secretly wish they’d studied in school: a mix of world order, energy transitions and the rare-earth chokepoints that keep global supply chains honest. China, he noted, will be soft in property but lethal in tech, while Trump remains a human wildcard, equal parts headline risk and market volatility. Lord Hintze, hedge fund titan and sitting member of the House of Lords, reminded everyone that investing never happens in a vacuum. Geopolitics, demographics, and energy transitions are the roof over your portfolio – not the wallpaper.
Moving back to the pitches, India’s insurance market is tiny in penetration, colossal in population. Think 4x Australia in the number of customers, pandemic-accelerated growth and scale that makes any investor sit up. Samir Mehta, J O Hambro (SG) painted Policy Bazaar (NSE:POLICYBZR) as a microcosm of India’s massive untapped financial potential – risky, exciting, and very, very big.
Nick Mowbray’s “From Toys to Tech” was the curveball hit of the day. His business ZURU is a Kiwi unicorn story involving robots, manufacturing and more hustle than a Sydney auction room. Where everyone else has outsourced, Mowbray owned the process and built a factory (and then more). Designing a home, updating engineering and structural models, optimising earthquake resilience, all normally months of work, now delivered instantly at scale. A blueprint for the future of construction that actually exists today.
Sometimes the excitement is in the heavy stuff, as shown by the pick from Mohammed Anjarwala, Advent Global Opportunities (US) – Heidelberg Materials (ETR: HEI). Cement may not spark a dinner-table debate, but it’s heavy to move. Meaning it’s about local market share (where Heidelberg is strong) and that gives them pricing power, proven by their ability to turn volume drops into profit gains. The strategic footprint consolidation means they have plenty of capacity to serve local markets. A sign that sometimes the quietest businesses are the stickiest investments.
Vihari Ross, Antipodes Partners, reminded the room that senior housing is all about occupancy. Her pick, Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: KDB), looks almost boring on the surface – an essential service, high incremental margins, and an audience that doesn’t quit (wealthy Americans, check). But that’s the point: the cash flows keep ticking higher, quietly proving that “boring” can be the most rewarding adjective in anyone’s portfolio.
Robert Mullin, Marathon Resource Advisors took a wrench to conventional thinking with SLB (NYSE:SLB), formerly known as Schlumberger. Everyone’s been staring at depressed oilfield spend and shrugging – but he’s looking past the plateaued US shale market (SLB’s weakest market) to Brazil and Ghana, where the work is tough, technical and in SLB’s sweet spot. Always a tech company at heart, SLB is quietly set to turn specialised know-how into a serious margin story, given the deep discount they are trading at and given they are a company potentially at the bottom of their trough.
Maybe Matthew McLennan, First Eagle Investments’ call to buy gold, gold, gold was the best of the day. In his session that felt part philosophy tutorial, part risk management therapy, he brought together US debt, deficits, global geopolitical factors (including the odd Trump and China headline) to suggest nominal drift is real and now is the time to look beyond the US for stable, value-rich allocations. McLennan reminded everyone that risk and opportunity often come in pairs.
Reminding us of the real-world outcomes your support makes possible, we heard from Hearts & Minds researchers at the Black Dog Institute and University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre sharing updates on mental-health prevention and breakthroughs in biomarker discoveries for neurodegenerative diseases.
By late afternoon, delegates were split between recalibrating China risk and debating whether Trump’s second-term trade agenda counts as macro policy or a weather event. Either way, SH&M again proved that you can blend complexity with clarity, global uncertainty with national optimism, and serious topics with good humour — and still leave the room energised.
Next stop: Queenstown, New Zealand, 2026. Pack your golf clubs, macro notes and an appetite for sauv blanc for our greatest adventure yet.
“The Mooch”, as he’s affectionately known, is a man in high demand. He’s flown into Sydney to headline the Sohn Hearts & Minds conference at the Opera House, an investment community jamboree that raises money for charity. He landed in London the night before, and will leave Sydney the next day for the brutal 24-hour return to New York.
Australian investors should be more worried about China than sweating on Federal Reserve independence and other market obsessions to do with Donald Trump, says billionaire conservative Baron Michael Hintze.
Beyond Wall Street, The Mooch is better known for his cutting takes on US politics in the popular podcast The Rest is Politics: US, which he hosts with BBC’s long-term North American correspondent Katty Kay.
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