Every time when I decided to go to the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, I told myself it would be the last year because I don't like trips that much in general. For this, I would have to pay top dollars for the plane tickets and hotel rooms, and would not have enough sleep given I would spend a lot of unstructured time at night with friends for sharing and catching up, and would need to catch events in the mornings, including lining up for the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting .
But after attending the event, after meeting a lot of great people, interesting people, hearing some insightful talks, seeing how successful and rich people being super humble to wait in line for free lunches, being able to become a full time value investor attending conferences for a few days (my day job is being a software engineer), I would always think that I will come one more time next year.
I found it helpful to have some questions in mind before going to Omaha. While most conferences and talks are about Berkshire Hathaway, for example, this year it's all about whether Berkshire Hathaway will still be fine after Warren Buffett is no longer the CEO, how well the culture will be maintained, how Greg Abel is performing in the shareholders meeting, what the intrinsic value of Berkshire Hathaway is, the expected return of the stock, etc., there are always panels with experts talking about some bigger pictures, like the macro environment, different industries and different companies. For this year, I want to know how people think about private credits and how AI will change our world. And I was glad that I got some insights from different industry experts during my trip:
Private Credits
A lot of investment "experts" do not actually have much insights about private credits. They mostly just dismiss it by repeating some news from the headlines, i.e. private credits are not transparent, they are risky (as a whole), etc. They pretty much see them as banks during 2009-2010 (i.e. after the great financial crisis).
An expert on private credits said he was fine with the public BDCs because they have a fixed pool of capital to invest without any urgency to reinvest capital with poor underwriting standards. He felt less comfortable for private BDCs which need to constantly raise capital and find new opportunities to invest the capital as soon as possible. So he was not very fond of the private BDCs side of Blue Owl.
An expert who is responsible for an endowment fund with about 5% private credits said that he was not a friend of private credits about 6 months ago when interest rate was on the way down. He said now facts changed and he likes them very much for the reason of the interest rate being held up. He didn't request any redemptions for the private credits the fund owned. He didn't give any colors on the credits concerning the private credits, so I would take that as a positive.
AI and Leadership
Greg Abel did not expect AI to change their business models that much. That being said, they will develop more software in house for Geico, and maybe in other businesses.
Most experts believe Greg Abel has a much stronger grasp on the businesses controlled by Berkshire Hathaway, and will increase their performance much more than when Warren Buffett was the CEO. It's not clear whether Greg would do better in terms of stock picking.
Some experts believe Greg Abel is underrated. They believe Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries will perform better under Greg.
Most experts do not see AI as a big threat to the US economy.
Some experts think AI is overhyped in terms of its capability to replace human jobs. None of them identified any big companies that would be deemed obsolete by AI.
I just want to add that I believe the investing experts who spoke on stage were wrong about AI. AI will change the landscape of jobs and the competitive advantages of companies by a lot. Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries, while already under-invested given Warren Buffett focus on return on investment too much, would be further behind their peers. Greg Abel is definitely better than Warren Buffett in fighting the trend, but their conservative capital allocation culture would hammer their ability to innovate their businesses with AI.
The whole Omaha event is very interesting because the business knowledge of investing is so vast that you can always learn from others, and you can also provide values to others. It is very unlike some technical conferences that unless you are already an expert in the field, most participants know more than you on everything relevant to the conferences. To get the most from the event, be humble, be open, and don't be afraid to share. It's okay to agree to disagree. Try to absorb more opinions from others without judging. Simply get your ideas across and hold the urge to change other people's mind.
I feel that I can get different things every time I come to Omaha. I know a little bit more about myself, my weaknesses, things that I have to work on, and the knowledge gap that I have to fill. I become a little bit better as an investor every time. I am looking forward to the meeting next year, and I hope Warren Buffett will come as well.
