I was in Omaha last week for the Berkshire Hathaway AGM.

It was a fantastic opportunity to meet other investors, many of whom I'd never met in person before.

Here are my key takeaways:

1. The meeting itself was underwhelming. Greg Abel lacks Buffett's charisma, and Ted Weschler was strangely enough absent from the meeting. The number of visitors must have declined by 60% over the past year.

2. The side events were excellent. ValueX, Creighton University, Fordham Gabelli School of Business, Vitaliy Katsenelson's, Mohnish Pabrai's, and Tilman Versch's events were fun and educational.

3. I spoke with a large number of value investors. The common theme this year was a focus on software stocks hurt by the so-called SaaS-pocalypse. One astute investor commented that the focus has shifted from datacenter beneficiaries to chipmakers and, now, finally, to companies benefiting from probabilistic computing/AI. The market has been indiscriminate, but software stocks are not all the same. Some will benefit and others not.

4. Bob Robotti's talks were a highlight of the week. He thinks the FTSE 250 will outperform the NASDAQ over the next decade. When asked what asset class he believes in today, he mentioned Canadian oil & gas companies. Furthermore, he thinks cheap natural gas will create a durable competitive advantage for US manufacturing companies.

5. Names worth digging into from last Sunday's IdeaHouse event: Duolingo, OTC Markets Group, Rayonier, Kimberly-Clark, Fairfax Financial. And out of the pitches at Himalaya Capital's event, CNOOC and Tencent stood as decent value picks.

6. The only Asia-focused name that caught my eye was China Merchants China Direct Investments (0133 HK). Argyle has been pushing management to improve the fund's capital allocation. It still trades at 0.5x NAV. But the real story is CMCDI's 0.86% stake in Moonshot AI - the company behind the Chinese large language model Kimi, now valued at US$18 billion and rising. It's set for a 2026 IPO.

If you're considering going next year, I recommend joining Tilman Versch's Good Investing Plus community. The whole point of going to the Berkshire Hathaway AGM is to meet other investors, and his events helped me get to know people in a low-pressure environment.