Creighton University’s 2026 Omaha Conference – Where Five Active Managers Are Finding Opportunity in an Expensive Market

At the Creighton University 16th Annual Value Investing Conference, held at the Heider College of Business in Omaha, five value investors gathered for a panel discussion moderated by Sarah Murray, adjunct professor at Creighton and Vice President of Investment Solutions at Bridges Investment Management. The panelists were Robert Robotti, President and Chief Investment Officer of Robotti & Company, which he founded in 1983 after serving as CFO at Gabelli & Company; Vitaliy Katsenelson, CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and author of three books including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life and Active Value Investing;

Mark Weiner, a portfolio manager at Tributary Capital Management who has run a small cap strategy since 1999; Jack Holmes, CFA, Chief Investment Officer at Bridges Trust; and Pieter Slegers, founder of Compounding Quality. The backdrop for their discussion was a student-managed endowment portfolio that returned 24.5% in the past year, placing it in approximately the top 4% of money managers, a result that drew applause from the room. The event took place on Friday May 1st 2026 before Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting the next day.

Value Investing as Philosophy, Not Formula

The opening question asked how value investing has evolved over the panelists’ careers and what it means in 2026. The answers converged on one point: value investing is a philosophy, not a recipe. Katsenelson argued that the most common mistake is reducing value investing to a mechanical checklist – buy stocks that are statistically cheap. He outlined five principles he considers the foundation: look at stocks as businesses, demand a margin of safety, treat the market as something that serves you rather than instructs you, maintain a long-term orientation, and lead with temperament over IQ. Within that framework, he noted, two managers can run very different strategies – one buying beaten-down cyclicals, another buying high-growth compounders – and both can be value investors, because the philosophy, not the style, is what defines it. He cited Chuck Akre as an example of a growth-oriented manager who is nonetheless a value investor at his core.

Weiner added that the basic principles at Tributary Capital Management have held constant across his 25-plus years as a small cap investor: find companies with rising intrinsic value, buy them at a discount to fair value, and hold with a long time horizon. What has changed, he said, is the lens applied to different industries. Analyzing a technology company requires a different framework than analyzing a consumer staples business. The evolution is in the application of the principles, not the principles themselves.

Robotti described how passive flows have reshaped the market. As passive vehicles have attracted more capital, the pool of investors doing fundamental analysis of individual businesses has shrunk. That, in his view, has expanded the opportunity set for those still willing to dig into specific companies, particularly in beaten-down and out-of-favor areas. Holmes noted that the spread between growth stock earnings and value stock earnings is as wide as it has been in a long time, which further explains why value strategies have struggled recently – and why sentiment-driven reversals can be sharp when they come.

AI as Friend, AI as Threat

The second major theme was artificial intelligence. Katsenelson opened with two direct statements: if you embrace AI intelligently, it will be your ally; if you ignore it, it will run you over. His more important point, though, was a warning about cognitive atrophy. Drawing on his own experience as a daily writer – he writes for two hours every day and has produced three books through that discipline – Katsenelson said the muscle memory of thinking is built through repetition, just like handwriting. Outsourcing your thinking to AI erodes that muscle. His practical rule: when he writes books or articles, he types. When he sends routine emails or does dictation, he uses AI tools. The line is drawn at anything requiring sustained original thought. ‘You want AI to help you think,’ he said. ‘You don’t want it to think for you.’

Holmes noted that JP Morgan had been encountering problems in investment banking interviews where candidates leaned so heavily on AI preparation tools that they struggled to reason independently once in the room.