Just came across something that's been rattling around in my head. Guy Spier, who runs Aquamarine Capital and has been crushing it as a value investor for decades, basically dropped a bombshell on Bloomberg saying the golden age of value investing is done. And honestly, his reasoning makes a lot of sense.

Spier's been managing around 500 million in assets since 1997, consistently delivering returns above the S&P 500 while keeping volatility down. He's the real deal—literally had lunch with Buffett back in 2007 (paid 650k for it with Mohnish Pabrai). But here's what got me thinking: he's arguing that the entire edge that used to separate successful fund managers from the rest has basically evaporated.

Back in the day, being a good fund manager meant you had an informational advantage. You'd spend weeks digging through research, making calls, reading annual reports. That was hard to do, so if you were willing to put in the work, you could find things others missed. Spier even traveled to Berkshire meetings and flew to London just to grab pasties with other investors and pick their brains. That kind of effort created real separation.

But that world doesn't exist anymore. AI, live streams, tweets, podcasts, LLMs—information is basically free and instant now. What used to take days to research takes seconds. The gap between what different fund managers know has collapsed. It's not even close.

This means the whole game has changed for active fund managers. When everyone has access to the same data, same tools, same analysis frameworks, you get crowded trades, amplified volatility, and a bunch of homogeneous competition. Returns from active management are getting squeezed toward index returns. The edge is gone.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Spier isn't saying value investing is dead—he's saying the old version of it is. The future isn't about who sees information first or deepest. It's about something different. It's about who can think more clearly, who can spot the blind spots in models everyone else is using, who can resist the illusion of consensus.

The real competitive moat for fund managers in the AI era probably comes from soft skills: discipline, emotional control, patience, the ability to go against the crowd when it matters. These things are way harder to replicate than information advantages. You can't automate conviction.

So we're not saying goodbye to value investing. We're just entering a new phase where the competition shifts from raw intelligence and information gathering to structural thinking, long-term perspective, and organizational discipline. The fund managers who adapt to that reality will probably be the ones who thrive next.