The landscape of investing has been fundamentally reshaped, and for Guy Spier, the change is absolute. In his Bloomberg article, he reflects that for thirty years, his advantage was built on “painstaking research.”
He recounts a time when knowledge was hard-won, a process where “acquiring knowledge was hard. Every step in the acquisition of investing knowledge involved a cycle of days, if not weeks.”
This methodical approach, requiring phone calls and mailed annual reports, defined an era where an edge was cultivated through sheer effort and access to rare sources.
That era, he states plainly, is now gone. The internet began the erosion, but artificial intelligence has completed it.
“The way investment research changed in the internet age was glacially slow when compared to the earthquake that is LLMs,” Spier writes. The laborious task of assembling a mosaic of information has been rendered obsolete.
Now, “you can just ask ChatGPT or Gemini to do all the trawling. An LLM can give an instant summary of all that has been said in the public domain about a company.”
This instant accessibility to collective wisdom means the path to original thought is “so much shorter — and so much more accessible.”
This technological leap leads Spier to a sobering conclusion: “the golden age of value investing is well and truly over.”
The unique insights that once justified active management are now commoditized. “Asset pricing will become more accurate,” he predicts, and “the return on better analysis and better insight will diminish because it will be available to all.”
The famous question posed to fund managers, “What’s your edge?”, now has a dismal answer: “there is no edge anymore. At least, none that is obvious to me.”
In this new environment, Spier believes money will flow toward index funds and large asset-gatherers. For smaller funds like his, survival may hinge on behaviors that algorithms cannot replicate, such as long-term time arbitrage and building durable relationships.
He sees a model in Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder base, which understands that “buying and holding for the long term, rather than chopping and changing, is the way to invest.”
Ultimately, Spier questions whether this leveling of the field is negative. “If the only thing AI and LLM’s do for finance is to level the playing field — to further marginalize the masters of the universe (and wannabees like me) — would that be such a bad thing? Most likely not.”
He concludes that the democratization of finance, a long-stated goal of markets, may finally be achieved, making outrageous fees unnecessary and giving every investor a powerful tool.
You can read the entire article here:
Guy Spier – The Golden Age of Value Investing Is Over
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