(Bloomberg) — Guy Spier keeps a bronze bust of the late Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in the hallway of his Zurich office. Yet the hedge fund manager, who has just closed up shop, says Buffett-and-Munger-style stockpicking doesn’t work any more.
Spier, 60, has returned the client money in his $470 million Aquamarine Fund after doctors in September found that his glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, had come back.
As he noted in a Bloomberg Opinion piece last year, artificial intelligence has streamlined the painstaking research once viewed as a key advantage for stockpickers. But that’s just the latest advance that makes it easier than ever to gather data, and harder than ever for an investor to beat competitors and indexes.
“If I would have still been running a public fund or a fund that people can invest with, I would have wanted to tell you something different,” Spier said in an interview. “I can just say straight: You know what? The probability that I’ll outperform has reduced even more.”
Spier’s lament reflects a growing malaise in investment management, with years of double-digit gains in US stocks putting managers under increasing pressure to justify their fees. Investors pulled $428.2 billion from US active mutual funds and exchange-traded funds last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence, and put $268.2 billion into passive funds.
The mood among stock pickers brightened at the beginning of this year, with 54% of active US mutual funds beating the S&P 500 through February, BI data show. Still, it remains to be seen how turbulence of the Iran war pans out for them.
The Aquamarine Fund returned 1,186% from inception in 1997 through the end of last year, according to his year-end investor letter, outpacing the 1,103% return for the S&P 500 Index. Yet the fund underperformed the benchmark in 2025 for the eighth year in a row.
That’s a common tale, especially for the community of value investors that rallied around Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Munger and their investment philosophy of buying high-quality companies at reasonable prices.
Spier said it’s grown increasingly difficult to identify overlooked corners of the market that had once allowed him to make investments that multiplied in value like shares of UK cereal maker Weetabix Ltd. or Philippine dairy company Alaska Milk Corp.
“The ways in which I think I outperformed the market was not by going against the trend; it was by being in things where nobody even was looking,” he said. Now, “everybody’s looking everywhere. And it’s much easier to look everywhere.”
