Why Leading Fund Managers Are Rethinking the Value Investing Playbook

The investment world is at a critical inflection point. What once seemed like an immutable competitive advantage for skilled fund managers—their ability to unearth hidden value through deep research—is rapidly eroding. This transformation isn’t driven by market cycles or economic shifts, but by a more fundamental force: the technological revolution in information access and processing. The question facing every professional in active management today is no longer “Can I beat the market?” but rather “On what basis can I beat the market?”

In September 2025, renowned value investor Guy Spier, who has led Aquamarine Capital since its inception in 1997, published a provocative piece on Bloomberg titled “The Golden Age of Value Investing Is Over.” Spier, who manages approximately $500 million in assets and has delivered annualized returns exceeding 9%—consistently outpacing the S&P 500—is not voicing doubt from a position of weakness. His argument cuts deeper: he’s questioning whether the foundational methods that created the golden age for value-oriented fund managers can continue to generate outsized returns in an age of artificial intelligence and democratized information.

How Fund Managers Built Their Competitive Moat in the Past

To understand Spier’s argument, we must first appreciate how fund managers historically constructed their informational advantage. In the 1980s and 1990s, investment success was fundamentally about access and effort. Information was scarce and friction-laden. Obtaining a single piece of market intelligence required phone calls, physical visits, careful correspondence, and painstaking compilation of annual reports and industry data.

Spier recalls his own journey vividly: attending Berkshire shareholder meetings, making pilgrimages across the Atlantic to London just to share meals and insights with Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria of the Nomad Investment Partnership, traveling extensively to piece together a coherent investment thesis. This “hard acquisition of knowledge” became the moat for many successful fund managers. When information gathering itself was an arduous undertaking, those willing to invest extraordinary time and effort gained a genuine edge.

The accumulation of investment knowledge back then was measured in “days or even weeks.” A thorough analyst might spend weeks reading, interviewing, and synthesizing information about a single company. That glacial pace meant that fund managers with stronger research disciplines and broader networks genuinely possessed asymmetrical advantages over their competitors. The very difficulty of information access became a protective moat.

The Earthquake: How AI and Technology Dismantled the Information Edge

The landscape has been inverted entirely. Information technology—and most recently, large language models—has functioned like an earthquake to the foundation of traditional fund managers’ competitive advantages.

What once required weeks now takes seconds. Corporate research has been partially automated. Industry scanning is now algorithmic. Data analysis capabilities have become commodified tools available at scale. Research reports, company announcements, and investment analyses are now nearly free and instantaneously accessible. Emails, tweets, live streams, videos, and podcasts enable any investor to absorb massive information flows with minimal effort.

The processing speed of public information has become nearly instantaneous. The analytical logic that once took fund managers months to develop and validate is now quickly copied and spread across the investment community. When an insightful framework is identified, it propagates with viral speed through digital channels. This has compressed the informational gap between professional fund managers and retail investors to almost nothing.

The consequence is profound: asset pricing becomes increasingly precise and efficient. The opportunities for excess returns based on superior analysis narrow. The subtle competitive advantages that once existed in detailed company knowledge—nuances that revealed whether a business was genuinely improving or deteriorating—are now exposed to nearly everyone simultaneously. Better analysis, once the exclusive province of elite fund managers, is now accessible to all.

The Crowding Effect: When All Fund Managers See the Same Thing

As information symmetry deepens, fund managers across the industry converge on similar conclusions. This convergence breeds dangerous dynamics:

• Asset allocation tends toward crowded trades: When many fund managers identify the same “mispriced” opportunity, capital floods into these positions, eliminating the edge.

• Market volatility amplifies: Synchronized positioning by fund managers can magnify price swings during stress periods, turning individual positions into systemic risks.

• Beta is mistaken for Alpha: In environments where consensus is widespread, fund managers may attribute market gains to their skill, when they’re actually just riding broader market movements.

Perhaps most unsettling is the shift in competitive dynamics. The question has pivoted from “Who sees deeper?” to “Who sees faster?” Speed now trumps insight, and quantitative algorithms that can process information microseconds faster than humans are equipped to reap disproportionate rewards. For traditional value-oriented fund managers, this represents an existential threat to their model.

The Silver Lining: Democratization and the Rise of Passive Investing

Yet Spier himself acknowledges that these technological shifts aren’t entirely negative. The democratization of high-quality analytical tools has been genuinely beneficial. Retail investors now have access to sophisticated resources that were once the exclusive domain of institutional fund managers. This has reduced costs, lowered barriers to entry, and broadened participation in capital markets. For many investors, the rational response has been to embrace low-cost index investing—which increasingly looks more attractive than the fees and uncertainty of traditional active management.

The Counteroffensive: How Fund Managers Can Rebuild Advantage

Facing this reality, active fund managers and research-driven firms have begun adapting their strategies. Spier’s own approach now involves:

• Continued grassroots research, but now augmented with large language models for cross-validation and pattern recognition
• Deeper relationship networks, including proprietary access to management teams and industry experts
• Integration of technology tools to amplify human judgment rather than replace it

Yet Spier admits this may feel like “a futile persistence”—attempting to maintain a competitive edge in an arena where technology has systematized the very skills that once created differentiation. He acknowledges that future fund managers may need to evolve further, potentially placing greater emphasis on relationship-based investing and networks that provide genuine, non-public insights.

Where the Real Edge Remains: Thinking, Discipline, and Behavioral Advantage

Despite the bleak assessment, Spier and other thoughtful fund managers recognize that technology hasn’t eliminated all sources of advantage. It has merely shifted where that advantage can reside.

AI can systematize information gathering and analytical frameworks, but it cannot replace rigorous thinking. Large language models are extraordinarily powerful at integrating known information, but they lack the ability to identify blind spots, question fundamental premises, or recognize when consensus thinking has become self-reinforcing illusion. The real competitive advantage will increasingly belong to fund managers who can:

• Question data premises: Recognizing when datasets are incomplete or biased
• Identify model blind spots: Understanding what AI and conventional analysis miss
• Resist consensus illusion: Maintaining independent judgment when crowd thinking threatens objectivity

This represents a fundamental shift in what separates elite fund managers from the pack. The distinction will increasingly derive from soft skills and behavioral factors:

• Investment discipline that delivers consistent decisions, rather than emotional reactions to market noise
• Emotional control and psychological resilience, enabling fund managers to hold positions others abandon
• Capacity for long-term thinking, resisting the pressure to match quarterly returns or follow trend-chasing fund managers
• Counter-cyclical courage, enabling contrarian positioning when most fund managers are herding

These qualities are genuinely difficult to replicate or systematize. They create authentic moats precisely because they’re rooted in human discipline and character rather than information access or computational speed.

The Phase Transition: From Information Advantage to System Advantage

The emerging reality suggests that “the golden age is over” is not pessimism, but rather a declaration of phase transition. The competition among fund managers has fundamentally shifted:

Then: Competition centered on who was smarter, who had superior information, who could access management teams first, who could synthesize data faster.

Now: Competition increasingly centers on who maintains superior discipline, who possesses a longer time horizon, who can resist momentum and volatility, who can build sustainable organizational systems.

The fund managers who thrived in the past golden age were often brilliant individuals—polymathic thinkers who could master information and identify hidden opportunities. But the fund managers positioned to succeed in the next era will likely be those who can build institutional discipline, coherent organizational frameworks, and sustained commitment to principle rather than personality.

In this sense, the future doesn’t belong to value investing abandoning itself. Rather, it belongs to a reconceptualization of what “value” means and how fund managers will extract it. The edge will increasingly accrue to those who understand that in an age where analysis is democratized and information is free, the sustainable competitive advantage lies not in knowing more, but in thinking better—and then having the discipline to act on that thinking with consistency, patience, and conviction.

The golden age of value investing may indeed be over, but the age of disciplined, thoughtful investing may just be beginning.