Wikipedia Page

Investor · Author · Zurich

Welcome. This is my original wikipedia page. For Grokipedia see here. For where I am right now, see my now page.

Guy Spier (born 4 February 1966) is a Zurich-based investor whose career has been shaped by a single, defining idea: that patient, principled investing is inseparable from the steady work of becoming a better person. He is the author of The Education of a Value Investor1, 2 and the manager of the Aquamarine Fund,3 an investment partnership inspired by, and styled after, Warren Buffett‘s 1950s partnerships.

Spier is perhaps best known for bidding US$650,100 alongside Mohnish Pabrai for a charity lunch with Warren Buffett in 20084, 5 — an experience he has described as a turning point in his thinking. (The final Glide Foundation lunch with Buffett later sold for more than US$19 million in 2022, some thirty times the sum Spier and Pabrai paid.55) In 2009 he was featured in Atul Gawande‘s The Checklist Manifesto for his use of checklists within his investment process.6 He is the brother of Tanya de Jager and the grandson of Selmar Spier, the German-Israeli jurist, historian, foreign correspondent and farmer.

Education & Early Life

Spier was born in 1966 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. When he was three months old, his family moved to Tel Aviv, Israel, where he attended kindergarten. In 1970 they moved to Iran, and he attended the British Embassy School in Tehran. In 1977 the family settled in Richmond in the United Kingdom, where he attended the City of London Freemen’s School in Ashtead, Surrey, as a weekly boarder.

His father, Simon Spier, was the son of German-Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution and later founded the chemicals company Aquamarine Chemicals — which would lend its name to Guy’s investment fund; his mother, South African by birth, had trained as a teacher in Britain. The family’s moves across South Africa, Israel, Iran and finally Britain gave Spier an early fluency in adapting to unfamiliar cultures.

In 1984 he matriculated to study law at Brasenose College, Oxford, tutored by Hugh Collins, Peter Birks and Mary Stokes, among others. Two years later he switched to Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Among his tutors was Peter Sinclair for Economics, where he occasionally shared tutorials with David Cameron, the future Prime Minister;7 he studied politics with Vernon Bogdanor. Though by his own account thoroughly mediocre at Politics, he proved a capable economist, graduating with a First-class degree and the Georg Webb Medley Prize for his performance in Economics.8

During his university summers, Spier studied at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg and at Harvard Summer School, and interned with Creditanstalt in London.9 In 1990 he was offered places in both Harvard’s joint Business and Economics PhD program and its MBA program; he chose the MBA, completing it in 1993. His contemporaries at Harvard Business School included Mark Pincus, Chris Hohn and Sherry Coutu.

Career

From 1988 to 1990, Spier was an associate at Braxton Associates, the strategy consulting firm later sold to Deloitte Consulting. Working out of the London and Paris offices alongside colleagues including David Pitt-Watson and Michael Liebreich, he advised British and European companies on their strategy toward the European Common Market. He subsequently interned at the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission in Brussels.

In his book, Spier writes that although he interviewed with white-shoe firms such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan in his final year at Harvard, he turned them down to join the lesser-known D.H. Blair, where, as a Vice President, he sought funding for technology startups. He has since described the experience as “not dissimilar” to The Wolf of Wall Street — a career decision he quickly came to regret.1

Upon leaving investment banking, Spier founded the Aquamarine Fund, which he continues to manage.3 He follows closely Warren Buffett’s principles on value investing and capital allocation, while acknowledging that the discipline has changed as its popularity narrows the field of opportunity — the successful value investor today must look further afield and, at times, think outside the box.10 In recent years he has eschewed activism of all kinds:11

My goal as an investor is to compound money for my shareholders, not to pick unnecessary fights or conduct myself like an avenging moral crusader.
Guy Spier

Spier has long advocated for probity and modesty in the management of financial firms. In 2008 he co-authored a paper with Peter Sinclair and Tom Skinner, “Bonuses, Credit Rating Agencies and the Credit Crunch,” arguing that short-termism had contributed to the miscalculation of bonuses at rating and other financial firms.12 He has been an outspoken proponent of zero management fees in professional investment management,13 and has called for Switzerland to become a centre of genuine investing excellence.14

In 2003, alongside David Einhorn, Bill Ackman and Whitney Tilson, Spier became a subject of investigations by then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer15 and the SEC concerning short positions in Farmer Mac, MBIA and Allied Capital. The companies’ difficulties during the 2008 financial crisis vindicated the short thesis,16 which later featured in books by Ackman17 and Einhorn.18

The pivotal episode of Spier’s career came in 2008, when he and Mohnish Pabrai won that charity lunch with Warren Buffett. Over some three and a half hours at Smith & Wollensky in New York, Buffett pressed the long-run value of integrity and reputation over transactional gain. The lunch crystallised a change already underway: in 2009 Spier moved himself and his family from New York to Zurich, relocating the Aquamarine Fund there to step away from what he saw as Wall Street’s culture of envy and short-termism, and remaking his daily practice around deep reading, checklists and deliberate distance from distraction.4, 5

In 2014, Palgrave Macmillan published The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom and Enlightenment, which narrates Spier’s early struggles in Wall Street investment banking and his transformation into a value investor. The book has sold more than 175,000 copies in English and has been translated into Spanish,19 German,20 Japanese,21 Korean,22 Chinese,23 Polish,24 Hebrew25 and Vietnamese.26

In 2016, Spier — with Phil Town and Matthew Peterson — successfully petitioned the Delaware Court of Bankruptcy to form an official committee of equity holders of Horsehead Corporation.27, 28 He hosts the annual VALUEx conference in Klosters and organises VALUEx BRK in conjunction with the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting in Omaha — small gatherings that bring value investors together to share ideas in an informal, collaborative setting.

Over the 28 years in which it managed outside capital, the Aquamarine Fund compounded to roughly thirteen times its starting value — marginally ahead of the S&P 500 — and at the close of Spier’s tenure for outside investors it held some $470 million in assets under management.60

In March 2026, Barron’s profiled Spier following his decision to return outside capital and convert Aquamarine into a family office, describing how he was reorienting his life around health, family, and “time-friendly” compounders, while questioning the long-term edge of traditional stock-picking. The article highlighted his emphasis on the “fiduciary gene,” his shift toward a concentrated portfolio of durable businesses, and his use of the Hebrew word Hineni — “Here I am” — as a guiding motif for this chapter of his life.30 In a 2026 interview with Bloomberg News, he argued that the rise of indexing, quantitative strategies and artificial intelligence has made it increasingly difficult for traditional stock-pickers to maintain an edge.31

Investment Philosophy

Spier’s approach grows out of Warren Buffett’s value-investing tradition, but is bound up with a conviction that how one invests is inseparable from how one lives. He argues that durable success comes less from chasing statistically cheap securities — opportunities he believes have grown scarcer — than from owning a concentrated set of high-quality businesses for the long term, and from aligning one’s financial decisions with one’s character and ethics.

Two practices recur throughout his writing and talks. The first is the checklist: borrowed from aviation and surgery — and the reason Atul Gawande featured him in The Checklist Manifesto — it serves as a deliberate guard against the cognitive and emotional errors that derail investors.6 The second is what he calls the “iceberg” nature of a portfolio: the holdings disclosed in public filings are only the visible tip, while cash, judgment and temperament beneath the surface do much of the real work. He treats concentration not as recklessness but as the natural consequence of acting only on high-conviction ideas, and increasingly frames his edge as “time arbitrage” — a willingness to hold quality businesses far longer than the market’s typical horizon.

Public Commentary

The role of paparazzi in British public life

In 1997, writing in The Independent, Spier argued against the growing intrusion of paparazzi into British public life, proposing that publications profiting from photographs of genuinely private moments be required to surrender those profits — while drawing a clear line between public events, such as speeches and hospital visits, and private ones, such as a family ski trip.32

The Hershey Trust

In 2002, writing for the Financial Times, Spier questioned the motives of the directors of the Hershey Trust Company in seeking to sell their stake, asking why anyone would trade a significant share of a business with Hershey’s qualities for an insignificant share of a “hotchpotch” of unrelated enterprises.33

The economic policies of Kwarteng and Truss

In 2022, Spier took issue with the economic policies of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. In an opinion piece for the Financial Times, he wrote that investors look for jurisdictions where governments take intelligent decisions and allocate resources rationally — and that the UK, once such a country, was increasingly deviating from that path despite its well-educated labour force, abundant capital, and the intangible infrastructure of a developed economy.34

India’s sovereign rating

In 2024, Spier joined V. Anantha Nageswaran in calling for a revision of India’s BBB− sovereign credit rating,35 arguing in an article for Horasis that “India deserves a better credit rating and a stronger role for local rating agencies.”36 He makes no secret of his investment in Care Ratings, which stands to benefit from greater involvement of local agencies in rating sovereign debt.37, 38

Value investing in the age of AI

In a 2025 Bloomberg Opinion column, Spier argued that the “golden age” of value investing has ended, as the internet and large language models erase the research-based information edge on which practitioners once relied. He predicted that faster diffusion of public information will make pricing more efficient and compress active managers’ returns toward index-like outcomes — leaving durable informational advantages mainly to secretive quantitative firms with proprietary data and infrastructure.39

Central banks and financial regulation

Spier has been a consistent advocate of central-bank independence, arguing that monetary policy works best when insulated from short-term electoral pressures. He has questioned the timing of post-crisis rules such as Basel III’s capital requirements — likening reactive regulation to shutting the barn door after the animals have bolted — while praising automatic fiscal stabilisers as a quieter, counter-cyclical buffer against downturns. Mindful of Buffett’s warnings on leverage, he favours defensive positioning against the distortions of expansive monetary policy and high sovereign debt.

Teaching & Community

Spier regularly addresses students and audiences at universities and institutions including MIT,8 the Ivey School of Business,40 Harvard Business School, the Guanghua School of Management and Google.41 His talks often centre on the psychological dimensions of investing, ethical considerations, and the importance of continuous learning. He is also an occasional financial commentator in the media.54

From 2000 to 2005 he served as President of the Oxford Alumni Association of New York, working closely with Amanda Pullinger; under their leadership the association grew to more than 5,000 members and pioneered an American-style approach to alumni relations for a British university.42, 43 He served on the advisory board of the Dakshana Foundation from 2007 to 2009,44 and has frequently promoted India as an attractive long-term investment destination — once remarking, “I think that India is going to be an exciting place to be for the next 50 years.”45

In 2017 he joined the board of the Swiss Friends of Oxford University.46, 47 He also serves on the board of UN Watch and on the advisory boards of Horasis and WorldMinds,48 and is a member of the International Council of the Global Leadership Foundation, founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate F. W. de Klerk.

Known for mentoring young investors, Spier remains an active member of the value investing community, engaging through interviews, podcasts and writing.51, 52 In a 2019 conversation with ValueDACH he memorably likened the art of stock-picking to “drunks in bars.”29 His investing style was the subject of a 2010 documentary in the series Legends & Leaders in Hedge Funds and Finance,49 and his portfolio is tracked by Dataroma among other value-oriented “superinvestors.”50 He founded the VALUEx conference in Klosters in 2011, which brings together a small group of investors each year to exchange ideas in an informal setting.53, 57, 58

Long before the conferences, Spier cultivated investing as a communal craft. In early-2000s New York he convened “The Posse,” a weekly group of investors — among them Ken Shubin Stein, Glenn Tongue and, on occasion, Bill Ackman — who came prepared to defend their ideas and critique one another’s. He later formed a smaller “latticework” group of around eight investors meeting quarterly, drawing on Charlie Munger’s idea of mental models to push thinking beyond pure financial analysis. The VALUEx gatherings extend the same spirit: small, sell-side-free rooms for candid exchange, with offshoots beyond Klosters.

He has also been an outspoken advocate of zero management fees, convening a 2018 symposium on the subject and publishing a survey of the handful of managers who charge performance fees alone — a model he adopted for the Aquamarine Fund.13 Beyond formal teaching, Spier reaches a wider audience through a long-running newsletter, a podcast and a YouTube channel, and mentors a small number of investors by correspondence, favouring those who show self-directed effort over those who simply ask. In a reciprocal echo of his own Buffett lunch, he has auctioned lunches with himself to benefit UN Watch.

Personal Life

Spier lives in Zurich with his wife, Lory, whom he met in New York, and their three children, who were born in the United States before the family settled in Switzerland in 2009. Through his great-great-grandmother, Johanna Lazard, he is related to the Lazard, Speyer and Rothschild banking families.59 A former resident of Tuxedo Park, New York — the village built by Pierre Lorillard in the late 1800s — he is a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, the Young Presidents’ Organization, and the Westminster Synagogue. He has spoken of spending more than a decade in Jungian psychotherapy.56

References

  1. Spier, Guy. The Education of a Value Investor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-1137278814. ↩
  2. VIAF authority record 19215566. ↩
  3. “Aquamarine Zürich AG appoints new Chairman and new Board Member,” PR Newswire. ↩
  4. “$650,100 bid wins lunch with Buffett,” Associated Press / NBC News. ↩
  5. Spier, Guy. “My $650,100 Lunch with Warren Buffett,” Time, 30 June 2008. ↩
  6. “Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto — How to Get Things Right,” Seeking Alpha, 22 June 2011. ↩
  7. Mayer, Catherine. “David Cameron: UK’s Next Leader?,” Time, 11 September 2008. ↩
  8. “Guy Spier,” MIT Sloan Investment Conference. ↩
  9. “Interview with Guy Spier,” Manual of Ideas. ↩
  10. “Guy Spier: How Value Investing Has Changed,” Opalesque TV. ↩
  11. Poljak, Vesna & Shapiro, Jonathan. “Sea change of a renowned short seller,” Australian Financial Review, 26 October 2020. ↩
  12. Spier, Guy; Sinclair, Peter; Skinner, Tom. “Bonuses, Credit Rating Agencies and the Credit Crunch,” CDMA Conference Paper Series, September 2008. ↩
  13. Spier, Guy. “Zero Management Fees,” Aquamarine Fund blog, 25 March 2019. ↩
  14. Spier, Guy. “Lombard Odier, Oxford University and Sustainable Finance,” Financial Nigeria. ↩
  15. “The Hedge Fund Witch Hunt,” Slate, 13 February 2003. ↩
  16. “MBIA falls 13% after Moody’s cuts rating,” MarketWatch, 20 June 2008. ↩
  17. Richard, Christine. Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street’s Bluff, Wiley. ↩
  18. Einhorn, David. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, Wiley. ↩
  19. La educación de un inversor en valor (Spanish), Value School. ↩
  20. Die Lehr- und Wanderjahre eines Value-Investors (German), 2017. ↩
  21. Japanese edition, Pan Rolling. ↩
  22. Korean edition, Iremedia. ↩
  23. Chinese edition (review, Sohu). ↩
  24. Moja droga do inwestowania w wartość (Polish), Onepress. ↩
  25. Hebrew edition, Kinneret Zmora. ↩
  26. Vietnamese edition, FinFin. ↩
  27. “Horsehead Shareholders Win Court Fight,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. ↩
  28. Morgenson, Gretchen. “How Bankrupt Is Horsehead Holding?,” The New York Times, 26 August 2016. ↩
  29. “What has a bar to do with finding investment ideas?,” ValueDACH (YouTube), 18 November 2019. ↩
  30. Serwer, Andrew. “After a Grim Diagnosis, a Value Manager Reflects on Life’s Lessons,” Barron’s, 12 March 2026. ↩
  31. Stamm, Levin. “Buffett’s Zurich Acolyte Says Odds of Beating Market Keep Fading,” Bloomberg News, 28 March 2026. ↩
  32. Spier, Guy. “How to Beat the Paparazzi,” The Independent, 4 September 1997. ↩
  33. Spier, Guy. “Investment in Chocolate — What Finer?,” Financial Times, 5 September 2002. ↩
  34. Spier, Guy. “What’s Stopping the UK Economy From Growing?,” FT Adviser, 13 October 2022. ↩
  35. Misra, Udit. “Why has the Indian government criticised the methodologies of global credit rating agencies?,” Indian Express, 23 December 2023. ↩
  36. Spier, Guy. “India Deserves a Better Credit Rating and a Stronger Role for Local Rating Agencies,” Horasis, 19 February 2024. ↩
  37. Alaimo, Ben. “Guy Spier on His Strategy and Investments in India,” GuruFocus. ↩
  38. Banerjee, Tanushree. “Global Hedge Fund Manager Signals India Ratings Upgrade,” Equitymaster. ↩
  39. Spier, Guy. “Buffett, Munger, Soros: Golden Age of Value Investing Is Over,” Bloomberg Opinion, 18 September 2025. ↩
  40. “Interview with Guy Spier,” Ivey Business School. ↩
  41. “The Education of a Value Investor — Talks at Google,” 22 September 2014. ↩
  42. “Things We Wish We’d Never Heard,” New York Observer, 6 June 2005. ↩
  43. “Value strategy — Observer,” Financial Times, 29 June 2006. ↩
  44. Pabrai, Mohnish. Dakshana Foundation Annual Report 2009. ↩
  45. “India to be an exciting place to invest in for the next 50 years,” The Economic Times. ↩
  46. “Swiss Friends opens for business,” University of Oxford Development Office. ↩
  47. “Our Board,” Swiss Friends of Oxford University. ↩
  48. Kirsch, Noah. “The Global Elite Just Gathered at a Secretive Mini Davos,” The Daily Beast. ↩
  49. Knab, Matthias. “Legends & Leaders in Hedge Funds and Finance — Guy Spier” (documentary), 2010. ↩
  50. “Superinvestors — Aquamarine portfolio holdings,” Dataroma. ↩
  51. “Author Guy Spier: From hospitality to smokestacks,” CFA UK. ↩
  52. “Learning from Guy Spier,” MOI Global, 2 November 2021. ↩
  53. VALUEx Klosters (official site). ↩
  54. “Guy Spier says no reason to be scared of US financials,” The Washington Post, 31 October 2011. ↩
  55. Stempel, Jonathan. “Warren Buffett charity lunch fetches record winning bid of $19 million,” Reuters, 18 June 2022. ↩
  56. Handley, Lucy. “What I learned over lunch with Warren Buffett,” Big Think, 17 March 2025. ↩
  57. Spier, Guy. “With Whom I Would Invest,” guyspier.com, 11 May 2019. ↩
  58. Katsenelson, Vitaliy. “Guy Spier: What I Learned From The Value Investor,” ValueWalk, 7 January 2016. ↩
  59. “Descendants of Wolf Speyer Spier, Merzhausen,” Alemannia Judaica. ↩
  60. Spier, Guy. 2025 Management’s Letter to Partners, Aquamarine Fund. ↩

External links