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The Unfair Advantage of Guy Spier
Methods of Prosperity newsletter no. 123: Guy Spier
Sean Allen Fenn
October 23, 2025
The entire pursuit of value investing requires you to see where the crowd is wrong so that you can profit from their misperceptions.”
Guy Spier is a Zurich-based Swiss-German-Israeli investor, author, and hedge fund manager. Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham inspire his value investing philosophy. He’s the founder and managing partner of Aquamarine Capital.
Ambition. Greed. Naïveté.
On Wall Street, many hard working people stumble into grey areas. No member of D.H. Blair management asked Guy Spier to lie or misrepresent anything. It was 1993 and his first job out of Harvard Business School (HBS) where he earned his MBA. His First-Class degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics is from Brasenose College, Oxford. Guy Spier received the George Webb Medley prize in Economics.
His boss was Morty Davis at D.H. Blair Investment Banking Corp located at 44 Wall Street, New York. Spier noticed some bad press about his employer. Labels such as “infamous brokerage house whose brokers... refuse to let customers sell when they request that a stock be liquidated”. Securities regulators in Delaware tried to revoke Blair’s license. Regulators in Hawaii accused Blair of using “fraudulent and deceptive sales practices”.
Morty’s response?
“People envy success and try to take you down.”
Guy was gullible enough to believe him. Guy ignored the warnings from his friends about working at a shady investment bank. He was desperate to look successful. A year or so into it, he realized his job was to more or less put lipstick on a pig. Ignore downsides. Make a bogus deal sizzle.
Execs of D.H. Blair:
“Yes, we are bullshitting you. This is almost certainly not going to work, but we’ve been working on it for years and have invested substantial personal funds in it. In any case, nobody can prove one hundred percent that it won't work. Moreover, think of the excitement that this thing will cause among investors and the press...”
Other D.H. Blair investment bankers:
“Yes, this is extremely unlikely to fly. But we need to fill our pipeline of deals so that you, the company management can get rich on the founders’ stock, and we, the investment bank, can get rich on fees and from trading the stock.... and who knows, it might even succeed. In which case, our clients might even make money too.”
A few years after Guy left D.H. Blair, the retail brokerage business, D.H. Blair & Co, closed down in 1998. In 2000, The Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC indicted fifteen of its employees. Racketeering was the charge, with 173 counts of stock fraud. Other charges against the retail brokerage included manipulating stock prices. As well as engaging in illegal sales tactics. Four executives pleaded guilty to securities fraud and collusion to fix stock prices. The SEC revoked Blair's broker-dealer registration in 2002.
“It certainly took me far too long to grasp that this business was set up in such a way that if I wanted to win, I’d have to lose whatever was left of my moral compass.”
His eighteen gut-wrenching months at D.H. Blair had destroyed his reputation for years.
“I hope that decision to work at D.H. Blair will turn out to be the worst mistake of my professional life, but thankfully, it didn’t break me.”
Guy was at his low point, unable to get another job. He wondered what attracted him to work in that kind of toxic culture in the first place. He did some serious soul searching. Which led him to drop his guard and pretense enough to attend a Tony Robbins Fire Walk event.
“In some ways, my original misgivings were right. Robbins’ seminars are a form of brainwashing. Shouting things out often enough really does pound it in. And any idea can be implanted by repeating it over and over. There’s a danger to this. One that can be exploited by religious fundamentalists and political extremists. But in this case, it was brainwashing for the good, designed to help us live a better, more successful life. I’m all for that sort of brainwashing.”
Guy also read and re-read a compilation of Berkshire’s old annual reports. To the point where he began to start thinking as Warren Buffet would. Desperate to lead a life that was more like Warren Buffett’s, Guy asked himself one question. “What would Warren Buffett do, if he were in my shoes?” It wasn’t a fleeting thought. Guy imagined that he was Warren Buffett.
Tony Robbins calls it modeling. Mohnish Pabrai, fellow value investor and Guy’s best friend, calls it cloning.
The lesson? Study the kind of person you want to be like. Emulate them using your vivid imagination. Visualization might be rather woo-woo, but it will change your life.
Continuing to change his own life, Guy attended Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting.
If you haven’t made the connection, this was Guy Spier’s Hero’s Journey, also known as the monomyth. The reluctant hero embarks on an adventure, faces challenges, and returns transformed.
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Guy Spier became obsessed with value investing, but he still couldn’t get a job as a stock analyst.
Until one day, his father called from his home in London to suggest that Guy manage some money for him. He entrusted around $1 million. Within a year he invested more, and two associates invested alongside him. As a result, the funds’ assets amounted to around $15 million. Guy named it the Aquamarine Fund. His father’s company, Aquamarine Chemicals, inspired the name. Guy Spier’s Aquamarine Fund started trading on September 15, 1997.
Was getting started with his father’s help an unfair advantage? That depends on your definition of fair. If so, unfair for whom? Someone else who hasn’t demonstrated their ability to manage money?
The whole idea is abstract and intangible.
The truth is it’s up to each of us to find our own unfair advantage.
Guy recognizes his cognitive biases.
Diagnosed with ADD, he designs his life and work to fit his requirements.
One more lesson: Control your environment.
“We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us.”
Most fund managers cluster in financial centers like New York to be “close to the action.”
Not Guy Spier.
He relocated to Zurich, Switzerland. His reasoning:
“New York with its restless energy, competitive spirit, and pockets of extreme wealth accentuated some aspects of my own irrational nature that aren't conducive to good investing. In comparison to New York, Zurich shares some commonalities with Omaha. Occasionally people ask me, 'But isn't it boring there?' My answer: Boring is good. As an investor, that's exactly what I want.”
Most fund managers need a firehose of financial data.
Not Guy Spier.
He disconnected from the constant stream of financial media.
He stopped watching Bloomberg TV and CNBC.
He canceled subscriptions to real-time market data.
He stopped taking calls from salespeople completely.
He removed the ticker tape and constant price updates from his life.
As he explained in his book:
“The main way in which I deal with these distractions is that I do not take calls from sales people. Period. Will I miss some opportunities? Certainly. But over a long period, it will help me avoid an awful lot of investment pain.”
Guy meticulously crafted his workspace to reduce cognitive biases:
He keeps a clear desk to avoid distractions.
On his desk are pictures of Charlie Munger and other role models to remind him of principles.
In his office are big clocks to help with his ADD.
One more lesson: Align incentives.
Spier’s Aquamarine Fund has no management fee structure. It only has performance-based incentives aligned with investors. This he cloned from Warren Buffett.
Most investors obsess over short-term performance.
Not Guy Spier. He created a rule:
“Before buying stock, make sure you like it enough to hold on for at least two years, even if the price halves right after you buy it.”
This forced him to focus on business fundamentals rather than market timing.
One last thing: The “inner scorecard”.
Guy shifted from seeking external validation to measuring himself by his own standards:
“The entire pursuit of value investing requires you to see where the crowd is wrong so that you can profit from their misperceptions. This requires a shift toward measuring yourself by an inner scorecard.”
From 1997 to 2017, the Aquamarine Fund returned 597.6% after fees versus 312.2% for the S&P 500.
That’s almost double the market’s return. Guy achieved this by doing the opposite of what most investors do:
Create quiet instead of noise.
Seek boring instead of exciting.
Think long-term instead of short-term.
Go for environment design instead of raw intelligence.
Maintain your inner scorecard instead of outer validation.
As Guy himself summarized:
“The goal isn't to be smarter. It's to construct an environment in which my brain isn't subjected to quite such an extreme barrage of distractions and disturbing forces that can exacerbate my irrationality.”
I like you,
– Sean Allen Fenn
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