Guy Spier
Guy Spier is a Zurich-based investor and author of a book on investing entitled The Education of a Value Investor. He is well known for bidding US$650,100 with Mohnish Pabrai for a charity lunch with Warren Buffett June 25, 2008. In 2009, he was featured in "the Checklist Manifesto", by Atul Gawande regarding his use of checklists as part of his investment process.
Education and Early Life
Spier as born in 1966 Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. When he was three months old his family moved to Tel Aviv, Israel where he attended kindergarten. In 1970 his family moved to Iran where he attended the British Embassy School in Tehran. In 1977 his family moved again to Richmond in the UK, and he attended the City of London Freemen's School, in Ashtead, Surrey as a weekly boarder. In 1984 he matriculated to the study of Law at Brasenose College, Oxford where he was tutored by Hugh Collins and Mary Stokes among others. Two years later, in 1986 he switched to study PPE. Among his tutors were Peter Sinclair for Economics – where he occasionally shared tutorials with David Cameron, who would go on to become Prime Minister. He also studied politics with Vernon Bogdanor. Although he was thoroughly mediocre at Politics, he proved to be a capable economist and graduated with a First-class degree having also been awarded the Georg Webb Medley Prize for his performance in Economics.In 1990 Spier was offered places both in the Joint Business and Economics PhD program and at the MBA Program at Harvard. He opted to do the MBA and in 1993 he completed his MBA. Contemporaries at HBS include Mark Pincus, Chris Hohn and Sherry Coutu.
Career
From 1988 to 1990, Spier was an associate at Braxton Assoiates, the strategy consulting firm which was later sold to Deloitte Consulting. Based out of the London and Paris offices, Spier worked with colleagues David Pitt-Watson, Michael Liebreich and others in advising British and European companies on their strategy vis-a-vis the European Common market. He subsequently took up an internship at the Forward Studies Unit at the European Commission in Brussels.Spier writes in his book that although interviewed with white-shoe firms like Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan during his last year at Harvard Business School, he turned down that opportunity to work in those, more structured environments for the lesser-known D.H. Blair. There he was given the title of Vice President and he sought funding for new technology startups. Spier subsequently described this experience as "not dissimilar" to the movie Wolf of Wall Street.. It was a career decision that he quickly came to regret.
Upon leaving the investment banking Spier founded the Aquamarine Fund, an investment partnership inspired by, and styled after Warren Buffett's 1950s investment partnerships – which he continues to manage today and which had $250 million in AUM as of December 31st, 2019.
He is also an occasional financial commentator in the media.
Spier follows closely Warren Buffett's principles on Value Investing and capital allocation. However, he also admits that Value Investing has changed over time, as the popularity of style means that generally fewer opportunities become available to investors. Ideas that will work would still be around, but the successful value investor of today has to look further and sometimes think outside the box..
In 2003, Spier became the target, along with David Einhorn, Bill Ackman, and Whitney Tilson, of investigations by Eliot Spitzer, then the New York Attorney General, as well as by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding short sales of Farmer Mac, MBIA corp and Allied Capital. The melt down of these companies during the late-2000s financial crisis vindicated their short thesis and was the subject of books by Ackman and Einhorn.
Spier has regularly advocated for probity and modesty in the management of financial firms. In 2008 Spier published a paper along with Peter Sinclair and Tom Skinner on "Bonuses, Credit Rating Agencies and the Credit Crunch" which argued that part of the cause of the 2008 crisis was short-termism leading to the miscalculation of bonuses at Credit Rating and other financial firms. He has also strongly advocated in favor of Zero management fees when it comes to professional investment management.
In 2014 Palgrave MacMillan published "The Education of a Value Investor" which narrates Spier's early career struggles in investment banking on Wall Street and his transformation into a Value investor. The book has sold more than 50,000 copies in English and has been translated into Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Polish, Hebrew and Vietnamese.
In 2016 Spier, along with Phil Town and Matthew Peterson successfully petitioned Judge Sontchi at the Delaware Court of Bankruptcy to form an official committee of equity holders of Horsehead Corporation – which had filed for bankruptcy earlier that year.
In a youtube interview with Tilman Versch of ValueDACH, Spier likened the art of stock picking to "Drunks in Bars". also referencing Dan Bilzerian
In 2020 Spier hosted a panel on "The Future of Intelligent Investing" with Niall Ferguson, Sandy Climan and Daniel Aegerter.
Non-Profit Contributions
In 1997, Spier spoke out in the Independent against the increasing intrusion of paparazzi in British public life, writing "...if such a regime had been in place before last weekend, every tabloid which published photographs of Princess Diana and Dodi on their summer holidays would have been required to pay the resulting profits to them. I do not think that it would take too fine a legal mind to distinguish between public events, such as speeches and hospital visits, and private events, such as a ski trip with one's children or a ride in a car with a friend." In 2002, writing in the Financial Times Spier questioned the motives of the directors of the Hershey Trust Company for selling out their stake asking, "Why would anybody in their right mind want to trade a significant share of Hershey, with its excellent characteristics, for an insignificant share of a hotchpotch of US business, probably chosen by some adviser who is better at getting selected than at delivering investment performance?"From 2000 to 2005 Spier served, with the close support of Amanda Pullinger as the President of the Oxford Alumni Association of New York. Under his and Pullinger's leadership, the association grew to over 5,000 members and was a pioneer in bringing an American style approach on alumni relations to a British university. From 2007 to 2009, Spier served on the Advisory Board of the Dakshana Foundation.. In 2011, Spier founded the VALUEx conference in Klosters. In 2017 Spier joined the newly formed board of the Swiss Friends of Oxford University. He also serves on the advisory boards of Horasis, and World Minds He is also a member of the International Council of the Global Leadership Foundation which was founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner F. W. de Klerk.