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COI disclosure. I am posting this {{request edit}}on behalf of the article subject, Guy Spier, who has reviewed and authorised the proposed text below. Mr. Spier has no financial relationship with Wikipedia, its editors, or the Wikimedia Foundation, and no payment of any kind is being made for this edit. Per WP:COI and WP:AUTOBIOGRAPHY, I am not editing the article directly and am requesting that an uninvolved editor evaluate the proposed changes. The page currently carries a {{COI}} banner (dated May 2026); the proposal below is intended to address that banner by replacing promotional and unsourced material with neutrally-worded, independently-sourced prose.
A {{connected contributor}} tag for this Talk page may be appropriate; please add one if reviewers see fit.
The current article (revision as of May 2026) is a short skeleton with several {{citation needed}} tags, an inconsistency between the lead ("Swiss-German-Israeli") and the short description ("South African-German-Israeli"), and an Infobox YouTube personality template that is a poor fit (the subject is primarily an investor and author, with a small secondary YouTube channel). It also omits several well-sourced biographical facts (the 2008 charity lunch with Warren Buffett, the 2014 book, and significant 2026 developments covered by Barron's and Bloomberg News).
This request proposes a full structural replacement of the article body. Every sentence is sourced to an independent secondary source. Reviewers are invited to accept, reject, or modify any individual section.
I have flagged neutrality risks in the "Notes for the reviewer" section at the bottom, and I have explicitly listed material I am NOT proposing to add (e.g. self-published or marketing-style claims), so that those items are not introduced by mistake.
{{Short description|Swiss-based investor and author (born 1966)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Guy Spier
| native_name = גיא ספייר
| native_name_lang = he
| image = Guy Spier, Chief Executive Officer, Aquamarine Capital.jpg
| birth_name = Guy Selmar Spier
| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1966|2|4}}
| birth_place = [[Pietermaritzburg]], South Africa
| citizenship = Switzerland, Germany, Israel
| occupation = Investor, author
| alma_mater = [[Brasenose College, Oxford]]<br/>[[Harvard Business School]]
| known_for = Founder of Aquamarine Fund; author of ''The Education of a Value Investor''
| spouse = {{marriage|Lory Spier|2003}}
| children = 3
| website = {{URL|http://www.guyspier.com}}
}}
Rationale:{{Infobox YouTube personality}} is inappropriate as a primary infobox — the subject is principally an investor and author, not a YouTube personality. The short description is also brought into alignment with the body. Heidelberg University has been removed from the alma mater list pending a reliable secondary source confirming a completed degree there (the current article asserts it without citation).
Guy Spier (Hebrew: גיא ספייר; born 4 February 1966) is a Zurich-based investor and author. He is the founder of the Aquamarine Fund and the author of the 2014 memoir The Education of a Value Investor.[1] In 2007, Spier and the value investor Mohnish Pabrai jointly won the annual charity auction for a lunch with Warren Buffett, paying $650,100; the lunch took place in New York in June 2008.[2] In 2026, Spier announced that he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma and was winding down the Aquamarine Fund.[3][4]
Rationale: The Cameron-era anecdote in the current article ("thoroughly mediocre at Politics") is not encyclopedic and is dropped. The HBS degree is now anchored to the Forbes review, which states it explicitly.
After leaving university, Spier worked in strategy consulting at Braxton Associates (later acquired by Deloitte Consulting) and subsequently in investment banking.[1] In 1997, he founded the Aquamarine Fund, a long-only value-oriented investment vehicle modelled on the early Buffett partnerships and based in Zurich.[4]
In June 2007, Spier and Mohnish Pabrai jointly won the annual Glide Foundation charity auction for a private lunch with Warren Buffett with a bid of $650,100; the lunch was held in New York on 25 June 2008.[2] Spier has subsequently described the meeting as a formative influence on the Aquamarine Fund's operating philosophy.[1]
In 2016, Spier — together with Phil Town and Matthew Peterson — successfully petitioned the Delaware bankruptcy court to form an official committee of equity holders of Horsehead Holding Corp., which had filed for Chapter 11 earlier that year.[8][9]
In March 2026, Spier announced that he was winding down the Aquamarine Fund, which at its peak had managed approximately $470 million, and returning capital to investors.[4]
Rationale: Fixes the date error (auction 2007, lunch 2008) which the current short description and external coverage make plain. Adds the founding date of Aquamarine, anchored to Bloomberg. Removes the {{citation needed}} tags on Braxton and Aquamarine by sourcing them to the Forbes review and the 2026 Bloomberg profile.
In 2014, Spier published The Education of a Value Investor (Palgrave Macmillan), a memoir tracing his shift from Wall Street investment banking to long-term value investing under the influence of Warren Buffett and Mohnish Pabrai.[1][10] Reviewing the book for Forbes, Phil DeMuth called it "this year's standout investment book" and characterised it less as a stock-picking manual than as an account of Spier's "descent ... into the shadowy world of Wall Street investment banking" followed by a turn toward value investing as "a disciplined, almost ascetic practice."[1]
In March 2026, Barron's reported that Spier had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and was reflecting publicly on the diagnosis in a series of interviews.[3] Later that month, Bloomberg News reported that the cancer had recurred in September 2025 and that Spier had decided to close the Aquamarine Fund and return investors' capital, citing his health and his view that "Buffett-and-Munger-style stockpicking doesn't work any more."[4] At its peak the fund had managed approximately $470 million.[4]
Leave the existing External links section unchanged, except please add an {{Authority control}} template at the bottom (already present in the current wikitext — keep as is).
Neutrality risks I want flagged for an independent editor. Because the proposer is acting on behalf of the article subject, please scrutinise particularly: (a) the phrase "long-only value-oriented" in §4 — this is the proposer's characterisation, not a direct quote from a source; reviewers may prefer to drop it; (b) the sentence "Spier has subsequently described the meeting as a formative influence" in §4 — this is closer to a self-characterisation, sourced via the Forbes review; reviewers may prefer to delete it; (c) the Bloomberg quote in §6 — please verify the precise wording against the underlying Bloomberg News piece if there is any doubt.
Items I am NOT proposing to add. To make this explicit so the request cannot be expanded by accident: I am not proposing to add any claim about book sales figures (e.g. "175,000 copies"), any reference to the subject's psychotherapy, any reference to the VALUEx conference attendee list, any anecdote involving Dan Bilzerian or "drunks in bars", any citation to self-published sources (guyspier.com, aquamarinefund.com), any citation to Equity Master, GuruFocus, Horasis, or any opinion piece that does not meet WP:RS. If reviewers feel any of these belong in the article, they should be added independently of this request.
Sources used. All proposed citations are independent secondary sources: Forbes (DeMuth, 2014), CNBC (Crippen, 2008), Time (Mayer, 2008; already in the article), Slate (2003; already in the article), MarketWatch (2008; already in the article), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Boselovic, 2016; already in the article), The New York Times (Morgenson, 2016; already in the article), Barron's (Serwer, 2026), and Bloomberg News (Stamm, 2026).
What this does to the {{COI}} banner. Once these changes are in, every assertion in the article is anchored to an independent secondary source and the obvious promotional traces (YouTube-personality infobox, unsourced biographical claims, internal contradictions on dates and nationality) are gone. The {{COI}} banner could then reasonably be removed by a reviewer in the same edit.
Not done. Wikipedia is written by human beings. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 01:41, 16 May 2026 (UTC)