Would they still be the GOATs today? And WTF can you do now?

The frontier is all the places you don’t want to go and in the jobs that don’t exist. Your job exists to make the market more efficient. So if there are no jobs to fix some "problem" it stands to reason that there will be more inefficiency. And, also, if there is a lot of demand to do a certain job due to high pay or prestige, it is far less likely that an inefficiency will remain. Kind of basic supply and demand. 

You can sort of think of the attractiveness of strategies or approaches the way Peter Lynch or a deep value guy might think about stocks. If a stock is kind of lame, hated, scandalous or unpleasant to invest it, maybe there's more likely to be value there? It's not a sufficient condition, but it sure is a hint about where you might want to look. Similarly, strategies can work the same way. 

It’s not like all the losers are actually winners or some silly cope like that but I would say I do think the “hidden” opportunities you are looking for are in fact hidden because you simply do not want to consider these opportunities. Or, it may be economically unattractive or unscalable to hire anyone for much of the time. Again, it's not like every shitty job is a good job. But every Warren Buffett started out doing something kind of shitty. That doesn't mean every rich person or "successful" person started out doing that - but the people with insane alpha did I think since alpha comes from solving an inefficiency others didn't want to solve. (In some sense it's sort of like the innovators dillemma  -- why can a new entrant beat the mighty incumbent? It's because the new entrant does something that the incumbent finds unattractive in the near-term for some reason.) 

If you think of all the great investors a lot of them were sort of losers in some sense for a long time. Buffett was not on the path of prestige and got rejected from HBS. He invested in companies that truly were retardedly obvious like American Express at 4x PE. If you look back at the case studies, you will think "fuck he makes it seem simple." No - it actually was that simple. No sh*t value investing works when you can buy AXP at 4x PE. 

But think of how shitty and unsexy it was to be Buffett. Back then you had to get PHYSICAL COPIES of  filings walking uphill both ways to some library or something. Calculating a ratio between a few numbers is extremely hard when everything is on paper and you are using a slide rule or maybe a hand calculator. When you really step through it, how would you even stay organized? Imagine if your investment workbook was like a pen and paper notebook from school. Remember how hard it was to keep all that shit organized? You can't control F or anything. I’m sure at some point he got a computer but even then early computers could barely do anything. Buffett had those opportunities back then because doing the simplest stuff we take for granted today was actually very hard. This man did this stuff LITERALLY BY HAND.

Literally think about how lame he was. He probably had friends that went to HBS and worked at whatever was prestigious at the time. Think of how lame you would feel talking to your successful friends banging the hottest women. Probably they would spend most of their day doing cool sounding stuff But nope Buffett lived in Omaha NEBRASKA. Have you ever seen this place? Try it sometime. He had a very unattractive and plain wife and did not get to cycle through a harem of finance groupies on Hinge from a penthouse apartment. It is understandable he would later get a mistress. HE WAS CALCULATING THIS STUFF BY HAND. Insane. Truly requires someone built different, but also to be built differently, probably your payoffs and how you get joy has to be different. He probably just really liked it. Yes, he was a genius. Yes, he was remarkably talented. But so were a lot of people. But how many people would want to live in a shitty house in Omaha? 

Just think for a moment about Buffett describing what he did. "Bro what I do is I calculate some ratios. Basically, what I do is I divide two numbers. You may have heard of this - division. In fact, long division sometimes. But often I find that to do this division, I have to make a couple adjustments here and there. What's annoying is getting the numbers - I have to get on a bike and go look at some microfiche machine to look at the numbers. Basically, after that it's like a word problem. You may have done these before. I have to add things to other things and sometimes I do subtraction too." Think of how lame that sounds. He wasn't doing some complex shit but he was doing something very painful. Note he DID NOT have many or any juniors.  He did the 1st grade math himself tirelessly. And he had an ugly wife and lived in Omaha. 

Think of how much more badass it would be to instead "make operational improvements" to "add value."  Look firing people works in PE. When it isn't the dead simple firing people, often it is kind of retarded IMHO. Did Buffett do the "operational improvements"? No. He had the humility to know that how much money you make has nothing to do with how smart or talented you are and he is not "smarter" than the people who run any high quality great American businesses. The people who run a business are better at it than you as an investor - leave them alone even if it feels "sexy" to do these retarded "operational improvements." Sure are there examples of some funds that are great at this? Yes, but anyone who is an operator thinks you are a clown 80% of the time even if you are ok at it 20% of the time. Buffett didn't do it just because it was cool. He just did what he knew works. 

These opportunities exists in other places and it’s what I’m personally very interested in. But you can’t get jobs looking at this I don’t think. Or if you do they won’t pay well because probably the places are much smaller in AUM and/or if you work there you won’t have much career flexibility which will reduce your wages (since your employer knows you can’t easily leave). FWIW I don’t actually work at citadel but worked at a fund that actually has far, far better than early Warren Buffet like returns but with an ultra niche strategy that nobody else does. It made it utterly miserable to get a job after. What if you don't like your boss? If a lot of people are not doing an attractive strategy there is a REASON for that. And whatever that reason is is probably terrible for your own career prospects. Note that these "successful" people often had TINY teams in their period of success. Often it was just a few people. Why? Because this stuff is unpleasant often because there are elements that are unpleasant precisely because do not scale. 

Another reason why it was lame to be Warren Buffett: he didn't hire anyone to do his bitchwork. He did it himself, especially in his periods of greatest success. Why? Because that's what worked. 

To a lesser extent the podbois 10 years ago were an example of this too. When I finished my banking stint basically people thought working at citadel was far lower tier than any reasonable single manager. I turned down an offer at Citadel empty handed simply because I wanted to work at a Tiger fund. Now look at how the tables have turned. In retrospect, my life would have been far better if I actually did work at Citadel but you live and you learn. In fact, the friend I had that intro'd me to the group where I got an offer is literally the richest mf I know. Last time I spoke to him he told me "Being successsful is nice, you should try it sometime." When I met with them, his team was a bunch of weird autists and seemed unprestigious. 

In this case I basically do think that the elite prop funds are the modern example of a case where prestige and actual high returns do overlap. But aside from this, basically the same sort of stuff that Buffett had access to is in any asset class that is massive, sort of new, hard to access, annoying, and unattractive to the most talented people due to a lack of scale.