Once you could make money in the markets by looking for value hidden away in financial statements. Thanks to the digital era and its ease of access to information, that day is now past. But there’s still a proven way to consistently earn a positive return in the market—you just have to understand why value investing once worked and why it never will again.

There’s no doubt that Benjamin Graham and David Dodd shaped the modern profession of investor more than anyone in our history. When they posited—starting in 1928 at New York City’s Columbia Business School—that investors could find companies whose stocks were mispriced by just digging through publicly available numbers, they set off a revolution.

First hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of investors learned the art of scrutinizing those numbers to find compelling companies trading below their “intrinsic value.” Graham and Dodd’s books—Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor—remain staples on virtually every financial bookshelf in the library.

Prominent investors all the way up to the inimitable Warren Buffett have long espoused the wisdom of the approach. It has evolved over the years as well, moving from a focus on book value to a focus on earnings value to a combination of similar factors. In fact, there are as many variations on the theme as can be imagined—thousands of permutations on how to discover value by crunching the numbers in the right way.

However, value investing has a dirty little secret.

It’s always been based on knowing something that few other people could know. In tech speak, it’s about an asynchronous information advantage.

In other words, value investing is not that different from, say, insider trading. In the case of insider information, the opportunity lies in being able to position yourself in front of some fact that has the potential to revalue a company on the market. Maybe you know Intel is going to miss on earnings next month because your friend is on the board. Trading on that information is, of course, illegal. But it’s a crime that’s committed again and again because it works and because it can be difficult to prove.

Value investing, on the other hand, is perfectly legal because in theory it is based only on public information. The catch is that it relies on the information being hard to find or hard to make sense of.

In the 1930s, of course, gathering information on the performance of a company was difficult. Xerox photocopiers hadn’t even been invented yet. (Those didn’t come around until 1959.) Even then, gathering information on a public company was tedious, time consuming, expensive, and really a task best left to the pros.

In other words, in order to learn of a compelling value, one had to make a significant time and energy commitment. That kept competition to a minimum, and allowed those with better information and a knack for processing it faster to position themselves earlier and then benefit as the word spread (and often, they spread it themselves—no harm in talking your own book).

You profit by being ahead of the knowledge of others. Nothing more than information arbitrage.

Value investing is not alone in its dubious distinction from insider trading, however. The same thing applies to all forms of investing, including technical analysis. In fact, it is the sole basis on which it is possible to make a living investing: your ability to be right about the future value of a company’s paper before others, whether they be your fellow speculators or a corporate suitor in search of an acquisition.

However, in an age of mass computerization and real-time streams of stock-market data over the public Internet, the idea that one can find a “value” stock by simply crunching the numbers has vanished into the Cloud.

Want to know what companies have the lowest P/E ratio among mid-caps, but still have >15% ROI and 70% gross margins? It takes only about half a second for one of the dozens of freely available websites to answer that question for me.

The group meeting those criteria, by the way, contains beleaguered REIT Annaly Capital, Indonesia and Argentina’s telephone companies, and controversial vitamin pusher Herbalife. If the predominant analysis on these companies is right, then they fall into the category of “value traps,” i.e., stocks that look good based on yesterday’s numbers but whose tomorrows will not be nearly as bright.

Base your investments on screens like that one, and you’re likely to fall into trap after trap.

Problem is, virtually anyone can find these numbers. Not only that, they can process them in bulk. On top of that, they can do it in near real time. And they can even use a service like Interactive Brokers to automatically trade on any numbers they like, without even involving a human.

Every day, millions of investors hit sites like Yahoo and Google to dig up value stocks. Thousands more do so on a massive scale across global markets. Every square inch of statistical performance information that can be covered has been, 1,000 times over, before you or I even started looking.

Value investing itself is, thanks to the Internet, dead… or at least drawing its last few breaths.

But the underlying principle is not.

To make money investing, you must find an information advantage you can exploit. It can come in any of a number of forms.

Those who are 60 Minutes fans know that groups of HFT traders have turned to speed as their information advantage. They analyze the same markets we do, using their computers to dig through data in search of a temporary mispricing they can exploit just a few seconds—or even milliseconds—before the next guy. Of course, once they had that capability, they increasingly turned to pure and simple arbitrage, stepping in between buyers and sellers who don’t even know they exist… a lazy man’s way to riches.

Of course, most of us mere mortals lack the means to acquire a dedicated fiber-optic feed to the center of the financial ecosystem, to develop artificially intelligent algorithms that exploit tiny gaps in information, and to profit by making fractions of a cent every few milliseconds. But thankfully, there are slower-moving and less costly options available to the likes of us.

One is to simply understand the world better than the next guy. Instead of finding out what the other guy doesn’t yet know, instead let him be first and then concentrate on figuring out where and when he’s wrong.

This happens day in and day out in the markets, where one investor battles the next on assumptions about toothpaste sales at Procter & Gamble next quarter, betting millions on the difference of a few pennies in corporate profits. That’s the world of earnings analysis, and it’s cutthroat.

Just because a company is big doesn’t mean that Wall St. is either paying attention or correct. Sometimes you can stumble upon a company that’s followed by plenty of analysts, only to discover none has bothered to update his or her guidance in a year or even two. Our most recent BIG TECH pick is a good example. Nearly half a dozen analysts “covering” the stock, but there’s been not a peep from any of them since mid-2012.

Another possibility is to find herd thinking at work, like we did with HP in BIG TECH. There, every analyst in the world was piling on the doom and gloom, trying to one-up each other in the fear department. But when one swam into the reports they were publishing, one thing was obvious: they were ignoring their own facts. Analysts were calling for 10% sales reductions, but chopping their price targets by 75% or more. Sure, earnings were going to suffer, but this was a company with billions in sales, solid margins, and good if not great management. The realistic view should have been much more tempered, but once those estimates made it into the hands of the mindless computers, the stock quickly plummeted far below sane prices. As they say in the computer world: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out).

It was the right moment to buy in. In no time at all, cooler heads prevailed, estimates were re-revised, and the stock recovered much of its lost ground. No amount of number-crunching on the spreadsheets could have told a computer that, however. It took human ingenuity and an understanding of what was going on behind the scenes to get there… which is why we exited the position with a tidy profit.

This illustrates how herd mentality can lead tens of thousands of professional financiers into failure to understand a business they spend every day watching. But if searching for such opportunities sounds a little daunting to you, fear not. There is still one other super-simple way to be right before the other guys.

Find growth that has yet be discovered. Despite the overwhelming number of computer-armed stock jockeys now saturating the markets, there’s still an amazingly huge universe of stocks which get little to no attention.

Yes, their numbers are crunched by the computers along with every other stock, because it costs nothing more to add a few thousand additional companies to an algorithm. But when it comes to estimating revenues and earnings going forward, there is no shortage of “blue ocean.” Thousands of smaller-cap companies are completely or mostly ignored by Wall St. simply because it has minimum investment sizes to worry about. Why spend an analyst’s time on a stock that can only take $20 million in investment when you have $5 billion to deploy? Instead, Wall St. focuses most of its attention on the big fish. That’s why, according to Yahoo Finance, there are 30 analysts covering Citibank, and only 1 watching National Bank of Greece.

This is a huge potential advantage. The lack of coverage for a universe of stocks like this means that any meaningful information you can find gives you a leg up on the field. And thankfully, these smaller companies are often easier to analyze. Want to know if a 25-outlet regional retailer is growing? Much, much easier to discover than for a big, multinational corporate brand, that’s for sure. Stake out a few stores, ask a few suppliers, and voilà, you’ve got an advantage over any NYC desk pilot… no matter how fast his Internet connection might be.

We do this every day in Casey Extraordinary Technology, where we specialize in companies still flying under the Wall St. radar—ones too small to be noticed today. But as they post bigger and bigger numbers, they get harder and harder to ignore. Wall St., after all, is happy to bend the rules on those minimum investment sizes if it really believes it can make 50% next year just by taking a smaller stake than usual.

Now, I prefer to find growth because I like to be long the market. I love to position myself in a company before it announces good news and wait for the stock to rise, as those computers and the hordes of investors behind them inevitably race to snatch up a profit in the 15 minutes (who am I kidding? 15 seconds is more like it) that “value” lasts nowadays. Nothing is more predictable to me.

The same applies on the downside, too. If you browse through the universe of uncovered stocks (or through the overly enthusiastic estimates of herd-thinking analysts), you’re bound to find plenty of stories that are too good to be true. That’s where many an investor has made a killing on the short side.

Either way, success is about finding your information advantage. What can you know before everyone else knows it? It definitely won’t be an imbalanced price/book ratio in the agricultural sector. It probably won’t be Comcast’s next subscriber count. But it could definitely be sales numbers from the company no one is watching.

And when you’re right, you’ll be glad to see all those value-investing computerized robots trade your shares right on up, providing you liquidity on the way.

This is precisely what we do here at Casey Research. We concentrate on the markets best suited to individual investors, we find our distinct advantage, and we exploit it again and again. For the technology team, that consists mostly of finding undiscovered growth. We comb relentlessly through the data, the opinions, and the companies in the tech markets in search of a mismatch between what products are selling and what companies Wall St. thinks are performing. Time and again, we find compelling bargains—never on past performance alone; almost always by uncovering the next big thing that consumers are walking out of the mall with, that businesses are migrating to, or that otherwise has yet to show up in the numbers available on any computer screen from Yahoo Finance to Bloomberg.

Maybe that’s why we’ve beaten our market index every year since we started publishing. If you’ve yet to see for yourself the advantage this approach provides, then take Extraordinary Technology for a spin and let us prove it to you.

While the computer may have killed old-fashioned, number-crunching value investing, it’s done nothing to change the rules of the game. It’s just shifted asynchronous information advantages around, making the ones where being human helps better than others.