Courtesy of Sherry Jiang
Sherry Jiang invested her way to financial independence over the course of a decade.
She started investing in ETFs in her early 20s after graduating from UC Berkeley and landing a job at Amazon.
One of her first riskier investments was buying Tesla shares in 2015.
She wasn't incredibly interested in the electric vehicle space at the time but thought to look into it after hearing her boss "bragging about Tesla," she said. "I thought, wow, there's some kind of identity and status and coolness now attached to electric vehicles in a way that previously wasn't as mass market."
Her hunch was correct, and since buying the stock, "my investments have grown basically 10x," said Jiang. Business Insider confirmed that she owns Tesla by looking at a copy of her shareholder statement.
Courtesy of Sherry Jiang
Around the same time she bought Tesla, Jiang bought other tech stocks, such as Apple and Amazon. She also landed a job at Google and was granted RSUs, which is where "a huge amount of my net worth growth came from," she said. "Maybe even 50% of it was just from RSUs because Google stock did really well."
As of August 2024, the 32-year-old has a seven-figure net worth, which BI verified by looking at screenshots of her various investment accounts, and considers herself financially independent. She left Google in 2021 to build a startup and now runs a personal finance platform called Peek.
Jiang pointed out that luck certainly played a role in her portfolio growth.
For asymmetric returns, you have to "go where the growth is early on," she said, which happened to be tech in the 2010s. "I do feel like it was a bit of a 'right time, right place' type of thing, where I happened to go to a school in the Bay Area, I happened to work in the Bay Area, and so tech was part of my psyche during a time when tech just did super well."
As for the next industry boom, "Maybe in a couple of years, it's renewable energies. It could be something else," she said. "But you kind of have to position yourself in a place where you can imagine growing with that company or with that industry."
The Tesla investment gave Jiang the confidence to take more calculated risks when it came to her portfolio.
"I started to take a little bit more of what I call the '10x in 10 years bets,'" she said. Meaning, "It's not going to be zero to 100 in a year but, over the long term, I think that it's following some kind of trend, I think it's going to stick around in the future, and it's still early enough where you can actually capitalize on asymmetric returns."
She still allocates the majority of her portfolio to what she considers "stable investments," like ETFs.
"I just take a few of these bets," she said. "They're not like 90% of my portfolio, but they're an amount where I feel like if it goes to zero, I will be totally fine, and if it goes 10x, it's actually a significant amount that could contribute to the portfolio."
Her favorite, more recent "10x in 10 years bet" is Palantir (PLTR).
"They've been on my radar since the early 2010s. At the time, they were still a private company but they were on my radar because I thought it was really interesting what they were doing in terms of using data analytics to help government agencies doing disaster relief, etcetera," said Jiang. "So I followed them, and then more recently because of the AI boom, I was like, I think Palantir is a bit of this under-the-radar investment to some degree when it comes to the other AI investments."
It's too early to tell how her investment will pan out, she said, "but it's for sure an interesting one to follow as AI gets more and more adopted from an enterprise or larger organization standpoint."
She understands and embraces the risk that comes with buying individual stocks.
"It allows you to take a view of the future — take some kind of bet against it," said Jiang, who stays current by following The Motley Fool and reading analyst reports. "I think it's a deeply interesting intellectual exercise to be able to do the research and be like, this is a $10,000 bet I want to take, or this is a 1% of my portfolio bet I want to take. I think it's one of the best decision-making trainings that you can get."
That said, "You can do all the research and be super thoughtful about things and lose your money," she noted. "That is just the reality of this game, and that's also what makes it fun."
