Sherry Jiang made smart enough investing decisions in her early 20s to walk away from a job at Google and start her own company.
The 32-year-old founder of Peek, a personal finance tracker, has a seven-figure net worth, which BI verified by looking at screenshots of her various investment accounts, and considers herself financially independent.
However, that’s not to say she did everything right.
Jiang, who started investing as soon as she landed a job at Amazon after graduating from college, began with simple ETF investing.
“As I got more comfortable I started taking more bets in the market,” she told Business Insider. One of her first riskier investments was buying Tesla shares in 2015. Today, she uses a barbell strategy to balance low-risk ETFs with high-risk investments like crypto and individual stocks.
After a decade of investing, Jiang shares the advice she’d give her younger self and the mistakes she’d avoid if she could go back.
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1. Invest consistently, as early as you can
Jiang understood basic investing principles and how markets work as a college student — she took finance classes and had a summer internship as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs — but didn’t act on it.
“I would say that intellectually I kind of knew what I was doing just because I studied finance, I had pitched stocks when I interviewed, I followed the markets,” she said.
What she had to learn was the “habit part,” she noted. “It’s not just enough to follow the markets and know what’s interesting. It’s more important to think, ‘Hey I just got my paycheck this month.’ Or, ‘I just got my bonus this month. I need to invest that right away,’ and never leave money on the table.”
2. Exit Tesla sooner
Jiang cites Tesla as her favorite investment. It was what she calls a “10x in 10 years bet” that “actually played out in my favor.”
However, “I should have sold it previously,” she said. “I think it was a great investment during the last 10 years but it’s facing competition from BYD; it’s also facing competition from other players.”
The profit margins are normalizing, she added: “It’s not really a truly infinitely scalable software company. It’s a car company at the end of the day.”
Plus, “Elon is very volatile. He Tweets something, he says something, he dedicates his energy to something else, and Tesla just goes haywire. I feel like it’s been a source of my anxiety if anything, and I wish I exited that position, as much as I loved following Tesla and investing in it in the first eight years or so.”
3. Don’t let your emotions guide your decisions
Overall, Jiang says she’s made money in crypto, but she would change a few things about the way she invested in the space.
“I probably day-traded a little bit too much for my own good during the crypto boom, and that was right around when I was doing my first startup, as well,” she said, noting that she experimented with a crypto startup before founding Peek. “It’s just really, really hard to be that active in trading while trying to do a company.”
She also fell for a couple of behavioral traps, particularly with DeFi protocols.
“I lost in some of the more ponzi-like DeFi protocols. In crypto, there are these crazy things you can invest in — they would tell you that you can make 70,000% yield, and some people did, but more likely than not you’re going to lose all of your money,” she said. “I had a lot of FOMO. I was in all these groups, and all my friends were talking about it, so I got caught up in it too, even though in my mind I knew that it was unsustainable.”
The experience didn’t completely turn her off from crypto investing, but it prompted her to change her strategy and think twice about an investment that sounded too good to be true.
“Some people are like, ‘I’m never going to get back into crypto. I’m burned from it.’ I was like, actually, when the market is down, that’s the best time to get back — with a proper strategy this time,” said Jiang, who isn’t bothered by her losses. “You win some; you lose some, is the way I see it. You just hope you can win more at the end of the day.”