A freelancer shares the financial advice he would give himself, including 3 mistakes to avoid

Jiang, who started investing as soon as he got a job at Amazon after graduation, started by investing in a simple ETF.

“As I got more comfortable I started betting more on the market,” he told Business Insider. One of his first risky investments was buying Tesla shares in 2015. Today, he uses a barbell strategy to balance low-risk ETFs with risky investments like crypto and individual stocks.

After ten years of investing,

Jiang shares the advice he would give and the mistakes he would avoid if he went back.

1. Invest consistently, as early as you can

Jiang understood the principles of investing and how the markets worked as a college student — he took finance courses and had a summer internship as an investment manager at Goldman Sachs — but he didn’t I did nothing.

He says: “I can say that intellectually I knew what I was doing simply because I studied finance, I was based in stocks when I discussed, I followed the markets.”

What he had to learn was “part of the routine,” he said. “It’s not enough just to follow the markets and know what’s interesting. It’s more important to think, ‘Hey I just got my salary this month.’ Or, ‘I just received my bonus this month I need to invest immediately,’ and never leave money on the table.

2. Get out of Tesla early

Jiang cites Tesla as his favorite investment. It was what he calls “10x in 10 years betting” that “really played in my favor.”

However, he said: “I would have sold it earlier.” “I think it was a great investment 10 years ago but it’s facing competition from BYD; it’s also facing competition from other players.”

Profit margins are normalizing, he added: “It’s not really a software company at the end of the day. It’s a car company at the end of the day.”

In addition, “Elon is very flexible. He Tweets something, he says something, he devotes his energy to something else, and Tesla just goes haywire. I feel like he was the source of my concerns if anything, and I wish I could get out of that area. , as I loved following Tesla and investing in it for the first eight years or so.

3. Don’t let your emotions guide your decisions

Overall, Jiang says he has made money in crypto, but he would change a few things about the way he invested in the space.

“I probably traded too much for my own good during the crypto boom, and that was when I started my first operation,” he said, noting that he tried to start a crypto. See. “It’s really hard to be active in business while trying to make a company.”

He also fell into several ethical traps, especially with DeFi protocols.

“I lost some of the DeFi protocols that are like a ponzi. In crypto, there are these crazy things that you can invest in – they would tell you that you can make 70,000% returns, and other people did, but more likely than you. ‘We’re going to lose all your money,’ he said. “I had a lot of FOMO. I was in all these clubs, and all my friends were talking about it, so I got caught up in it too, even though in my mind I I knew it wasn’t stable.”

The experience didn’t completely turn him off from investing in crypto, but it did prompt him to change his strategy and think twice about an investment that sounded too good to be true.

“Some people are like, ‘I’m never going back to crypto. I’m burned out on it.’ I was like, when the market goes down, it’s a good time to come back – with the right strategy this time,” said Jiang, who is not worried about his losses. “You win some; you lose some, that’s the way I see it. You just hope that at the end of the day you can win some.”