"Her Power" | Zhi Yu Zhishan Fund Manager Sun Jiabao: Using keen insight and persistent technology to build a long-term upward trajectory, navigating through the cycle fog with a long-term perspective

In traditional understanding, strength is often associated with rigidity and sharpness, but the capital markets are never short of sharpness. Female fund managers are redefining professional strength by combining firmness and flexibility. The current “her power” precisely breaks this binary opposition—firmness means sticking to principles and bottom lines, while flexibility signifies wisdom and guidance. Together, they forge an investment path that balances strength and warmth, reflected in net value curves and long-term value.

“Investing in outstanding companies at reasonable prices.” Fund Manager Sun Jiabao summarized.

Fund Manager Sun Jiabao

Using Sharp Insight and Steadfast Action to Long-Term Tech Growth

After earning her PhD from King’s College London in 2017, Sun Jiabao has been engaged in investment research. She joined Zhi Yu Zhi Shan Investment in 2021 and has been there for five years. Currently, she manages the Zhi Yu Zhi Shan Value Investment Fund No. 4, which focuses on global storage opportunities.

Her investment style centers on sharp insight, excelling at detecting industry reversal signals amid data noise. Looking back, Sun Jiabao reflects: During the storage downcycle in 2023, her forward-looking judgment that AI servers would weaken the growth cycle of HBM led her to decisively allocate to Korean storage stocks with heavy positions. In early 2025, when NAND prices surged, she quickly followed up with investments in U.S. and Japanese tech stocks, continuously capturing opportunities in the tech sector’s certainty.

In her long-term investment practice, her “sharpness” repeatedly manifests.

“Value investing is not only about investing in excellent companies at reasonable prices but also about betting on the certainty of technological trends. As long as the underlying logic of AI reshaping the world remains unchanged, short-term fluctuations are opportunities for deployment,” she says.

As a female researcher, she has a profound understanding: “Women have a superior ability to select the best among many options in research and investment. The best investments are often not about capturing many possibilities but about steadfastly holding onto the inevitable—those that are irreplaceable. This inevitability comes from observing and tracking industry trends.”

She believes risk control is an a priori logic embedded in every decision, not a passive mechanism triggered after a drawdown. She admits she never pursues extreme leverage but instead hedges through global asset correlations and deep pre-judgment of technical pathway risks, ensuring her portfolio captures AI’s explosive potential while maintaining high safety margins.

Traversing Cycles with a Long-Term Perspective

Looking ahead to 2026, Sun Jiabao clearly states her top bullish sectors: storage chips, optical chips, and CPOs, with clear and firm logic.

First, in storage chips, the AI-driven super cycle continues to exceed expectations, with ongoing shortages expected throughout 2026 and the first half of 2027. As AI applications enter the reasoning era, demands for memory capacity far surpass previous levels. AI agents require frequent access to massive vector databases during task execution, causing NAND capacity per GPU to grow exponentially.

Second, in optical chips, Lumentum reports a supply-demand gap of 25%-30%, and has secured CPO orders with backlog exceeding $400 million.

Third, in CPOs, the commercialization inflection point is near. According to Yole, under optimistic scenarios (Nvidia mass-producing CPO switches), CPO shipments could be ten times higher by 2035 compared to baseline estimates.

She also rationally warns of risks: investors should pay attention to geopolitical reshaping of supply chains and valuation fluctuations caused by sudden technological shifts. However, current industry signals show no signs of these risks erupting, and overall industry trends remain positive.

Regarding hot topics like AI and quant investing, she maintains an open and rational attitude: AI is not an opponent but a super assistant and digital colleague in research and investment.

Sun Jiabao explains that her research team has used over ten AI tools, with each member spending more than 1,000 hours on AI. By leveraging AI to efficiently process unstructured data, analyze financial reports of thousands of global tech companies, and integrate industry news, they have significantly improved research efficiency and coverage, even gaining forward-looking investment insights.

She emphasizes that AI and quant methods cannot replace deep industry foresight and judgment. The team relies on their self-developed “AI Cyber Tan” research system to precisely capture opportunities and strictly avoid risks, adhering to the core philosophy of “investing in outstanding companies at reasonable prices.”

In team management, she pursues a self-driven, flat structure. Three strategies ensure the team adapts efficiently to market changes: encouraging research staff to experiment with non-core positions through a fault-tolerant mechanism; conducting retrospectives on each investment decision; and emphasizing AI skills and global perspectives. The team must be capable of using AI and reading multilingual literature to stay at the forefront of new technologies and maintain awareness of developments in Silicon Valley and Seoul.

Looking to the future, she is confident and steady: she hopes to be a friend of time, a long-distance runner in the tech industry, using her female-specific sharpness and determination to help investors precisely position the most promising core assets during each technological paradigm shift.

Finally, she sincerely addresses her clients: the most captivating aspect of investing is the compound interest from realized insights. Thank you for your trust amid cyclical fluctuations. I will continue to carefully select each certainty, helping us penetrate market fog and patiently wait for cognitive dividends to naturally bloom over time.

Written by Xu Nannan, Edited by Xu Nan

(Edited by Xu Nannan)

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