"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 edge. Female fund managers are redefining professional strength by combining firmness and flexibility. The current “her power” precisely breaks this binary opposition—being firm means upholding principles and bottom lines, while softness signifies wisdom and guidance. Together, they forge an investment path that balances intensity and warmth, reflected in net value curves and long-term value.

“Investing in outstanding companies at reasonable prices,” summarizes Sun Jiabao, fund manager of Zhiyu Zhishan Fund.

Zhiyu Zhishan Fund Manager Sun Jiabao

Using Sharp Insight and Steadfast Technology

After earning her Ph.D. from King’s College London in 2017, Sun Jiabao has been engaged in investment research. She joined Zhiyu Zhishan Investment in 2021 and has five years of experience. Currently, she manages the Zhiyu Zhishan 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 downturn cycle 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 seizing opportunities in the tech sector’s certainty.

In long-term 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 become opportunities for deployment,” she says.

As a female researcher, she has a profound understanding: “I believe women possess a superior ability to select the best among many options. The best investments are often not about capturing numerous possibilities but about steadfastly holding onto the irreplaceable inevitability among countless options. This inevitability stems from observing and tracking industry trends.”

She believes risk control is an a priori logic embedded in every decision, not a passive compensation 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 the portfolio captures AI’s explosive potential while maintaining high safety margins.

Traversing Cycles with Long-Term Vision

Looking ahead to 2026, Sun Jiabao clearly states her top three preferred directions: storage chips, optical chips, and CPO, with a clear and firm logic.

First, in storage chips, driven by the AI wave, the super cycle of storage chips continues to exceed expectations. It is expected that shortages will persist throughout 2026 and into 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 CPO, the commercialization inflection point is approaching. According to Yole, under optimistic scenarios (Nvidia mass-producing CPO switches), CPO shipments in 2035 could be ten times the baseline scenario.

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

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

Sun Jiabao explains that her research team has already used more than ten AI tools, with each member spending over 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 strategies cannot replace deep human foresight and judgment about industry futures. 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 organizational structure. To ensure high efficiency in adapting to market changes, she implements three strategies: encouraging research staff to experiment with non-core positions through a fault-tolerant mechanism; conducting retrospectives on each investment decision logic; and emphasizing AI proficiency and global perspective. The team must be capable of using AI and reading multi-language 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 determined: she hopes to be a friend of time, a long-distance runner in the tech industry, using her unique female sharpness and resolve to help investors precisely position the most promising core assets amid every wave of technological paradigm shifts.

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

Written by Xu Nannan, Edited by Xu Nan