Gabe Mays

Investing

I enjoy investing. I’ve made decent returns since I started, with most of them around three major opportunities:

  • Investing in real estate following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis
  • Buying “pandemic stocks” during the post-COVID drawdown in 2022
  • Investing in AI beginning in 2023

When I don’t have strong convictions between opportunities I generally stick to indices.

I only started blogging about investing recently, so most of the public record here starts in 2022. That began with buying a basket of beaten-down pandemic stocks after many were down 70%+.

I later reallocated more heavily into AI-related stocks when my conviction changed in 2023 after building one of the first AI products at the public tech company I worked at.

This isn’t investment advice, just a way to track my thinking over time. As I update this overview in mid-2026 I have less to write about since my thesis is unchanged and AI continues to run hard.

The biggest change starting in Q3 2025 was that I now spend most of my time building software. AI is changing so fast that I’ve found the two best ways to stay in the loop are:

  1. Read analysts who deeply understand the supply chain
  2. Build with models daily, because changes show anecdotally up before they are reflected in financials or consensus estimates.

Plus, it’s fun to build. In a way, I feel retired since if I had no other obligations this is what I’d be doing anyway.

Scorecard

As of my latest update, the portfolio I opened in June 2022 had a 56% annual return through June 2025. That is down from 73.6% in the prior update, mostly because I did a poor job planning (we had a death in the family at the beginning of the year) and had to liquidate some positions during the April 2025 lows. Self-inflicted, and avoidable but lesson learned.

Visualized

I exported my performance history from Vanguard since account creation and had ChatGPT create this visual.

Cumulative
2022
2023
2024
2025

Portfolio growth is money-weighted and net of inflows/outflows. The S&P 500 line is a price-return baseline, so it does not include dividends.

A few caveats:

  • I use IRR because it reflects my actual experience with inflows and outflows.
  • Portfolio growth is net of inflows and outflows.
  • I do not share exact dollar values or full position weights for privacy.
  • The returns are less useful without weights, but I try to add enough context to make the updates meaningful.
  • I benchmark against the S&P 500 price return baseline in my latest visual, but I should probably add Nasdaq-100 and/or semiconductor benchmarks in future updates.

I’m still well within the “maybe I’m just lucky” phase. Three years is not a real investing career. But it is enough time to start seeing whether my actual decisions matched my stated thinking.

Investment updates

I try to post updates every 6 to 12 months.