Barry Iyengar explains why he invests beyond New Zealand, how he built a long-term portfolio and which AI energy stocks are now on his radar.
Name: Barry Iyengar
Location: Auckland
Investment style: Set and forget
How long have you been investing?
Since 2020 (COVID), so a few years now. That period pushed a lot of people to actually look at markets for the first time, and I was one of them. I had a vague idea about it and did tinker before that, but it took me some time to familiarise myself, get comfortable, and go all in.
Why did you start investing, and why the U.S. market?
I co-founded Pivot Labs, a product design agency, and recently launched our own product Matey. Building them taught me there are only two ways to own equity: build it or buy it. I'd done the building. Public markets are the other half.
The pull was specifically Silicon Valley. I wanted to own a piece of the companies actually driving the innovation I work with every day. There are great companies doing that here and in Australia too, but most of them are still private, so there's no way to buy in. New Zealand's market is too small to express that on its own, so I looked outward: some ASX, mostly U.S. Not just because it's big but because it's where the most new equity is being created. World-tracking index funds sit alongside it, because the interesting things aren't all happening in one place.
What were your first investments?
My first buy was actually on the NZX: Air New Zealand ($AIZ), during COVID. Travel had fallen off a cliff and the share price looked like better value than the business deserved to be priced at. My first U.S. buy was Apple ($AAPL), for a much simpler reason. I'm deep in the ecosystem, I use their products daily, and I've always admired the experience they build. Tesla ($TSLA) followed not long after.
After that I slowed down and went broad before going deep: $VOO, $VB and $VXUS covering U.S. large-cap, small-cap and international, with $SCHD as a value counterweight. I also put a small amount into crypto around the same time.
Where does Wall St fit into your overall investing picture – alongside things like KiwiSaver?
For me, it's the growth engine. KiwiSaver runs quietly in the background as the conservative, compulsory player. I don't touch it, and that's the point. The Stake portfolio is where I'm actually building, and where the ETFs I mentioned live.
The bulk of it, roughly 70%, sits in stocks and ETFs. The rest is spread across KiwiSaver, a crypto slice and some physical gold. I think in decades, not quarters, and the split reflects that: most of the money is in things I don't have to think about, and a smaller piece is where I'm willing to take a view.
Describe your investing style
Set-and-forget but deliberate about the setup. Planting a hedge rather than tending a vegetable patch. I want to do the hard thinking once: what to buy, why, and how much. Then automate the contributions and leave it alone. Dollar-cost averaging monthly, low fees, minimal admin. The individual stocks are the exception, and that's where I'll actually pay attention and have an opinion.
What research do you do before buying a stock?
I've spent my career building products, so I tend to approach a company the way I'd approach one. Fundamentals matter, but just as much I want to understand what's actually being built, what value it creates for the people using it, and where the vision goes from here. Then I ask whether that vision can genuinely run for decades. That's how I decide if it's the right fit for me.
I'm also drawn to emerging technologies. They can be volatile, but I like understanding the use cases and how they might shape the future, even if I only take a small position while I'm learning.
What U.S. stocks are currently on your watchlist?
I've been keeping a close eye on the energy side of the AI story. It's become clear to me that power is the real bottleneck behind AI and data centre growth. Compute demand doesn't mean much without the energy to run it, so I've been reading more about utilities and grid infrastructure than about the chipmakers themselves.
Constellation Energy ($CEG) is the obvious one: it’s the largest nuclear operator in the U.S. and now signing long-duration power agreements directly with AI customers. Vistra ($VST) is the other, an independent producer picking up grid capacity fees as regional demand climbs. Nothing I've pulled the trigger on yet, it's still more of a theme than a shortlist.
What surprised you most when you first started investing on Wall St compared to NZ?
The sheer scale of it! The number of companies, sectors and instruments available compared to the NZX is on a completely different level. It took a while to get comfortable that having more choice wasn't the same as needing to act on more of it.
How much do you think about the NZD/USD exchange rate when investing in the U.S. – if at all?
Honestly, not much. I know it moves and I know it affects what I'm actually paying, but I don't track it and I've never timed a buy around it. Investing monthly means I'm averaging into whatever the rate happens to be, which does the job well enough for me.
How did you react when you saw one of your investments go down?
Honestly, not calm at first. There's a real gut-drop the first time you watch a position go red and know it's your own money. What's kept me steady since is coming back to the time horizon: a 30-40 year plan is built to absorb a few brutal years, and reacting to short-term drops is the opposite of the strategy I set up in the first place.
What advice would you give your younger self before making your first trade?
Start earlier than you think you need to. I wish I'd begun in my teens rather than my late twenties, and that's the one piece I learned the hard way. Time in the market beats timing it. Over a 30-40 year horizon, how you enter matters far less than starting and staying consistent.
Build the boring core first, too. It's tempting to chase individual names early, but a low-cost broad index base should come before the satellite bets, not after.
Finally, what’s it like being a Kiwi investing in Wall St?
A bit like watching the biggest game in the world from the cheap seats, only you can actually buy a stake in the players. The market opens while I'm asleep, which turns out to be a feature.
Quick fire: tell us…
- One U.S. stock you’d happily hold for 10 years? SpaceX ($SPCX). It's only been public since June and it's already had a hard reset from the early highs, so holding it for ten years is a genuine conviction call rather than a comfortable one. But it's three businesses now - launch, Starlink and xAI - not one moonshot, and that's what makes it a decade-long holding rather than a punt.
- A company you’d love to own a tiny piece of, listed or not? Anthropic. I use Claude every day for work, so I'm hardly objective, but it's rare to watch a company build something that changes how you do your job in real time and not want a piece of it.
- Investing on Wall St in three words? Patience over prediction.
Important: The personal views in this article do not reflect the views of Stake and do not constitute financial advice. As always please do your own research before investing on Stake. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.
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