July 14, 2025
2 min read
Key takeaways:
- Young physicians may achieve financial independence sooner if they take calculated risks such as individual equities and options trading.
- All risky investments must be well researched.
We (Jayanth Sridhar, MD, and Chirag P. Shah, MD, MPH) typically espouse a slow-and-steady tortoise approach to personal investing for physicians.
It’s a boring and slow formula to save 20% of your gross income and invest it in index funds and bonds for 30 years, and then emerge financially independent when you’re old.
The problem with this advice is that youth is wasted on the young and indebted doctor.
Chirag Shah
Who wants to wait until they are old and less healthy to be financially independent? Or what if a doctor takes a 50% haircut through a divorce, putting her back years on her financial road? Why not try to be young and rich like some of our business or finance colleagues?
Shah’s dear friend, Owen Halloran, MD, takes the perspective that doctors can achieve financial independence sooner in life if they take some calculated risks.
Jayanth Sridhar
We caution readers that it is possible to lose your entire investment if an individual equity or stock option tanks; thus, all risky investments must be well researched and calculated.
Halloran shares his thoughts:
You are not truly free in this world until you have financial freedom.
As young attendings, many of you will be at a stage in your life where you have incurred a large amount of debt and ongoing expenses with student loan repayments, mortgages and the costs associated with starting a family and catching up on life experiences that will keep you from being financially free. Not to mention that many of you will someday face divorce and potentially be cut in half financially, as well as face major financial burdens such as alimony and child support.
The world has conditioned you to believe that your goal is not to be financially free now, but rather to save up as much as you can for this mythical retirement dream that you will someday enjoy. This dangled carrot will cause many of you to work excessive hours while continuing to delay life experiences and gratification, and possibly ruin marriages, until you can enjoy your money at a time when you are potentially debilitated, sick or even dead.
Your “future you” would rather be you right now with no money than old with a lot of money.
Physicians who are brilliant enough to master medicine are made to believe by the financial planning industry that they aren’t capable or responsible enough to manage their own investments, find quality stock ideas or learn about options trading. The only way out of this rat race is to first realize you are in it, and then take some calculated risks from time to time to multiply your potential return. This can happen with individual equities and/or the extreme power of trading options. All it takes is for some proportion of your portfolio to be invested in successful equities, options or other investments with tremendous upside to realize gains more quickly than a conservative index fund portfolio.
It might be worth taking some calculated risks to potentially multiply your portfolio so that you can be a hare, and work because you love what you do rather than work because you have to.
For more information:
Chirag P. Shah, MD, MPH, is a soccer and Nordic ski coach who also practices medicine and teaches in Boston. He can be reached at cshah@post.harvard.edu.
Jayanth Sridhar, MD, is an award-winning podcaster, physician and educator who is chief of ophthalmology at Olive View Medical Center in Los Angeles. He can be reached at jsridhar119@gmail.com.
Owen J. Halloran MD, is an anesthesiologist at St Joseph’s Physician Health PC. He can be reached at halloroj@gmail.com.
Editor’s note: This article is for educational purposes only. Please consult a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions.