Home The Cointelegraph Top 100 2023 Cathie Wood

#76

Cathie Wood

Founder, CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Invest

Coinbase stock? Yes, please!

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“If inflation is unwinding, as we believe, then we could be heading back to the future, the Roaring Twenties, the last time several general purpose technologies evolved at the same time: telephone, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. The setup is remarkably similar!”

Biography:

Cathie Wood is the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Investment Management, a United States-based investment firm that manages just over $6 billion in investor assets as of January 2023. Wood created the company in 2014 to provide stock packages in the format of exchange-traded funds.

Wood studied economics at the University of Southern California under the tutorship of Arthur Laffer, a renowned economist who was also an adviser in the administration of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. While at the university, she worked as an assistant economist at Capital Group, a financial services company.

After graduating, Wood joined Jennison Associates in 1980, where she spent 18 years working in various capacities, including as a portfolio manager. She left the company in 1998 and went to work at the Tupelo Capital Management hedge fund as a portfolio manager. The firm applied thematic strategies extensively, a technique used today by Wood’s ARK Invest.

She then joined AllianceBernstein in 2001, serving as a portfolio manager and a limited partner during her stint at the firm. She stayed at the research and investment company for 12 years before leaving in 2013 to start ARK Invest.

Wood’s 2022:

Wood’s ARK Invest faced significant headwinds in 2022 due to unexpected market drawdowns. Her company also had substantial market exposure to volatile tech stocks and digital assets, which further contributed to the losses.

ARK Invest lost over $50 billion due to the bold bets, which also devalued the company by about 50% over the year. Despite the negative results, Wood remained adamant that markets would recover in the long term.

In December, her firm bought about $12 million in Tesla stock after CEO Elon Musk offloaded $3.6 billion worth, indicating renewed confidence in the car company’s future performance.

In November, her company also purchased 176,945 shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, valued at $1.5 million.

Wood’s 2023:

Wood, through ARK Invest, is likely to invest in stocks that she predicted will climb over the long term in 2022, one of which is Tesla. She admitted that she was bullish on the electric vehicle maker in the last quarter of 2022.

Her company doubled down on this conviction by purchasing an additional 389,305 Tesla shares, worth $47 million, in January 2023 after Tesla cut the prices of its Model Y and Model 3 cars. The carmaker grappled with low demand for its vehicles in 2022 amid news of a global recession and inflation, but the price reduction brought renewed hope of sales recovery.

Wood is also likely to continue betting on crypto companies in 2023. In December 2022, her investment company purchased 158,000 shares of Coinbase, which underperformed in 2022 and lost over 70% of its value after the cryptocurrency market turned bearish. The move further underlined her belief in the industry. 

Wood’s sentiments about the crypto space are unlikely to change in 2023.