Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest Sold $605 Million In Tesla Last Month—But
Topline
Famed stock picker Cathie Wood, the CEO of investment firm Ark Invest, offloaded a massive stake in Tesla last month, dumping more than $600 million in shares to instead splurge on recently struggling stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood—doubling down on her staunchly bullish stance on disruptive tech despite growing skepticism around the strategy on Wall Street.
After declaring bitcoin’s price could skyrocket to $500,000, the famed Wall Street investor splurged … [+]
Eli Warren for Forbes
Key Facts
According to Ark’s daily transaction reports, the firm’s funds sold another 381,000 shares of Tesla this week, representing a stake worth about $297 million and lifting its total sales of the stock to $605.7 million based on closing market prices.
By far, Tesla has remained Wood’s most-sold stock throughout September, but she’s also sold stakes in Singapore-based Internet firm Sea, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis and industrial automation company Teradyne for a combined $583 million.
In their place, Ark has shifted its buying focus over the past two weeks to a crop of new stocks that all started trading this year and haven’t been faring too well, led by a $143 million investment in cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, whose shares have plunged 34% since an April trading debut amid a broader crypto-market rout.
In the middle of her Coinbase buying spree last month, Wood hit back at “naysayer” investors critical of the nascent cryptocurrency space, calling bitcoin “much more than just a store of value or ‘digital gold,'” and forecasting its prices could skyrocket from current levels of about $41,000 to more than $500,000 in the next five years.
Ark has also been plowing into a slew of tech stocks that rallied last year at the height of pandemic uncertainty, but have since shed as much as 50% of their value—investing roughly $320 million in New York automation company UiPath, and about $160 million each in streaming company Roku, Zoom Video Communications and genetics testing firm Invitae.
Ark declined to comment on its specific trades, but transaction reports reveal the firm’s top buys this month also include at-home healthcare company Signify Health, online brokerage Robinhood (another crypto-exposed stock) and sports-betting company DraftKings.
Contra
Increasingly, Wood’s strategy—which Ark says focuses on “disruptive innovation”—has garnered skepticism on Wall Street. As of Friday morning, the firm’s $25 billion flagship fund, the Ark Innovation ETF, seemed poised for its worst quarterly outflows ever, with investors cashing out some $2 billion over the past three months, according to a Bloomberg analysis. Meanwhile, Scion Asset Management—the hedge fund headed by investor Michael Burry, who famously predicted the housing market crash in 2007—last month disclosed it holds bearish…
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