![]() Yet Wood tends to plow right on through any adversity, be it criticism or a market sell-off, as though she believes she’s fighting a righteous battle. But she also owed some credit for her start to a now-disgraced peer: Bill Hwang of Archegos Capital Management - arrested following his fund’s implosion last year - gave Wood critical seed money. Wood, a devout Christian, credited the inspiration for starting ARK - which offers nine exchange-traded funds that anyone can buy like a stock, making them accessible to rank-and-file investors in a way that hedge funds are not - to a divine “ calling” from the Holy Spirit. She started ARK after reportedly clashing with her former employer: Her old boss at AllianceBernstein told the Financial Times that “her biggest blind spot is managing risk and volatility” - a serious charge against someone responsible for other people’s money. In her view, it seemed, tech stocks only went up and to the right.īetting it all on super-volatile tech stocks.Įven the origin story of Wood’s firm was unconventional. She told risk-drunk investors exactly what they wanted to hear. In an industry loath to make guarantees about the future, Wood’s brand was like price-prediction porn: To hear her talk was to feel your mind liquefy in a clickbait-like flood of dopamine-inducing buzzwords - her portfolio a cornucopia of self-driving cars, crypto, genomic cancer cures, AI, streaming, and gaming. Wood’s willingness to make such calls so far ahead of reality - and so out of step with Wall Street’s old guard - has earned her a rockstar reputation among stonks-obsessed retail investors, making her a mascot for buy-the-fucking-dip Robinhood traders, some of whom have dubbed her “Cathie Bae” on Reddit. Last fall, she put a $500,000 price target on bitcoin, then - as bitcoin’s price cratered - raised it to $1 million a few months later. (Wood declined to comment for this article.) In the realm of Wall Street, Wood is an unusual creature: Not only is she a rare female portfolio manager, but she was also an outlier in her nearly boundless optimism about the riskiest investments on the market, including cryptocurrency and Tesla, which four years ago she (correctly) predicted would go up more than 1,000 percent. While that’s a fraction of the $40 billion ARK had in March (a figure the firm still lists on its website), it means Wood’s pool of money is still roughly the same size as major hedge funds like Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square. So far, she’s been wrong - her main fund is down another 34 percent since her comments - but her firm still has more than $16 billion in assets, according to fund-tracker Morningstar. Instead, she doubled down: “Now we think 50 percent.” A year earlier, she’d thought her firm, ARK Invest, would deliver annualized returns of 15 percent, she acknowledged, setting up what seemed like a mea culpa for her poor performance. Wood, though, had evidently not lost her luster - judging by the crowd’s applause - nor her brazen bullishness. It was an awkward time to be a keynote speaker at a conference for money managers: Wood’s flagship fund, the ARK Innovation ETF, had lost roughly half of its value over the prior year, as its aggressive bets on hot companies from Coinbase to Robinhood and Tesla had melted down amid a bear market in tech stocks. Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesĪround the middle of April, Cathie Wood sat onstage at the storied Fontainebleau hotel in Miami. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photo: Patrick T. ![]()
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