The Rise and Fall of Wall Street’s Most Controversial Investor

Around the middle of April, Cathie Wood sat onstage at the storied Fontainebleau hotel in Miami. 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.

Wood, though, had evidently not lost her luster — judging by the crowd’s applause — nor her brazen bullishness. 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. Instead, she doubled down: “Now we think 50 percent.”

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. 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. (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. 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.

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