In this new age of feminism, several women are its horsewomen. One such inspiring woman is Catherine D. Wood who is an entrepreneur and investment. She is currently the Chief Investment Officer, Chief Executive Officer, and Portfolio Manager at America based ARK Investment Management LLC. ARK Investment focuses on companies in the area of robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and genome sequencing.
ARK investment spans the sectors, geographies, and market capitalizations so that it can focus on public companies, beneficiaries, and enablers who are bound to be the leaders of the future. Concerning the traditional form of investment strategies, ARK aims at investing long term with low correlation.
ARK believes that futuristic and sustainable innovation is going to be the thing of tomorrow and hence the company invests in companies that are based on innovation and can be the next big thing.
Cathie’s early life
When Cathie break away from AllianceBernstein after working for 12 years and decided to build her firm she was met by a lot of people who doubted her resolve and dedication. She recalls that a lot of her friends thought that she will fail if she continues down this path. Cathie However believed in herself as she knew that the market needed a little bit of shaking up.
She completed her Bachelor of Science in the domain Economics and Finance and Summa Cum Laude from the University of Southern California in the year 1981. Before founding ARK Investment Management LLC she worked as an Assistant Economist at Capital Group for 3 years, Managing director at Jennison Associates LLC for 18 years, Limited Partner at Tupelo Capital Services for 3 years, and Chief Investment Officer at AllianceBernstein for 12 years.
Cathie Wood: A natural-born disruptor
ARK launched in the year 2014 but Wood had been preparing for the launch of it her entire career. Cathie had moved her way around the other analysts at Jennison Associates and that led her to companies that fell through the cracks. She moved into and built interest in the newly emerging internet stocks. She began covering wireless stocks and it helped her observe ever-emerging innovations that were taking place in the markets as a repercussion of the increased demand for wireless communications.
She intelligently focused on identifying the stocks that were misunderstood and neglected. These stocks majorly belonged to these five innovations: energy storage, deep learning, blockchain technology, robotics, and DNA sequencing.
The investment process begins with Wood and her group of analysts exploring and evaluating the opportunities in every one of the five fields without referring to any files or screens. When the group has distinguished which stocks are best situated to benefit from these chances, it draws up its investment briefs, expected rates of return, bottom-up forecasts, investment thesis, and other financial metrics. It likewise builds up a six-point scoring framework dependent on measures, for example, organization culture and hindrances to passage for each stock.
ARK and its disruptive methods are awesome
It is quirky and unique that ARK distributes its white papers and research on social media platforms like Medium, Facebook, and Twitter. Because of this approach, they have attracted a lot of innovative businesses with high potential in the market. Cathie herself credits social media for the elevation of her business.
While Wood and ARK have a lot of articles floating around about her that reflect her new ideas and ventures in which the management is interested, the most famous one is related to her bet on Tesla.
Tesla holds a majority of ARK’s funds that include ARK Industrial Innovation ETF, ARK Innovation ETF, and ARK Web x.o ETF.
How is ARK investment’s strategy different from Traditional strategies?
- The market is easily motivated and distracted by things of the present and short-term money movements hence losing the primal focus on the long-term effects of organizations that inculcate innovation and have the potential to massively growing in the next 3-4 years.
- The public markets have gone passive while the innovation investors are crowding and focusing on the private markets. ARK believes that innovative public companies that are forward-looking and have a high scope of growth are inefficiently priced in the market.
- ARK follows the open approach and research technology to deeply understand their full market potential and convergence across technologies. An open Research ecosystem is used by ARK to combine bottom-up and top-down research. This approach helps in identifying the innovation early and allows organized communication and exchange between the Director of Research, Portfolio Manager, Analysts, and external sources.
- ARK believes that innovation should not be limited to categorization and divided into geographies, sectors, or market caps. Index strategies usually miss progressive opportunities. The traditional analysts who are responsible for covering disruptive companies lack in understanding technology cost curves. Analysts at ARK are focused on organizing by cross-section disruptive innovation so that they can capitalize on the convergence of research.
ARK and Tesla
Tesla, the revolutionary and innovative electric vehicle maker holds the largest holdings in the funds of ARK. Wood has envisioned the stocks of Tesla to reach $700 per share in the coming five years that were around $285 as if mid-March this year. Wood believes that Tesla will take out all the oxygen from the room for other automakers as it is much more software-centric and many people will want to work for Tesla in the coming years.
Wood also believes that the company has the potential to target and thrive in the Chinese market which is using electricity operated vehicles to tackle the issue of air pollution. Retailers as