It’s been a rough few years for Cathie Wood. Once a thought leader and Bitcoin visionary who reached dizzying heights via her ARK Invest funds, she’s now tallying losses that reach well into 11 figures.
On May 27, 2021, Wood was at her peak of fame. Her starry-eyed projections of futuristic AI, healthcare, crypto, and automation technologies earned her a spot on the cover of Bloomberg’s Businessweek magazine.
According to the editors of the double issue with a print circulation of 325,000, she was the “The Believer” who was selling “a future so fantastic you’ll beg her to take your money.”
However, since 2021, when she predicted that bitcoin (BTC) would rally to $1 million within nine years, shares of Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) have lost 59% of their value.
As she lost money, she raised her BTC forecast to $1.5 million, but her BTC investments failed to stem the declining tide.
ARK Innovation ETF: 71% below all-time high
By the end of 2023, Morningstar tallied Wood’s losses using 11 dollar figures, pointing out that “the ARK family wiped out an estimated $14.3 billion in shareholder value over the trailing 10-year period — more than twice as much as the second-worst fund family.”
ARK Invest was also one of the very few firms that bought shares in digital asset-related companies like Coinbase. Unfortunately, many of those investments declined.
For instance, analysts estimated that ARK Invest’s ETFs lost $280 million when it sold 1.42 million Coinbase shares (COIN) in July 2022.
ARK Invest also owned 4.3 million shares of the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF as of December 27, 2023, worth $92 million. Those same shares impute a value of just $86 million as of Tuesday’s closing price.
The company is also a famous buyer of so-called Magnificent Seven stocks like Tesla, Amazon, and NVIDIA, which have been struggling recently amid Donald Trump’s tariff vacillations and market uncertainty.
Wood also invested in Block, SoFi, GitLab, AMD, The Trade Desk, Roku, Shopify, and PagerDuty via her Ark Invest funds — all of which are negative year-to-date.
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Cathie Wood, the bitcoin believer
ARKK, the largest ETF Wood manages, has lost one-fifth of its value since the start of the year.
Her ARK Genomic Revolution ETF and ARK Fintech Innovation ETF have both lost 10% over the same time period while her ARK Next Generation Internet ETF has declined 14%.
Even her ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF is slightly negative year-to-date. As of publication time, BTC is 94% shy of Wood’s $1.5 million price prediction.
