Cathie Wood

Cathie Wood is a top stock investor and the founder of ARK Invest, a $60 billion (assets) firm that invests in cutting-edge technologies, including self-driving vehicles and genomics.

Who Is Cathie Wood?

Catherine ‘Cathie’ Wood founded ARK Invest in 2014 after working at other investing firms and hoped to bundle active stock portfolios in an ETF structure. Over the last five years, her flagship $23 billion (assets) Ark Innovation Fund has returned over 45 percent yearly on average.

Wood studied economics at the University of Southern California under Art Laffer, the creator of the Laffer Curve, which theories the relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. Wood is one of Elon Musk’s most ardent supporters. She believes the electric car firm will be valued at over $3 trillion in the future.

Before 2020, many people didn’t know Cathie Wood, but it didn’t take long for her to become a legendary investor in the stock markets. Despite enduring some instabilities for the ARK Innovation ETF (NYSEMKT:ARKK) and other ARK Invest exchange-traded funds last year, numerous investors still see Wood as an inspiration with talent toward the developments which will define high-growth funds to invest for years to come.

Cathie Wood, whose ARK Innovation ETF was the best-performing U.S. equities fund last year, has been an outspoken supporter of Bitcoin (BTC). When China banned Bitcoin in June, many crypto analysts saw it as a bad thing for the cryptocurrency world, however, Wood saw it as a benefitting move in the long run. Furthermore, when Bitcoin was criticized for its environmental effect by Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX and Tesla, with concerns over bitcoin mining’s energy usage, Wood reaffirmed her support for bitcoin as “environmentally conscientious.”

Wood stated that bitcoin is transparent and allows for economic empowerment throughout the world. She further added that when mining shifts to renewable energy, bitcoin will be a net benefit to the planet and the environment.

Wood’s company ARK Invest provides strategies for investing in cryptocurrencies. ARK Invest believes that cryptocurrencies regulated by open-source networks will usher in a new era of monetary systems and value storage and transfer methods. The investment manager anticipates that the characteristics like value and market share of cryptocurrencies will be “power-law distributed,” indicating that just a few cryptocurrencies would grab the major share of the market.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest is launching a bitcoin exchange-traded fund.

Wood, a longtime bitcoin supporter, has been buying bitcoin proxies from companies, like Coinbase and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, as the innovative investor now wants to be the owner of the asset.

According to the SEC filing, the ETF’s investing aim is to track bitcoin’s performance. If the SEC approves the fund, it will trade under the ticker symbol “ARKB.” The ETF will be launched by Ark Invest in collaboration with 21Shares.

Back to Glossary Index Page