Catherine Wood is a famous investor and portfolio manager mostly known as the founder and CEO of ARK Invest, one of the most successful and fast-growing investment management firms. Wood is one of the most innovative investors: her fund heavily invests in disruptive technologies, such as genomics or artificial intelligence. In this article, we’re going to provide a brief overview of Wood’s biography and analyze her investment strategy to understand how she managed to get so rich and famous.
Brief biography
Born in Los Angeles, California in 1955, Wood graduated the University of Southern California earning a degree in Economics and Finance. She worked at Capital Group for three years and then moved to New York City to join Jennison Associates. Wood worked there for eighteen years and established her reputation as a professional investor. In 1998, she co-founded Tupelo Capital Management, a hedge fund. However, her true success was ARK Invest, an investment fund founded by Wood in 2014.
How did she make her money
Wood’s father was a radar systems engineer, and he taught her a lot about technologies. In 2001, she started to work for Alliance Bernstein where she proposed a creation of a specialized ETF that would be entirely focused on innovative technologies. However, this proposal was refused, and Cathie Wood left the company to create her own fund. She asked her friend to invest several million dollars, and so her Ark Innovation ETF was created.
Wood started to invest heavily in stocks of innovative firms with great disruptive potential: for example, she bought many Tesla shares while they were still on the rise. While some experts criticize Wood for having too many overvalued shares in her portfolio, she is widely known as a successful stock picker, and her fund is considered one of the largest female-run funds by overall net value. Wood has a net worth of about $150 million, and ARK Invest has about $60 billion in assets.
Investment strategy
Basically, Wood invests in innovative technologies that may shape the future: genetic engineering, AI, self-driving cars, blockchain, and so on. She firmly believes that Bitcoin is undervalued and supports innovations that can reduce costs and lead to breakthroughs in various industries. However, Wood is fully aware that innovations are risky, so she recommends novice investors to diversify their portfolios and calculate the growth potential of every company before investing.
