If I asked you to name the person who most epitomizes today’s stock market you might say Roaring Kitty (aka Keith Gill) or Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, or some other millennial meme-stock trading bro. They’re the ones driving the narrative, right?
I would argue instead for someone who appears to be the exact opposite of that stereotype: A 65-year-old female financial services insider, who supported Donald Trump and has deep religious convictions—and paradoxically, (or perhaps naturally), is beloved by the WSB Reddit crowd.
I’m talking of course about Cathie Wood, founder, CEO and CIO of ARK Invest.
Like Elaine Garzarelli, Peter Lynch, Bill Miller, Henry Blodget, Mary Meeker or the guys from the Big Short in cycles before, Wood has become the public face of this market’s moment, personifying the crazy gains in crypto, fintech, cloud computing and biotech stocks. And Tesla, especially Tesla, where she made a ridiculous, moonshot of a call that proved to be 100% right. (More on that later.) Wood isn’t just a money manager though, she is literally an evangelist for these companies and the new technological world she sees them ushering in.
If you follow the markets, you probably know about ARK, which has become the “It” investment house on Wall Street, albeit far from a typical one. ARK is known for its ETFs (or exchange traded funds), the most famous being a “disruptive innovation” ETF (ticker ARKK), which has run circles around the stock market averages, up 152% last year and over 45% every year on average over the past five years. Early last month, Bloomberg reported that “Ark’s exchange-traded fund assets under management crossed $50 billion this week, up from only $3.6 billion at this time last year.”
