Confronting Cathie Wood About Her Fund’s 70% Decline

TL;DR

Cathie Wood defends her ARK Innovation ETF’s performance by citing a ~15% compound annual rate of return since inception, while acknowledging that the fund has underperformed over the last five years due to the COVID spike and supply-chain bottlenecks.

Key insights

• Wood’s firm gives its research away on social media (especially X) to “battle test” ideas and avoid “not invented here” bias, a practice she started in 2001.
• The active trading in ARKK is not day-trading but portfolio rebalancing: taking profits from winners like Tesla when they become overweight and buying back during dips, using volatility to the fund’s
• ARK’s venture fund charges a 2.75% fee with no carried interest, justified by historical top-quartile VC returns, and allows investors with $500 to access cap tables of private companies like SpaceX,