Cathie Woodchief of Ark Funding Administration, likes to commerce round earnings season.
Typically, Wooden provides or sells shares proper after their earnings. Typically, she makes strikes days forward of outcomes, betting on potential beneficial properties. That’s what she simply did, shopping for shares of a megacap tech agency forward of its earnings subsequent week.
In 2025, the flagship Ark Innovation ETF gained 35.49%, far outpacing the S&P 500’s return of 17.88% in the identical interval. To this point this 12 months, Wooden’s flagship Ark Innovation ETF (SHEET) is up 1.84% 12 months to this point, whereas the S&P 500 surged 4.27%, Yahoo Finance data exhibits.
Wooden gained a status after the Ark Innovation ETF delivered a 153% return in 2020. However her type additionally brings painful losses in bearish markets, as seen in 2022, when the Ark Innovation ETF tumbled greater than 60%.
These swings have weighed on Wooden’s long-term beneficial properties. As of April 21, the Ark Innovation ETF has delivered a five-year annualized return of -8.52%whereas the S&P 500 has an annualized return of 12.73% over the identical interval, in keeping with knowledge from Morningstar.
Wooden focuses on high-tech firms throughout synthetic intelligence, blockchainbiomedical know-how, and robotics. She thinks these companies have robust progress potential, although their volatility typically causes fluctuations within the Ark’s funds.
From 2014 to 2024, the Ark Innovation ETF worn out $7 billion in investor wealth, in keeping with a March 2025 evaluation by Morningstar’s analyst Amy Arnott. That made it the third-biggest wealth destroyer amongst mutual funds and ETFs in Arnott’s rating. The analyst hasn’t up to date the 2025 rating outflows.
In a March Bloomberg podcastWooden says the worldwide financial system just isn’t heading right into a downturn, however into what she calls a “nice acceleration” pushed by AI and different breakthrough applied sciences.
“We’re not going into the Great Depressionwe’re going into the nice acceleration,” Wooden stated, pointing to how previous technological revolutions reshaped financial progress.
Related: Cathie Wood buys $2.5 million of tumbling megacap stock
She famous that international actual GDP progress averaged simply 0.6% between 1500 and 1900, earlier than the Industrial Revolution lifted it to round 3% for greater than a century. Now, she argues, a brand new wave of innovation may push progress a lot increased.
“We expect (applied sciences) are going to take progress into the 7 to eight% vary,” Wooden stated, including that the quantity may very well be conservative.
Wooden additionally famous that AI is driving down prices throughout industries.
