It’s been a tough few years for Cathie Wooden. As soon as a thought chief and Bitcoin visionary who reached dizzying heights through her ARK Make investments funds, she’s now tallying losses that attain nicely into 11 figures.
On Might 27, 2021, Wooden was at her peak of fame. Her starry-eyed projections of futuristic AI, healthcare, crypto, and automation applied sciences earned her a spot on the duvet of Bloomberg’s Businessweek journal.
In line with the editors of the double challenge with a print circulation of 325,000, she was the “The Believer” who was promoting “a future so fantastic you’ll beg her to take your money.”
Nonetheless, since 2021, when she predicted that bitcoin (BTC) would rally to $1 million inside 9 years, shares of Wooden’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) have misplaced 59% of their worth.
As she misplaced cash, she raised her BTC forecast to $1.5 million, however her BTC investments did not stem the declining tide.
ARK Innovation ETF: 71% under all-time excessive
By the top of 2023, Morningstar tallied Wooden’s losses utilizing 11 greenback figures, declaring that “the ARK family wiped out an estimated $14.3 billion in shareholder value over the trailing 10-year period — more than twice as much as the second-worst fund family.”
ARK Make investments was additionally one of many only a few corporations that purchased shares in digital asset-related corporations like Coinbase. Sadly, lots of these investments declined.
As an example, analysts estimated that ARK Make investments’s ETFs misplaced $280 million when it bought 1.42 million Coinbase shares (COIN) in July 2022.
ARK Make investments additionally owned 4.3 million shares of the ProShares Bitcoin Technique ETF as of December 27, 2023, value $92 million. Those self same shares impute a worth of simply $86 million as of Tuesday’s closing worth.
The corporate can also be a well-known purchaser of so-called Magnificent Seven shares like Tesla, Amazon, and NVIDIA, which have been struggling just lately amid Donald Trump’s tariff vacillations and market uncertainty.
Wooden additionally invested in Block, SoFi, GitLab, AMD, The Commerce Desk, Roku, Shopify, and PagerDuty through her Ark Make investments funds — all of that are detrimental year-to-date.
Cathie Wooden, the bitcoin believer
ARKK, the biggest ETF Wooden manages, has misplaced one-fifth of its worth for the reason that begin of the yr.
Her ARK Genomic Revolution ETF and ARK Fintech Innovation ETF have each misplaced 10% over the identical time interval whereas her ARK Subsequent Era Web ETF has declined 14%.
Even her ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF is barely detrimental year-to-date. As of publication time, BTC is 94% shy of Wooden’s $1.5 million worth prediction.
