So far, she’s been wrong — her main fund is down another 34 percent since her comments — but her firm still has more than $16 billion in assets, according to fund-tracker Morningstar. While that’s a fraction of the $40 billion ARK had in March (a figure the firm still lists on its website), it means Wood’s pool of money is still roughly the same size as major hedge funds like Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square. (Wood declined to comment for this article.) In the realm of Wall Street, Wood is an unusual creature: Not only is she a rare female portfolio manager, but she was also an outlier in her nearly boundless optimism about the riskiest investments on the market, including cryptocurrency and Tesla, which four years ago she (correctly) predicted would go up more than 1,000 percent. Last fall, she put a $500,000 price target on bitcoin, then — as bitcoin’s price cratered — raised it to $1 million a few months later.
Wood’s willingness to make such calls so far ahead of reality — and so out of step with Wall Street’s old guard — has earned her a rockstar reputation among stonks-obsessed retail investors, making her a mascot for buy-the-f***ing-dip Robinhood traders, some of whom have dubbed her “Cathie Bae” on Reddit. In an industry loath to make guarantees about the future, Wood’s brand was like price-prediction porn: To hear her talk was to feel your mind liquefy in a clickbait-like flood of dopamine-inducing buzzwords — her portfolio a cornucopia of self-driving cars, crypto, genomic cancer cures, AI, streaming, and gaming. She told risk-drunk investors exactly what they wanted to hear. In her view, it seemed, tech stocks only went up and to the right.
