The Anti-ARK (or Anti-Cathie Woods) ETF

Over the past few years, Cathie Woods has made a name for herself. It started with her ARK Invest flagship Exchange Traded Fund the ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), which returned an astonishing 45% annually for five years straight. Her other Ark Invest funds had similar success, and regularly these funds would rank in the top 10 of the best performing non-leveraged equity ETFs investors could buy.

Cathie became more of a household name when she not only went on CNBC years ago and said she thought Tesla was a $2,000 stock (this was prior to Tesla splitting), and she was proven correct. When she made this claim, her Ark funds were doing well, but most investment insiders thought she was crazy and that her prediction for Tesla would never come true. So, when she was proven correct, everyone started watching what she was doing and either trying to copy her or attempting to bet against her.

Copying what she was doing was and still is easy since her fund publishes the daily trades they made during the previous session. Not only do they publish the stocks they sold and bought, but how many shares of each company they traded. For a time, the morning show on CNBC would review her previous days' trades and discuss whether or not they agreed with what her funds were buying and selling.

Some would say that Cathie's luck has now run out because while for years she had some of the top-performing ETFs, 2021 has not been so kind to her. Continue reading "The Anti-ARK (or Anti-Cathie Woods) ETF"

Using ETFs To Help You Cherry Pick Stocks

Cathie Woods and her ARK Invest group of funds are changing the way investors look at Exchange Traded Funds in a number of ways. Whether it's from the standpoint of high-performing funds or innovative investment strategies that are looking years or even decades down the road, what Cathie and her team are doing is extraordinary. But what may be the biggest and most important innovation ARK is bringing to the investment community is the transparency her funds have shown investors.

ARK Invest gives investors the stocks they are buying. Well, every fund does that. But what ARK does, is they give you their stock buys and sells on a daily basis. Yes daily.

Furthermore, they tell you the exact amount of shares they bought or sold, the amount of money they spent (which allows you to determine the average cost), and which one of the ARK funds the shares were bought or sold in.

This is a big change from the way most funds operate, in which they post quarterly or monthly their holding list, number of shares, and percent that the company makes up in the fund based on assets under management.

While what Cathie and ARK are doing is ideal, investors can still use the information other funds provide in order to ‘cherry pick’ stocks in certain industry’s that they believe will do better than others. While this idea may not be for all investors, it is something that investors who prefer to buy individual equities, as opposed to going down the ‘fund’ route, can still use ETFs and other funds to their advantage, without ever owning them. Continue reading "Using ETFs To Help You Cherry Pick Stocks"