Cathie Woods Arche has lost almost $ 50 billion in assets since the highlight in 2021

Cathie Woods Ark Investment Management has lost almost $ 50 billion in assets from his stock market trades in 2021, which illustrates the extent of this year's losses in speculative technology stocks.

According to Morningstar data, the total assets of the nine ETFs from ARK from a maximum of $ 60.3 billion in February broke out to $ 11.4 billion. This was led by strong declines in his flagship Ark Disruptive Innovation ETF, known under his ticker Arkk, which has lost around two thirds of its value this year and is on the way to his worst annual performance.

"The results of ARK Innovation were horrendous this year and very disappointing for investors," says Robby Greengold, a strategist at Morningstar, who downgraded the ETF from "neutral" to "negative".

The steep decline shows how growth investors such as Wood were caught on the wrong foot this year when the US Federal Reserve and other central banks ended a decades of cheap money with interest rate increases to combat inflation.

This has led to a sale in technology stocks, especially in the case of rapidly growing and loss -making companies that are particularly susceptible to interest rate increases that reduce their potential future returns. Investors have invested in value shares that appear cheap compared to key figures such as book value and profit.

Arkk is the largest of a group of strategies that combine an ETF structure with the possibility to select shares. Wood tries to identify the handful of companies that can achieve exponential profits through the design of the future and covers areas that range from space research and fintech to robotics and the genomic revolution.

The shares of the flagship Arkk fell by about 65 percent this year, remain at a five -year low and develop worse than the technology -heavy Nasdaq Composite, which has lost 32 percent in the same period.

The losses of ARKK led to a decline in the managed assets from a maximum of $ 27.9 billion in February 2021 to USD 6.4 billion. The decline in assets was only due to evaluation declines in its investment portfolio: The ETF actually has a total of 1.4 billion

"A great cause of the underperformance was a stylistic nature.. Growth stocks have suffered worldwide and substance values ​​were more resistant," said Green.

Greengold added that Arkk "represents the canary in the coal mining for the change of regime because he began his descent in February 2021" and the first of many prominent growth funds, including Baillie Giffords Scottish Mortgage and Chase Colemans Tiger Global, who suffered high losses.

WOOD, 67, founded in St. Petersburg, Florida, local asset manager Ark Investment Management in 2014. She is known for her large, concentrated bets on "disruptive innovation" and its borderline, unusual predictions to everything, from shares of the electric car manufacturer Tesla to the price of Bitcoin and their experienced handling of social media.

"Cathie Wood is very gullible-as long as there is a good story that suits something, she is ready to believe it," said Ramin Nakisa, a former UBS analyst who is now heading the advisory company Pensioncraft. "You have to ask yourself whether you have put the evaluation, the market share and the potential profitability of companies through its paces."

Arkk rose by 149 percent in 2020, when pandemic increased the excitement of investors through the technologies that underpin his Portfolios-DNA sequencing, robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence and blockchain. After a loss of 24 percent last year, the fund continued in 2022.

The three largest positions of ARKK are the video communication platform ZOOM, a COVID-19 winner, who then gave up his profits from the Pandemie period; Exact sciences, a provider of molecular cancer screening and prognostic tests; And the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, whose shares have fallen by more than 60 percent this year.

WOOD is also a loud supporter of cryptocurrencies. This year the price of Bitcoin fell by more than 60 percent to $ 16,800, in the middle of the collapse of several large crypto hedge funds, stock exchanges and lenders, including Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, Blockfi and FTX.

In a Bloomberg interview last month, Wood confirmed her forecast that Bitcoin will reach USD 1 million by 2030. . . To see the survivors, ”she said. Ark has doubled many of his investments, acquired more shares in the Coinbase crypto exchange and increased its participations in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and the crypto-oriented lender Silvergate Capital.

Ark rejected a statement. Wood defended her approach in an investor comment at the beginning of this month, in which she argued that disruptive innovations were both inefficient and undervalued.

"The companies in which we invest, sacrifice short -term profits to benefit from exponential growth and highly profitable opportunities that create a number of innovation platforms," ​​she said, adding that "long -term profitability and companies that are described as" profit -free technology "will be shaped in the shade, the short -term shareholders with short -term Have served stocks and dividends at the expense of investments in the future. ”