In early 2018, a US-based hedge fund owner had said on national television that she expects Tesla’s stock to hit $4,000 by 2023. This statement came at a time when the electric carmaker was facing tremendous issues in terms of production and quality control. It was also in the middle of a liquidity crunch that made many believe that the Elon Musk-led company might go belly up soon.

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Tesla was then trading at $300/share and the prediction met with a lot of ridicule. Not many thought it would come true.

In January 2021, Ark Invest founder & CEO Cathie Wood’s prediction did come true. That is, two years earlier than what was predicted when Tesla closed at $816 or $4,080 on a split-adjusted basis. Moreover, Wood is forever bullish on Tesla and says that someday it will be valued at over $3 trillion.

Wood is one of the most popular fund managers of current times. Her company funds innovative projects like self-driving cars and genomics and also places heavy bets on companies working in sectors like alternative-energy businesses, space exploration and digital currencies.

Wood is also a vocal supporter of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency. In an interview with Bloomberg, she said she expects Bitcoin will someday reach the price of $500,000. Last month the hedge fund owner joined Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, two of the biggest supporters of Bitcoin, at the B-Word Conference for a discussion on cryptocurrency.

She also has a ubiquitous presence on social media and television channels. She has a tremendous following on social media with one million followers on Twitter. Her fans on social media refer to her with nicknames like “Mamma Cathie,” “Aunt Cathie” and, “Money Tree” in South Korea.

Whenever she invests in a stock, her loyal fans follow. Over the past few days, three funds operated by Wood invested 6.5 million shares of Robinhood Financial Markets which led to the stock surge by 45 percent.

The 65-year-old is an alumna of the University of Southern California and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance and Economics. She studied under the tutelage of Art Laffer, who later became her mentor. Laffer is the inventor of the Laffer Curve, which studies the relation between tax rates and tax revenue.

Her career in finance began four decades ago with the Capital Group. She founded ARK in 2014 with the aim to package active stock portfolios in an Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) format. Her ARK Innovation ETF was up 149 percent in 2020 owing to her grand bets on companies like Tesla, Zoom Video, Teladoc Health and Roku. ARK has collected close to $45 billion across eight ETFs, up from just $3.3 billion at the beginning of 2020.

(Edited by : Kanishka Sarkar)

First Published:Aug 7, 2021 2:16 PM IST