By Zoe
ARK Investment has recently become a huge player in the ETF industry due to its wildly optimistic price target for Tesla. Its founder Catherine Wood is even called 'female Buffett'.
However, her investment preference is different from Buffett's. Wood advocates investment in transformational technologies, which she describes as "disruptive innovation", unlike Buffet, who rarely touches tech industries.
ARK currently has 5 actively managed innovation ETFs:
$Ark Autonomous Technology & Robotics Etf(ARKQ.US)$)$
$Ark Next Generation Internet ETF(ARKW.US)$
$ARK Genomic Revolution ETF(ARKG.US)$
$Ark Fintech Innovation Etf(ARKF.US)$
The performance of these funds is amazing. ARKK, the most well-known product, has an average annualized return of nearly 40% over the past five years. Moreover, all five funds have risen more than 80% in the past year. All of them have outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) and the NASDAQ 100 Index ETF (QQQ).
The top three stocks on the list of lastest trades were:
$Alibaba Group Holding Ltd(BABA.US)$ recently posted fiscal third-quarter numbers that easily beat analysts' expectations. The revenue rose 37% YoY to 221.1 billion yuan ($33.9 billion), topping estimates by $530 million. The company revealed that its cloud business, which grew 50% YoY to 16.1 billion yuan ($2.5 billion) during the quarter, was finally profitable after bleeding red ink for over a decade.
Due to the delay of Ant Financial's first IPO, Alibaba's stock declined by over 20% during the Q4. However, Polen Capital Management said in their Q4 2020 Investor Letter, that Alibaba still remains one of their highest conviction positions.
As China reorients its economy from export-driven to domestic consumption, Alibaba's platforms—Taobao and Tmall—are arguably the very best tools to achieve this. Its competitive advantages, tailwinds in digital payments, e-commerce, and cloud technologies are poised for continued growth even with potential government penalties in the future.
$Shopify Inc(SHOP.US)$ As one of the most valuable companies in Canada, Shopify provides a platform for online retailers to sell, ship, and manage their inventory as well as a point-of-sale system to manage transactions.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic drove up online buying and selling, delivering a boost to the e-commerce platform provider. More consumers and merchants turned to the Shopify platform. And the company emerged as a more potent threat to $Amazon.Com Inc(AMZN.US)$ and $Ebay Inc(EBAY.US)$. In fact, Shopify has now surpassed eBay in gross merchandise volume for two quarters in a row.
The company estimates it now has a 6% share of the U.S. e-commerce market — more than eBay, $Apple Inc(AAPL.US)$ or $Wal-Mart Stores Inc(WMT.US)$, but still below Amazon at 37%. Recent reports suggest that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is concerned about Shopify's growth trajectory.
$DraftKings Inc(DKNG.US)$ As sports-betting legalization spreads across U.S. states, DraftKings is at the forefront of the online betting industry. It is an American daily fantasy sports contest and sports betting operator.
The company allows users to enter daily and weekly fantasy sports-related contests and win money based on individual player performances in five major American sports (MLB, the NHL, the NFL, the NBA, and the PGA), Premier League and UEFA Champions League soccer, NASCAR auto racing, Canadian Football League, the XFL, mixed martial arts(MMA) and Tennis.
On Feb. 4, the company announced it expanded its exclusive daily fantasy partnership with the NFL to Canada. Previously, the deal between DraftKings and the NFL was limited to the U.S.
Please do not blindly follow ARK's trades. This is to provide you with a list of quality companies worth looking at. It is always smart to do your own due diligence before investing!