/rant

It is now fashionable to hail Cathie Wood now that her fund is huge. IMO she’s a great marketer and fund raiser but I get why she gets little respect as an investor. Let’s see.

If a million ppl flip a coin a 100 times, someone will get Heads 100 times, and be invited to

CNBC. In this cycle, that person is Cathie Wood. Her style as a ‘believer’ investor coincided with a time in which the market rewarded that approach, and it looks like she doesn’t realize that.

If she were saying: “the market goes through these cycles in which it gets

enamored with the future. During those times believer investors will bid story stocks and tech stocks and innovation to the moon. Believer investors will say that it’s a new paradigm, and that valuations and fundamentals don’t matter. And under the right conditions like now the

market will reward them, creating a virtuous self-reinforcing cycle. And I Cathie Wood will ride this wave to extract every ounce of flesh out of believer investors”

If she had said that, she would be thought of as the new Druckenmiller. But she’s not saying that. Instead she

behaves like the prototypical believer investor:

Her financial models are a disaster. Her business analyses are awful. Her risk mgmt is non existent. Same for portfolio mgmt. And hubris is running high - she even made a marketing video mocking investors that don’t do like her

So I predict than when this believer cycle ends, so will ARK, and so will the aura around Cathie Woods.

She had the 100 Heads in a row, and she became the genius. A believer investor with marketing skills at the right place at the right time.

Now, if she can navigate a change in market cycle and rotate into whatever is working during the next cycle, and control risk while doing so, then I will be happy to admit that I am wrong

/end rant