The rise and fall of Cathie Wood, controversial Wall Street investor
&gt; Wood’s flagship fund, the ARK Innovation ETF, had lost roughly half of its value over the prior year, as its aggressive bets on hot companies from Coinbase to Robinhood and Tesla had melted down amid a bear market in tech stocks.<p>It&#x27;s important to note what this really means. You can have 4 years of 20% returns and if the last year you&#x27;re down 50%, you gave back nearly everything you&#x27;ve ever made, assuming you had no new money come in those years, otherwise even more. The max drawdown is whats important. You can almost always make money writing out of the money call options, except the one year where you give back everything you&#x27;ve made and then some. As expected:<p>&gt; Her ARK Innovation fund, often known by its ticker as ARKK, returned some 157 percent during that first year of the pandemic, compared to just 18 percent for the S&amp;P 500 as a whole... Wood’s fund is now exactly where it was in March 2020, meaning pandemic investors who bet on her have now round-tripped all the way up and all the way back down. Adjusting for inflation, they have lost money.<p>Cathie Wood is one of those investors that just makes directional bets, in her case high growth tech stocks. They happened to do well last 5 years or so, so it appears that Cathie has done well. But same as someone who just plowed a bunch of money into Bitcoin in 2012, it doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re a good investor or you have anything interesting to share today.<p>I read her Twitter occasionally and found her very unimpressive. For instance, she made some uninformed comments about &quot;velocity of money&quot; decreasing and that&#x27;s the reason we won&#x27;t have inflation (this was during the &quot;transitory&quot; phase of inflation denial). Then she had some ridiculous examples of things actually going down in price like AI training costs, which should balance things out. It was so comical it could have been on the show Silicon Valley.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mleverything.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;cathie-wood-inflation-and-velocity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mleverything.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;cathie-wood-inflation-an...</a>