Cathy Wood, CEO of the investment management firm ARK Invest, has acquired more shares of the main cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which has lost almost 90% of its value in the last year.
The company bought roughly $5.8 million worth of COIN shares on Thursday, split between the ARK Next Generation Internet (ARKW) and ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF) ETFs, with the former holding 27,813 COIN shares and the latter 144,463 shares.
Wood’s investment management firm ARK is piling up shares of Coinbase. Last month alone, she snapped up about 800,000 Coinbase shares worth about $27 million by the end of January 5th. All of the purchases make Coinbase the #14 holding in Wood’s flagship Ark Innovation ETF ARKK.
Launched in 2019, ARKF plans to invest in equity securities of companies it believes are transforming financial services and economic transactions into technology infrastructure platforms. Square, Shopify and PayPal are the fund’s top three holdings.
Coinbase is the largest US cryptocurrency exchange. The platform went public in 2021 but since then has faced weakness in the crypto market. Coinbase stock plunges 86% in 2022
Meanwhile, Wood appears to be a bit bullish on Silvergate, having dumped more than 400,000 of the company’s shares. That leaves the fund with just 3,434 shares of Silvergate, worth a recent $37,465.
As reported, Silvergate cut its workforce by 40% in the fourth quarter of last year, when it experienced a 68% drop in crypto-related deposits. After FTX’s collapse, the company was in the banking business, forcing it to sell assets to honor an estimated $8.1 billion in customer funds.
Amidst high inflation and weak earnings, timber funds have not performed well in the past two years. For example, Cathy Wood’s ARK Innovation ARCKE in 2011. It has lost more than 60% of its value by 2022, prompting many investors to pull their money out of their funds.
However, Wood remains bullish on her investments, saying they have high potential for long-term growth. She recently tweeted he said.:
“Financial World’s ARK Invest Research and Investing is focused on and dismissive of research-based growth: it refutes our predictions of massive hidden profits in companies that sacrifice short-term profitability for demanding, highly profitable long-term growth.”
It’s worth noting that Coinbase failed to benefit from the collapse of rival platform FTX last year. In contrast, the world’s largest cryptocurrency Binance It ended with 66.7% market share in 2022 compared to 48.7% at the beginning of the year.