"I have been following NVIDIA throughout my career. It is a stock with very strong cyclicality." - For this reason, "Wood Sister" missed out on earning one billion US dollars!
On the eve of the AI boom, Cathy Wood significantly reduced her holdings in NVIDIA, with an average selling price of only $146. However, as of Friday's close, NVIDIA's stock price has soared to around $1100 per share, nearly 8 times higher than the average selling price by Ark Invest
Driven by the artificial intelligence boom, NVIDIA's stock price has surged more than 6 times this year. However, the biggest winner of this round of market rally does not include the former tech stock star fund manager Cathie Wood (Wood Sister).
Regulatory filings show that in the first quarter of this year, Wood Sister chose to continue selling NVIDIA, selling 81,239 shares. As of March 31, Wood Sister's ARK Investment Management held 67,000 shares of NVIDIA, worth about $75 million.
Over the past year, despite NVIDIA's stock price hitting new highs, Wood Sister has continued to sell NVIDIA, causing ARK Investment Management to miss out on over $1.2 billion in huge returns.
Before the AI investment frenzy sparked by ChatGPT in November last year, ARK Investment Management sold 859,000 shares of NVIDIA at an average price of only $146. As of the Friday close, NVIDIA's stock price has soared to around $1,100 per share, nearly 8 times higher than the average price at which ARK Investment Management sold.
Even when NVIDIA's market value was only $575 billion at the beginning of 2023, Wood Sister still believed that the stock was overvalued. She once said:
We think NVIDIA is a good stock, but for ARK, its valuation is a bit high.
And now, NVIDIA's market value has soared to $2.8 trillion.
According to Stockcircle's data, ARK Investment Management started buying NVIDIA in the fourth quarter of 2016, with an estimated average price of around $81.
Behind Wood Sister's cautious attitude towards the AI investment frenzy lies her concerns about the sustainability of this round of market rally and NVIDIA's high valuation.
In an interview with the media this year, she said:
I have been paying attention to NVIDIA, which is a very cyclical stock. Whenever everyone rushes in excitedly, there is often repeated ordering, and then in the end, there will be inventory adjustments.
Currently, NVIDIA does face pressure from overcapacity. Not long ago, some data center companies in the United States paused new GPU chip orders, leading NVIDIA to lower its revenue expectations for this year, causing its stock price to plummet by 20% at one point. If this situation persists, it may also cast a shadow over NVIDIA's high valuation.
However, investors clearly still believe in the long-term prospects of the AI wave and NVIDIA's leading position as a GPU company. Several Wall Street investment banks have recently raised their target prices for NVIDIA, believing that the stock still has room to rise.
Wood Sister's caution has greatly weakened the profit effect of ARK Investment Management on NVIDIA, and she has also failed to capture better investment opportunities. So far, she has redeployed the proceeds from selling NVIDIA stocks into other AI targets, but most of the results have been disappointing.
It is evident that regardless of the credibility of the investment logic, the decision to sell NVIDIA undoubtedly once again plunged Wood Sister into a vortex of doubt. This fund manager, known as the "mother of tech stocks," was once highly praised for her early optimism on emerging tech tracks such as Tesla and Bitcoin. However, her concentrated bets on venture capital and decentralized finance in the past year or two, as well as repeatedly missing opportunities in mainstream tech stocks, have increasingly drawn criticism from the industry After reaching a peak of $59 billion in 2021, the management scale of Ark Investment Management has experienced a significant decline due to tightening monetary policies. Currently, the management scale is around $11.1 billion, representing an 81% decrease from its peak