MW Cathie Wood's highflying ARK ETF just entered a bear market--a sign of the times?
By Mark DeCambre
ARK Investment, one of the fastest-growing fund managers in 2020, just saw its flagship company enter a bear market, highlighting a brisk selloff in growthy, technology-related stocks amid a persistent rise in interest rates.
Led by CEO and founder Cathie Wood, ARK Innovation(ARKK) fell some 6.3% on Wednesday, pushing the exchange-traded fund down 20% from its peak at $156.58 put in on Feb. 12, representing the commonly used definition for a bear market used by market technicians.
The ARK Innovation ETF boasts assets of $24.6 billion, but its focus on buzzy companies including Tesla Inc. $(TSLA)$, Square Inc. $(SQ)$, Teladoc Health Inc. (TDOC), Zillow Group $(ZG)$ and Roku Inc. (ROKU) have proved a boon--and now a bane for the fund.
The decline for ARKK comes as the Nasdaq Composite tumbled 2.7% and marked the worst two-day skid for the tech-laden index since Sept. 8, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Investors have been eschewing tech in favor of so-called value stocks, those that are considered undervalued by some metric, against growth stocks, which have shown a record of outgrowing peers.
A rise in the 10-year Treasury note yield to around 1.47% on Wednesday has underpinned the rotation out of tech and tech-related companies and into energy and financials, which are expected to perform better as the economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tech names are more vulnerable to a pullback in a higher rate regime because those stocks don't tend to offer a yield and they also are an area that is considered overvalued by some measures.
Wood is known for targeting investments in growthy names and disruptive innovations. Over the past year, ARK has seen the assets under its seven exchange-traded funds explode by more than 10-fold .
But now investors are questioning how the highflying fund manager will respond to richer yields and a shift to underappreciated companies as vaccine rollouts and the expectation for COVID aid packages help drive bets to the less-loved sectors of the market.
Wood told CNBC s. Reports also indicated that she bought more Tesla as the electric-vehicle maker's shares slumped.
Ark Innovation's shares are down 8.6% so far this week, hanging onto a less than 1% year-to-date gain. By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 2.2% so far in 2021, the S&P 500 index is up 1.7% and the Nasdaq Composite Index is up 0.8% after being hammered over the past few sessions.
-Mark DeCambre; 415-439-6400; AskNewswires@dowjones.com
$(END)$ Dow Jones Newswires
March 03, 2021 17:04 ET (22:04 GMT)
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