These are the 10 fund-management firms that lost the most money in the past decade. You'll never guess No. 1.

MW These are the 10 fund-management firms that lost the most money in the past decade. You'll never guess No. 1.

By Joseph Adinolfi

Losing money during a roaring bull market is quite a feat. But these 10 fund managers have made it look almost easy.

A team of analysts at Morningstar last week published a ranking of the fund-management shops that have incinerated the most investor capital over the past decade.

Their analysis focused not only on the worst-performing managers of mutual funds or exchange-traded products, but also the 15 mutual funds, or exchange-traded products, believed to be the worst offenders - although a few categories were excluded from their analysis. Their income payouts complicated Morningstar's analysis, the team said.

The worst-performing manager? Cathie Wood's ARK Invest. The shop, best known for betting on companies like Tesla Inc. $(TSLA)$, Roku Inc. (ROKU) and Block Inc. $(XYZ)$ , has destroyed $13.4 billion over the past decade, according to Morningstar's calculations.

        Fund family      Value destroyed over the past decade 
   ARK                                        ($13.36 billion) 
   Kraneshares                                 ($6.66 billion) 
   Barclays                                    ($4.34 billion) 
   AdvisorShares                               ($2.71 billion) 
   GlobalX                                     ($1.78 billion) 
   ETF Managers                                ($1.21 billion) 
   Amplify                                   ($998.36 million) 
   Brookfield                                ($730.57 million) 
   LJM Funds                                 ($606.60 million) 
   Eagle MLP                                 ($361.92 million) 
   Source: Morningstar 

That shouldn't come as a surprise to regular readers of the financial press. Wood earned widespread notoriety during the COVID-19-era stock-market boom as many of her firm's biggest holdings soared.

Her flagship, the ARK Innovation ETF ARKK, rallied nearly 150% in 2020. But by the end of 2021, Wood's hot streak had fizzled. The innovation fund ended that year down 24%, before tallying a brutal 67% drop during the 2022 bear market.

Morningstar's list of the worst-performing funds was populated mostly by inverse or leveraged products, or funds betting on notoriously hard-hit assets, like Chinese stocks - although this latter group has enjoyed something of a renaissance lately.

The ProShares UltraPro Short QQQ ETF SQQQ took the top spot - hardly a surprise for a fund that aims to move in the opposite direction of the Nasdaq-100 NDX to the tune of 3X daily leverage.

The ProShares Ultra VIX Short-Term Futures ETF UVXY came in second place, also hardly surprising given that the fund offers 1.5X leveraged-long exposure to futures tied to the Cboe Volatility Index. Wall Street's "fear gauge" has been mostly subdued over the past decade, aside from a few short-lived blowups, like during the March 2020 COVID-19 crash, and the Aug. 5 global stock-market selloff sparked by the unwind of the yen carry trade.

But the ARK Innovation still took third place, which is surprising, given that U.S.-listed technology stocks have done pretty well over the past decade.

ARK Invest didn't respond to a request for comment from MarketWatch.

-Joseph Adinolfi

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March 26, 2025 09:09 ET (13:09 GMT)

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