Show HN: I built a comprehensive Ark ETF tracker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a comprehensive Ark ETF tracker

cathiesark.com

Looking at the 13F filings is also a great way to track what Ark and other investors (like Buffett) are investing in: https://cheaperthanguru.com/portfolio/cathie-wood

Not really. 13F filings are quarterly with a 45 day delay. ETF holdings are published daily with no delay on the Issuers website.

Eh, my buddy runs a hedge fund that uses aggregate 13F info to generate alpha. Individually 13F filings may not be accurate, but taken together they can be very valuable.

If there's any trade its a "mean reverting" one - would be my educated guess.

Very cool! The weight rankings over time and performance views you have are awesome. I actually just started git-scraping [1] Ark's EOD holdings a few weeks ago [2] (although I'm not scraping trades out of emails since I couldn't find a trivial way to integrate them into my scraper)

I wanted to be able to justify to a friend that despite 10% of their entire portfolio oftentimes being TSLA they ARE selling shares as it goes up so it's not their ONLY holding :D

[1] Git Scraping Article that inspired me https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/

[2] My ark holdings scraper (and the data) https://github.com/tigger0jk/ark-invest-scraper

They are profit taking, for sure.

More accurately they are selling because they cannot hold (by mandate) too much weight into a single asset. So if they really like an asset they will take their maximum position and sell as it goes up even though they would like to hold on to it.

Never heard of Ark. I checked out their site but can anyone give me some context on why they're notable?

Just a stock noob, but they are an investment company which markets things like ETFs for buying baskets of stocks. They are known for being big proponents of Tesla stock before it blew up. Now they seem to be considered thought leaders on what is the next tech stock to achieve Tesla-like returns.

Tesla is 9% of their portfolio. Tesla has a P/E of over 1000. It seems incredibly risky to hold Tesla now.

It's their strongest conviction holding. They're limited to 10% exposure to any 1 company...

Tesla is expected to 4x it’s revenue in 2 years. So in 2 years that could be a much lower PE. Maybe try a PEG ratio or discounted future cash flows

Do you expect $TSLA to stagnate for the next two years then?

No, you’re misinterpreting it. I don’t expect Tesla’s growth to be flat for 2 years and then 4x in 1 quarter; that would be insane.

I think parent is talking about the price of Tesla's stock, since your comment seems to suggest that this growth is already priced into Tesla's stock price, meaning that, based on that reason alone, Tesla's stock price is unlikely to increase in the next two years unless it exceeds even those targets.

Ark creates ETFs that focus entirely on publicly-traded future tech companies. They operate in four segments: Genomics, Robotics, Internet, and FinTech.

You will find very few, if any, companies in the Ark ETFs that would be considered "safe" picks for most investors. This is a testament to the nature of choosing companies working on the forefront of technological breakthroughs.

My summary spin on what they're doing is picking companies working on "what will be" as opposed to "what is".

Wright's Law is their guiding light. Worth a Wikipedia browse.

> You will find very few, if any, companies in the Ark ETFs that would be considered "safe" picks for most investors.

That is an understatement! This table looks like a wallstreetbets word cloud!

Seriously? People aren’t investing in companies like Tesla, Square, Twilio, Paypal? That’s being unreasonably conservative.

Tesla at nearly 10% is unreasonable for an ETF. I hope it’s so overweight because of appreciation rather than active buying.

ARKK (and maybe their other ETFs) are capped at 10% per individual holding. They take profits when the holding becomes overweight. Cathie Wood has said she would hold more TSLA if she could. I don't know when or how they plan to exit if things start to go sideways.

Hold more if she could? Not according to this interview.

If we had not taken profits in its ride up from [$]178 to 900 or nearly 1,000, it would’ve been ... maybe over 20% of the fund,” she said. “That would not be wise portfolio management. We like to control our position sizes.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/22/ark-invest-ceo-why-weve-sold...

You know, I thought I heard her say that in an interview, but I can't seem to find it. I might be wrong on this one.

They are notable for being good (or lucky) stock pickers bullish on trendy futuristic tech.

They also have mounted an unprecedented marketing campaign that breaks away from typical Wall st old boy's club or stodgy retirement advisor style to masquerade as a tech company. Just compare: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com, https://www.youtube.com/c/Arkinvest2015/videos

ARK Invest for those not familiar: https://ark-invest.com/

I'm surprised to see Roku as such a big holding for them. I wonder what their thesis. Apparently I'm not the only one confused by this https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/f3my4w/why_would...

https://investorplace.com/2020/08/roku-stock-is-poised-for-l...

It's not like they bought it big. It grew up. Same as TSLA.

But they've kept it as a big portion of their holdings, which means they believe it still has more to go.

Ark dropped all their shares in Illumina because they didn't see that company as continuing it's growth rate.

Yeah Roku confuses me more than any of the other holdings but apparently it has also outperformed the S&P500 so it turned out to be a good pick.

The basic thesis is: As more people quit cable, advertising dollars move from cable TV to ad supported content on Roku.

As someone who is kicking himself every day for turning down a job with Roku a while back...

I think the impression is that Roku has built a durable brand and will continue to capitalize on it going forward. Roku has not generated much profit yet, but AFAICT their expenditures are low and they can scale quite well. They are part device mfg and part advertising company, and we all know the market loves ad companies(Facebook, Google, etc).

As a cynical embedded guy who has worked in settop boxes for the last 20 years, I see them as having easily replaceable tech and facing stiff competition from Amazon, Google and Apple(along with unforeseen foreign competitors) in the future. I specifically avoided them because I thought they were a flash in the pan(well, it was also a brogrammer shop and I wanted to avoid that).

I think they've proven themselves to have some staying power, but I think their current valuation, like a lot of the market, is just flat out silly.

> As someone who is kicking himself every day for turning down a job with Roku a while back...

Same here.

I am not too bothered. Reflecting on the decision, I think the prestige of working at Google is the main reason I turned down Roku. And precisely because that Roku is a promising company, because they are focused on building a business, not building a prestige, for example, a fancy office.

That's one good lesson to learn from this event. Good enough for me.

A high percentage of tvs come with roku built in now. They have benefited greatly from the stay at home trend. There was actually an acronym ZARP for this, Zoom Amazon, Roku, Peloton.

This is all useful information. Roku has always been a bit puzzling to me. Might be because I don't use it and therefore don't understand the functionality.

Do you feel like Ark will be able to perform as well as they had in the past in the upcoming years?

Like how does Ark do it? How are they able to perform way better than other investors? Isn't there a mental model that sooner or later they wouldn't be able to have returns higher than market returns

Disclaimer: I do hold ARK shares and options

I don’t know.

Early Jan could be sketchy as people sell their best performers to defer taxes on their high gainers.

I would be surprised if ARK didn’t outperform the market average over any 3 year period. But I also worry about Cathie and her team’s continuing motivation after Resolute and Kelso & Company took control of Ark Invest. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cathie and her team issued a new set of replacement ticker symbols under a new name.

Disclaimer: I do hold ARK shares and some bullish options positions.

I agree I think she will start a new company to regain control of her own work.

their conviction on bitcoin, tesla, etc has been a significant driver of their returns. if they can continue being so prescient about controversial investments remains to be seen. not taking any credit away from them - their performance nothing short of phenomenal.

one thing they definitely get right is risk control/management - they cap individual holdings to 10%, so it provides profit-taking and cuts down single-holding risk by design

> Isn't there a mental model that sooner or later they wouldn't be able to have returns higher than market returns

Reversion to the mean.

Also survivorship bias: at any given point there is a hotshot fund that outperforms the market, but fast forward five years and it's probably a different fund that did well, and the hotshot fund is underperforming the market, but nobody talks about them anymore.

All that matters is that there is a new golden child to fill financial news bandwith and get people shuffling their money around so the croupier gets paid.

Of course there are outliers like Rentech, but Cathie Wood is not Jim Simons.

Huh, totally forgot about Jim Simons. Thanks for some of the insights, thats a good point

Also thanks for the reminder, funny how following the latest trends and putting my focus onto those kinda made me forgot about all the other hot shots from the past that faded from the spotlight

Thank you for this! I’m curious if there are products (or interest in products) where people can mirror portfolio of these etf/famous investors at a much smaller expense ratio. This can be done with a combination of data aggregation + alpaca api.

I think there is a site in the UK called eToro where you can do this. I'm not sure if that's what they do, but it's something along those lines.

Either way, it's a good idea. You might run into regulatory issues but I'm sure it would find a market

Yes, I'm interested. I was thinking along the same lines.

M1 Finance at least lets you set up a portfolio by weight, instead of individual trades: https://www.m1finance.com/

I believe they have an API, so you could automate it.

Cool site and visuals.

Do the trades reflect re-weights? Or do they reflect money flows (creations and redemptions) into the fund?

Also for the performance heatmap it would be cool to normalize performance to the return of the S&P or of the ETF itself over that same time frame.

The trades... great question. They reflect re-weights, so could be profit taking, a change in conviction, etc. They do not reflect creations and redemptions. The purple line on each positions holding page (https://cathiesark.com/arkk-holdings-of-roku) does reflect creations and redemptions. So that line can actually be seen as a combination for fund demand re-weights.

Second the heat map idea. I'll put it on the list, that would be interesting.

There is also a site with similar functionality. [1]

[1] arktrack.com

https://www.arktrack.com

What is with the disclaimer? Not affiliated with Cathie Wood or Ark investments.

This + the site name and branding is confusing at first glance.

Just want to be clear that the site has no affiliation with Ark Invest. It is a third-party.

The choice of words for website is unfortunate, makes it look scammy.

These ARK funds have been making some killer investments. I'm so excited about the companies in ARKG and PRNT.

It's going to be an interesting decade. ARKG is probably the least understood of them all.

Do you mean underestimated or overestimated?

Of the 5 ETFs ARKG is the most underestimated. Particularly, maybe entirely, by those outside of the industry and Ark community. Grasping the impact of how genomic medicine will reshape lives is too much for your average person.

That's largely the point of the ETF though, right?

Total speculation on my part... but I would predict that the average life span is pushed to 100+ by 2050. Largely on the back of genomics.

Instead of editing...

Differentiating life span and health span is worthwhile here. It might not be great to live to 100. But if your quality years (health span) are increased it will be. That is the primary promise of genomics, secondary is life span.

Do you think Tesla will roll out an autonomous taxi service in the next few years? It seems that ARK believes this to be the case. I'm wondering how much their conviction on Tesla is based on this leap in tech.

https://ark-invest.com/articles/analyst-research/teslas-auto...

It reads like a list of trends from 2017.

FYI: On the holdings plots I see "invalid date" on all of the x-axis labels

https://cathiesark.com/arkk-holdings-of-tsla

Ah yes, thanks for pointing it out. I suspect you're on Safari. Just tinkered with those dates yesterday. Tech note: momentjs isn't foolproof when it comes to Safari

I am also getting it on Firefox

Thanks for the heads up. Fix is going out shortly

Appears to be fixed now. Good job and thank you.

Is there a discord for anyone who wants to work on algotrading together?

This discord is from the r/algotrading sticky: https://discord.com/invite/86a5SGh

The real question. Remove tsla from arkk, how well did they perform?

Likely still better than the S&P500 and the Nasdaq 100. Hopefully someone else commenting will answer.

I can't tell you all time, but in the a last 60 trading sessions ARKK has gained 21%. This is the breakdown... https://cathiesark.com/arkk/performance

Thanks for building this!

Sure thing!

Do you update the share prices every day? How do you get the data?

The data is updated every day. They are actively managed so they'll send trade data via email if you request it.

ARK publishes their "balance sheets" daily. I noticed that they update them usually around 6:30PM central. So you're basically just comparing with previous day's data to find deltas.

They update their holdings every day at https://ark-funds.com/investor-resources - I've been scraping that to https://github.com/tigger0jk/ark-invest-scraper for almost a month now (I did not make this website).

They also will email you daily trade notifications if you request them: https://ark-funds.com/subscribe (I'm not scraping those)

Damn I didn't realize that ant design could look so clean

The website looks good, but you should change the name. It gives the wrong impression that it is associated with them.

Do you how can we mirror this tracker automatically? My broker doesn't support the ark etf

this is great. Before, i was just getting the ARKK emails and trying to "feel" what they are accumulating and selling.

Glad you're finding it useful!

thank you, what your view for ARK as first investment ?

What difference does it make being your first, second, hundredth, or thousandth investment?

It depends on what your goals are and how you rank those goals.

You’ll probably make more money with ARK funds but you won’t learn as much about picking stocks. Instead you’ll learn about picking ETFs.

You’re pretty likely to wake in 10 years in a world you’re happy to live in with ARK funds. Even though that’s not the primary objective like performance is, it can help you sleep better at night.

If you’re afraid of a stock market correction happening soon, SHV is likely a better short term holding for you. It’s hard for any meaningful correction to last though with QE firing up the M1 and M2 supplies.

Best to only start with money you’re willing to lose so that you have the mental fortitude to ride out the INTENSE volatility you will be experiencing in Ark’s funds.

better return than S&P500, but right now its seems so overvalued.

Tell me how you performed your valuation on the ETF

Tough to give first time investment advice. You should invest for sure, but what to invest in is largely a matter of risk tolerance and expectations. Ark is much riskier than SPY (S&P 500 Index).

My advice would be to invest in SPY and see how you feel after a few months. If you're not losing sleep and are comfortable with the ups and down maybe move into a more niche basket of positions, Ark being one of them.

Really well made!

Thank you!

Wow!

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