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> "She's crazy christian". "She took money from Bill Huang". "It's all fed-driven mania". "She's trading like an amateur hodler". "That guy says she doesn't know what she's doing". "clickbait-like flood of dopamine-inducing buzzwords".

You just nailed it. There was no talent, it was just pure survival bias. Out of all the portfolio combinations, someone out there was going to go with purely speculative unprofitable tech. Someone always does. ARK began in 2014 and they were too early. For several years they were mostly flat, offering meager returns.

And then again, through sheer statistical probability, that person did it at a time when the Fed went nuts, the President at the time was highly focused on the market, when the new Dot Com bubble was inflating and VCs were desperate to give anyone with an idea and the right buzz words money, and across the ocean, some guy was committing hilarious financial crimes that make Wall Street Bets seem like responsible investing. In fact Bill Huang blowing up marked the peak of speculative tech's valuation.

And it's happening again - but this time in energy and commodities, except those fund managers have all been humbled by the absolute knackering that has been the last decade. They don't go out there and talk about how WTI crude is going to trade at $500 and their projections for 50% GDP (before inflation of course). They generally just talk their book in the appropriate channels, and err on the side of cautious optimism instead of outrageous projections. Their models are also infinitely better than anything ARK has ever put out.

In summary: "there are no gurus, only market cycles".

The irony is that Bill Hwang didn't blow up because of tech bets..it was boring old media companies like Viacom and Discovery

Not if you can explain it. Listen to some podcasts where she talks about AI, Gdp growth and futuristic Societies and you will see she is not a monkey throwing darts. The thing is, the absolute favorite game of humans is hating and laughing on the failure of others.

The sad thing is that these types of hit pieces about [insert hot name here] tend to work in terms of being an article that people both click on and discuss. I try to avoid clicking into them now, and if I do happen to, I might try to block that news source unless I have seen other value from it. It's just noise.

Another tactic I have seen used a lot is that of the "if we all use the same hashtags, this is an ad, it will then spread through the ecosystem." This tactic doesn't work. If I use #StopHateCamps with every retweet and the article still gets flagged, this would be a waste of my time and effort.

I haven’t read the piece yet, but am commenting on your comparison of the AUM of Ark versus Pershing Square. Because they are different asset types (hedge fund vs ETF), I don’t think it is fair to compare the two. And, in my opinion, a hedge fund with $12bn is much more notable than an ETF with $16bn, although bravo to both of them.

For context, I’ve been a professional public markets investor for a number of years. Also, this isn’t a comment on either Ackman or Wood.

It’s also ridiculous to claim that Chanos is a one hit wonder, Enron, Wirecard, Luckin Coffee, Valeant if memory serves, any one of those is impressive. Not to mention Kynikos is designed as a market hedge, since markets tend to go up so pure shorting as an investment strategy is foolish. Cathy Wood clearly got extremely lucky by taking huge, risky bets on Bitcoin and Tesla that both paid off dramatically but are starting to come back to earth. This isn’t a hit piece, the dozens of worshipful CNBC segments where she pumped garbage companies, and often turned around and sold them after, those were the real fluff pieces.

The fund still exists, but it's a failure. Many funds lost far less money than ARKK.

ARKK was levered bet on growth stocks, and buys them at high multiples. There's no risk management. Good funds manage risk well so that it's harder for them to be cleaned up by a black swan.

Granted many fund managers don't very do well either, but at least Burry had a much better track record: https://stockcircle.com/portfolio/cathie-wood/performance https://stockcircle.com/portfolio/michael-burry/performance

> it was all so obvious that inflation, war and fed rising rates will happen, right

I'm an extremely boring passive investor who doesn't know anything about macroeconomics but I was definitely hearing people across the political spectrum warning about inflation 2 years ago. And as long as I've been on this site people have thought the Fed's interest rate was causing market distortions.

Yes, and everyone would have been right in that observations. But they probably would have lost money anyway because saying something happens 2 years before it does is dead wrong in terms of investing and you would have had your eyeballs squeezed out by the market rally we had last year if you tried to short

Would Ark still have that huge run up if a completely unpredictable event (pandemic) and an even more unpredictable response to that event (lockdowns and massive money printing) had happened?

If the answer is no, then it’s largely pure stupid luck.

Dunno about war but inflation was super obvious, yes. Expanding money supply = inflationary pressure. Literally economic orthodoxy.

Have you bet your house on your very obvious prediction to win money against market fools? No?

Yes

Not sure what you mean. Inflation drives prices up so it was a great run up. Not going to short my house or anything (especially living in it) because, as they say, people can stay irrational for a long time. I did get out of all my investments (stocks, crypto, etc...) a few months ago when it was obvious central banks would have to act.

If it is so easy and so obvious for you to predict the market you are beating all the hedge fund managers almost. Change of job?

Predicting that massive spending will lead to inflation isn't that same as predicting the market itself. There's correlation but It's not 100%.

Paul Krugman amongst others, a novelist predicted that massive spending will not lead to lasting inflation. Many top notch economists said that. If you think you knew better hindsight bias.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/03/25/j...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/26/economy/inflation-larry-summe...

Tons of economists predicted this. Larry Summers is a very prominent example. You just have to open your eyes.

You don't get it. If 50% predict a and another 50% predict b and a layman predicts b saying "hey it was so obvious" he is in great error. You that is my friend.

Layman? My degree is literally in economics. And yes it was obvious. Any economist who didn't see it is probably a bought shill.

It's not 50/50. What happened is orthodox economics ie. academic consensus. And Krugman is a shill, FYI.

Also hedge funds have different goals for themselves and their clients. It's not necessarily hard to beat them, the question is whether it's worth your time and if the returns hold up when you trade larger amounts. I daytraded for awhile, got good returns but more traditional work is more rewarding and a better use of time, not to mention less stressful.

ARK is still earning fees, and a -50% drawdown in a highly volatile thematic fund isn't that bad. Comparing her to investors who lost everything they had because of leverage? Yeah, she's definitely not falling.

You could possibly argue that ARK investors have fallen, but even that is a question semantics and of what the future holds for innovation. She has a broad set of funds in the growth space. Perhaps a bit US-centric, but that's easily known before buying. Are we really seeing a future where those companies won't be bid back up?

>I think she's getting a bit of reflected Musk hate because unlike pretty much all wall street "professional" she was right about Tesla.

Too bad her fund is composed of many companies that are not tesla and have done horribly. Just being right about one stock means nothing if the rest of them do poorly.

>I've never seen such hit piece written about any of them. They're still considered successful investors.

Success at raising money does not mean successful as in making their clients money or making good investments.

No, Cathie Woods is stupid because she runs her fund like an institutional scale day trader and makes knee jerk reactions to catch falling knives in bad companies that just compound her losses. She has made errors that even basic stock market investors know not to make and refuses to learn.

>Bill Ackman, Jim Chanos, Micheal Burry - those are just few investing douchebags that had one or two hits and then proceeded to be wrong and loose money many times over.

See the link between the 3? She was basically the only woman of the lot. Do you see a lot of famous hedge funds women? Yeah. None.

I don’t think it is hit piece. She is supposed to be expert day trader. She is supposed to be surrounded by economics gurus. She is supposed to have eyes and ears in her investments. She should have offloaded her positions in time, pocketed the gain and waited to re-buy assets she believed in at lower prices. That’s what the day traders do. That’s why they get paid obscene management fees. Instead she sat on risky bets which are underwater and there is no sight when it will get back on track. It is ok if ARKK isn’t growing because they are all in cash Buffet style but it is not ok if it severely underwater. It is an actively managed very high management fees ETF with expected anytime liquidity and shouldn’t fail so horribly.

She is not a day trader, her fund has a very explicit 5 year horizon. Where did you read about that?

They publish their trades every day. It is very actively managed fund and only in name "ETF".

Good investors adapt to changing conditions. But even a bad clock is right two times a day.

There actually was a very good piece about this a while back that many here criticized...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698436

Mind you, Cathie Wood and Bill Huang and Masayoshi Son and Tiger are all levered beta plays with Ponzi dynamics. The core premise is not valuation but rather can they find another buyer willing to pay a premium for the story they shill. Think We Work but in the equity markets. The high beta stocks in these funds aren't only held by ARK, they're held by many, many hedge funds and are known in the business as "hedge fund hotels".

As such, many on Wall Street are incentivized to juice these stocks, promote them, and find bag holders as exit liquidity at the highest prices possible. This does not make them good investments and it absolutely makes these fund managers shitty fiduciaries.

What's worse, she makes statements to lure in retail investors:

""" For those who aren’t following along closely, Wood once again publicly predicted that ARK Invest’s flagship exchange-traded fund — ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) — would generate annualized returns over the next five years of 50%. Said another way, she predicted that ARKK would generate over 650% in total returns in five years. We all know this is highly unlikely. In fact, I believe that since the enactment of the Investment Company Act of 1940, it has only been achieved by a registered investment company a single time. In that instance it was achieved by a 3X leveraged fund.

These outlandish predictions help ARKK and Wood at the expense of retail investors. Unsophisticated retail investors look to ARKK’s incredible past performance and Ms. Wood’s stature in the industry and are likely to rely on these predictions in making investment decisions. If these investors place a high level of confidence in Wood, they may lose a large portion of their capital. Retail investors are the real victim of these predictions. """[0]

Think about everything Chamath promoted. Every single one of those companies had multiple rounds of VC funding which were ultimately unloaded on the public at insane valuations through SPACs. Sure he and his LPs made out like bandits, but was he right about anything other than the fact he could lure retail to pay stupid prices and hold his bags? Think about alt coins. Same bullshit.

IT'S ALL FRAUD. JUST LIKE CRYPTO. IT NEEDS TO STOP. THE CAPITAL MARKETS ARE A CIRCUS FOR VCs.

I don't think it some coincidence Tesla mooned alongside crypto. It's all the same crew...

[0]: https://citywireamericas.com/news/opinion-the-sec-needs-to-c...

i think a “hit piece” is the least they can do after 2 years of fawning uncritical admiration for a fool who won the lottery and thinks it was cuz of skill