Famed tech investor Cathie Wood was sanguine about her Nvidia Corp investment strategy in a Bloomberg interview on Thursday.
Her Ark Invest asset-management firm famously exited most of its position in the microchip giant before the company’s unprecedented artificial intelligence-fuelled rally of the past couple of years.
“We were saying to ourselves if Nvidia is going to keep running like this, the only reason it should deserve to do that is if it’s going to benefit a lot of other companies, and we began to look at what those other companies might be,” Wood told Bloomberg. “We did pull away and I suppose it was a bit of a statement.”
Ark’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) closed the last of its Nvidia position of 39,000 shares in February 2023, calling the price “very high”.
Prior to that, ARKK held 750,000 Nvidia shares as of October 2022, according to Bloomberg.
Nvidia was priced at around $170 as of the end of November 2022 and around $229 as of the end of February 2023.
Since those dates, the stock has soared 612% and 429% respectively. In terms of raw valuation, Nvidia has added $2.58 trillion and $2.41 trillion, respectively.
A crude, back-of-the-paper calculation suggests ARKK lost a more than $600 million opportunity by exiting its Nvidia position when it did.
That said, Wood reportedly first invested in Nvidia in 2014, when the stock was valued at just $4. She also still holds Nvidia positions in her myriad of other funds.
You win some, you lose some, as the saying goes.