In the past months and years ARK-Invest has become a well known investment entity. Specifically their founder, CEO and CIO Cathie Wood with her visionairy thinking when it comes to future technologies and potential developments in the markets. She frequently speaks on the ARK Invest youtube channel about her observations and about future technologies and how they may change the face of the world in the coming 10, 20 or 50 years.
ARK Invest offers several Sector based ETFs, which are (size in brackets):
ARKK: Ark Innovation ETF /general innovation (8.9 Bil $US)
ARKQ: Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (633 Mio $US)
ARKW: Next Generation Internet ETF (2.4 Bil $US)
ARKG: Genomic Revolution ETF (2.3 Bil $US)
ARKF: Fintech Innovation ETF (674 Mio $US)
There are 2 more ETFs that are not as popular and significantly smaller:
IZRL: Israel Innovative Technology (34 Mio $US)
PRNT: 3d Printing ETF (51 Mio $US)
Unfortunately I haven't been aware of 2 things in the past:
The majority of the ARK ETFs have been outperforming the general market indices significantly. For example the ARK Innovation ETF since inception had an annual performance of 30% on average since it's inception. However, in the past year, where a lot of people had to deal with significant losses around the pandemic, this ETF performed with a stunning 100%+. All of the 5 main ETFs, since their inception have shown average performances between 20 and 50 per year.
The transparency in which ARK provides information about their investments. A youtube channel I am following mentioned some months ago that it possible to subscribe to their newsletters so that you will receive daily email notifications of their portfolio updates, which makes it easy to follow and also interesting from an investment perspective to get an idea when they are buying and selling.
Since late September of 2020 I have been subscribed to their newsletter and started building my own personal data base on their porfolio updates, which I track in an excel spreadsheet, which I may share in the future.
It is interesting to see the changes they are making to their porfolios over time, so I noticed for example that they have been steadily decreasing their Square positions. They also have been constantly loading up on Nintendo stock. These are helpful indicators for me to maybe start looking into a company or think about if there may be reasons to buy or sell some of these positions.
Since I am constantly working on my investment strategy, these additional pieces of information will contribute to some of my future investment decisions and have already helped me in some investment decisions in the past 2 months.
Unfortunately it is really difficult to invest in their ETFs when you are living in Germany, which I do. On the other hand it doesn't matter a lot to me since I am not so much into ETFs, although I do own some.
For me it is exciting to do my own research in certain companies that I am interested in, check their balance sheets, their investor presentations, find out about their products, read reviews etc. to build my own picture of a company and decide whether I invest or not. The difficulty is, however to really find those phenomenal companies that may disrupt certain industry sectors and can grow to be a tenbagger investment or more.
My Strategy inspired by ARK Invest:
Everyone is responsible for their own investment decisions. My philosophy in investing is to have a very wide field of view when it comes to potential investments. I am following many different sources, newsletters, youtube channels but also instagram channels that help me getting inspirations and ideas, which of these tens of thousands of companies out there may be interesting to start investing in.
However I will never (and so should you) invest in a company, just because one of your sources, even if you think you can trust that source, buys shares of that company. I will always take a deep dive into a company's data, reports etc. before making an investment decision.
The great opportunity that I see in the information that ARK Invest is giving out for free, specifically when you follow their newsletter for a longer period of time, that you will notice certain buying or selling patterns that could give a hint on when may be a good opportunity to buy or sell a stock that you are interested in. But you should always question it, since there have been cases where they sold positions that afterwards still gained a lot. They will not always be right.
But primarily, and that probably is my most important point, you will find interesting companies that you may not have come across by your own research, when frequently checking ARK Invests frequent portfolio updates.
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