Cathie Wood buys the dip on pandemic darlings Roku, Zoom, Roblox

STAR stock-picker Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest this week snapped up shares of pandemic darlings including Roblox, Roku and Zoom Video Communications that have fallen out of favour this year.

The asset manager’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF has slumped 43 per cent this year, lagging far behind the S&P 500‘s 7.7 per cent decline as the prospect of aggressive US policy tightening hammered the fund’s hyper-growth stocks.

Over the week, ARK bought 100,642 shares of e-commerce firm Shopify, 329,073 of Zoom, 739,082 of gaming site Roblox and 575,648 of streaming device maker Roku.

Wood’s shopping spree came after a shocking subscriber loss at Netflix triggered a selloff in stocks that thrived during Covid-19 lockdowns.

The asset manager shed more than half a million shares of Snap this week, ahead of the company’s earnings. The Snapchat owner slipped nearly 2 per cent in premarket trading on Friday after warning inflation could hurt revenue growth in the current quarter.

Last week, Wood reiterated her bullish stance on the fund’s biggest holding, Tesla. ARK Innovation ETF’s stake in Tesla is worth US$969 million, or 10 per cent of the fund’s weight.

The electric-car maker’s stock is the only one among the fund’s top 10 holdings that has climbed over the past year. The other 9 - including Roku, Zoom and Teladoc Health - have plunged between 22 per cent and 62 per cent.

Tesla’s shares have climbed about 35 per cent over the past year and rose 3 per cent on Thursday after its results raced ahead of expectations. REUTERS