These two up-and-coming trends could soon dominate the market and Wood has big bets on these 5 stocks that stand to benefit.
ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood has been generating a lot of buzz recently.
At the beginning of the month, two of her firm’s ETFs added around $1 billion in a single day in an emphatic display of investor loyalty for Wood as the firm launched its new ARKX Ark Space Exploration and Innovation fund.
Then this week, three of Wood’s funds bought up shares of Coinbase—the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange—on its highly anticipated trading debut on Wednesday, building up a stake worth around $246 million.
But beyond these two big headlines, Wood had an interview with CNBC’s Shepard Smith on Tuesday that investors may have missed. And in this interview, Wood made it clear which corners of the market she’s keeping an eye on right now.
“We’re very excited about digital wallets,” Wood said. “We really think that these digital wallets and two-sided market places, merchants and consumers… are going to usurp a lot of the role the banks play today.”
Square (NYSE: SQ) and PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) are two “digital wallet” names Wood has placed big bets on, with Square being the second largest holding in ARK Invest’s flagship Innovation fund, representing more than 7% of the ETF. Wood also noted WeChat Pay and AliPay are major players in China.
Wallets are “going digital… going mobile,” Wood added. “A little bank branch in your pocket. We’re going to have all kinds of financial services available through them, including loans, debit cards, credit cards, stock buying, bitcoin buying.”
Beyond digital wallets, Wood is also bullish on the genomics space and through ARK’s Genomics ETF, has put big bets on Exact Sciences (NASDAQ: EXAS), Invitae (NYSE: NVTA), and CRISPR Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CRSP).
“DNA sequencing is going to introduce science into healthcare decision making for the first time,” Wood said. “We can honestly say that until now more than half of all healthcare decisions were in some part made though guesses or experiences. Now we’re going to have the data.”
“We’re going to be able to cure diseases that we never though it would be possible to cure, including cancer,” Wood concluded.