The Indefatigable Cathie Wood

(WSJ photo)

Cathie Wood came to my attention about a year ago due to her frequent appearances on the cable business channels. Her ARK Innovation ETF was being buzzed about, and the normally conservative TV analysts were nodding their heads while she made bold, some would call them outrageous, predictions about the you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet futures of bitcoin or Tesla.

Cathie Wood's principal approach is to invest in potentially disruptive businesses that don't worry much about generating profits today. This high-risk high-return philosophy, which sometimes produces steep short-term losses, had its zeitgeist moment during the coronavirus, when trends that took years to ripen manifested in a matter of months. [bold added]

Ms. Wood’s Innovation ETF was up 149% last year, her best year ever, thanks to big bets on Tesla, Zoom Video Communications Inc., Teladoc Health Inc. and Roku Inc. ARK has amassed about $45 billion across eight exchange-traded funds, up from just $3.3 billion at the start of 2020...

Ms. Wood has responded [to her funds' lackluster 2021 performance] by putting more money into some of her riskiest investments. Her latest predictions call for Tesla shares to quadruple to $3,000 by 2025, and bitcoin to eventually hit $500,000. The electric-car maker’s shares, which remain the biggest single position across Ms. Wood’s ETFs, are flat this year.

After laboring most of her Wall Street career in relative obscurity

At age 57, she left AllianceBernstein and founded ARK. Ms. Wood has said the name is both an acronym for active research knowledge and a reference to the ark of the covenant in the Bible.

She has embraced new media with a vengeance:

Ms. Wood said that her use of social media, videos, podcasts and other mediums give her a competitive edge. “There’s a great hunger out there for information from professional investors,” she said.

Ms. Wood has been mentioned on Twitter more than a quarter-million times this year, quadruple the count for all of last year, according to social-media analytics firm Sprout Social. Since the start of 2020, she has appeared more than two dozen times on CNBC and Bloomberg. Monthly videos featuring Ms. Wood’s musings on the economy and markets regularly garner hundreds of thousands of views.

Adding to her unique narrative is that she is a devout divorced Catholic who reads the Bible every day and openly supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

I haven't decided whether she is a late-blooming genius, a self-promoter who got lucky, a true believer who bets billions while breaking all rules of portfolio diversification, or some combination thereof.

Meanwhile, she gives hope to all us over-60's that we can adapt to the seismic changes in our society to such an extent that our best years can still lie ahead.