Cathie Wood's Ark Invest dumps $13.5 million of Coinbase stock as crypto exchange notches 7-month highs
Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
- Cathie Wood's Ark Invest sold $13.5 million worth of Coinbase stock on Tuesday.
- The famed money manager now holds a 7% stake in the crypto exchange worth $837 million.
- Shares of Coinbase are up nearly 30% in the past five trading sessions as crypto prices rallied.
Cathie Wood's Ark Invest sold $13.5 million worth of Coinbase stock, dumping 160,887 shares from the firm's Ark Fintech Innovation exchange-traded fund Tuesday.
The famed money manager now holds $837 million of the crypto exchange's stock across three of its ETFs. Ark Invest has a 7.03% stake in the Nasdaq-traded company.
Shares of Coinbase dipped 2% Wednesday but earlier traded at a seven-month high of $83.49. The company's stock is on a tear, up 30% in the past five trading sessions.
Major cryptos are making gains as well, according to Messari, with bitcoin and ethereum up 16% and 9% in the past week, respectively. When crypto bets are doing well, typically company shares that service the nascent space follow suit.
Wood's investment firm snatched up Coinbase stock several times amid crypto's lengthy bear market.
Meanwhile, Ark Invest is coming off of a brutal 2022 for the firm's performance, especially its flagship fund, Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK), which dropped 69% last year.
On Tuesday, Wood said the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest-rate hikes hit Ark's investment strategy "like an earthquake." She revealed that ARKK logged more than a $2 billion loss from selling stocks during last year's market rout.
"It's like an earthquake, not just for our strategy, actually. We now think the earthquake is rolling off of our strategy and into other strategies and those that are cyclical," Wood told CNBC, referring to growth equities that are sensitive to changing borrowing costs.
She added: "We think [they] are going to face some quite severe challenges during the next ... six to nine months."