- Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood glorified her flagship fund as "the new Nasdaq" in a Thursday Bloomberg interview.
- The famed investor said ARKK offers investors more exposure to disruptive innovation stocks than the benchmark index.
- Her comments come after the Ark Innovation fund just logged its best month ever in January, rising 28%.
Famed investor Cathie Wood hailed her flagship Ark Innovation (ARKK) fund as "the new Nasdaq" after it notched its best ever monthly performance in January.
In a Bloomberg interview on Thursday, the Ark Invest CEO said ARKK gives investors more exposure to disruptive innovation stocks than the tech-heavy benchmark index.
"As we were getting hit so badly, what we also saw is investors taking tax losses in some of Nasdaq and other strategies and moving into our strategy, which was hit so hard, because they did believe that we were going to rebound faster."
"We are the new Nasdaq," Wood said, as a selling point to investors of her fund. "Look through [the Nasdaq] now, you will not find the kind of disruptive innovation, it certainly doesn't dominate those indexes," she added.
Wood's exchange-traded fund delivered a 28% gain for January following two years of low performance – it dropped 69% in 2022 and 21% in 2021.
ARKK has rebounded as tech stocks like Tesla, Spotify and Roku, which make up a large chunk of its portfolio, made a strong comeback at the start of 2023. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq rose just 10.62% last month.
Compared to ARKK, the Nasdaq 100's top holdings include Amazon, Microsoft and Apple.
The gain in Wood's fund was bolstered by investor optimism that cooling US inflation would prompt the Federal Reserve to ease up on its aggressive campaign of interest-rate increases, which have been adding pressure on corporate finances.
According to Wood, "innovation was one of the biggest victims of the massive interest rate increase we saw last year. It was like an earthquake." She added however, that she would not be surprised to see the Fed cut rates this year.
