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Cathie Wood’s funds have bought Coinbase shares this week as they fell.
Reed Young
Coinbase
,
the trading platform for cryptocurrencies, has fallen more than 75% this year. Cathie Wood is buying.
Wood’s ARK funds purchased a sizable number of
Coinbase
(ticker: COIN) shares this week, emailed fund updates show. They continued to add even after the plunging value of Bitcoin (BTC), the biggest cryptocurrency, hurt the exchange by association.
The ARK Innovation ETF (ticker: ARKK) bought 187,462 shares of Coinbase, a Thursday email showed while the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW) bought 33,636 shares.
ARK Fintech Innovation (ARKF) bought 19,693 shares. An email the previous day showed ARKK bought 360,855 shares, ARKW 62,602 and ARKF123,122.
Coinbase had also been dragged down by disappointing first-quarter earnings and filings saying that customers’ funds might be at risk if the company goes bankrupt. What’s more, a temporary outage on the exchange Thursday prevented some customers for trading.
Swift assurances from executives that the problems were fixed and funds were safe may have turned things around for now. Coinbase shares shot up 11% in Friday’s premarket after a 9% gain on Thursday.
Wood tweeted earlier in the week that “Genomic sequencing, adaptive robotics, energy storage, AI, and blockchain technology are realities, their stocks” are “seemingly in deep value territory.”
Coinbase still has Wood’s confidence. Her funds have spent about $3 million on shares this week.
But it hasn’t helped the ARK funds. Her flagship Innovation ETF had lost about 75% of its value from its peak on Wednesday, erasing the gains it made as the global economy emerged from the pandemic. It recovered 6% Thursday and was trading up another 4% in Friday’s premarket.
Write to brian.swint@barrons.com