Weekend Engagement - Learning From The Guru

If you had to spend three years together with only one single person (other than yourself), who would it be and why? (Your current partner, friends and family are excluded from this answer.)

This is tough!

Based on the exclusion list, it seems like the person will have to be a stranger. I did some brainstorming and was down to two names.

Perhaps, before I share my answer, I thought of giving a mention to the name which made it to the final two, but was eliminated eventually. It would be J. K. Rowling. For those who aren't familiar, she is most known for being author of the Harry Potter series. During my younger days, I really enjoyed reading the Harry Potter books and watching all the movies. It was a great part of my childhood and I thought it would be great if I could interact with one of the popular authors in recent times.

Ok, to the final name, that I had to spend 3 years together with - and it cannot be my partner, friends and family.

I am not sure if many people are familiar with her - that would be Cathie Wood. If you are into finance and are familiar with the investment space, you would likely heard of her name or her company as well. She is CEO and CIO of ARK Invest, an investment management firm, and her flagship fund is the ARKK ETF.

Before I go any further, I should also include a disclaimer that this is not financial advice and I am not in any way promoting the ARKK ETF, since this post is about spending time and learning from Cathie Wood herself.

1) I am interested to learn about innovation, more particularly disruptive innovation, and understand how ARK Invest analyse these companies from an investment perspective. I have extracted this from their website and I think the stuff they do are very interesting. Most major funds that I know about just focused on stock picking and outperforming their peers and the benchmark indices, and I would say it's very bold of them to incorporate this vision in their funds.

2) I am interested to learn about her life experiences in managing these ETFs. She shot to fame on Wall Street in 2020 (which was a Covid year) where her flagship ARKK ETF delivered a whooping 152% return in a single year! It turned out that most of the disruptive technology companies benefited from the pandemic, such as Zoom which we are all familiar with and telemedicine companies like Teladoc. Of course, we all knew what happened to those "pandemic stocks", they subsequently fell, partly due to the end of Covid, and also the interest rate hikes. The dismal performance in 2021 and 2022 led people to claim that she "got lucky in 2020" or was just a "one hit wonder". I beg to differ as I could see myself aligned with her vision and investment thesis that innovation is the future.

3) I like to find out more about their conviction in Tesla. Tesla has been one of the top stocks in their ETFs over these years and it's no surprise that they are bullish about the company's prospects. That said, my jaw dropped when their forecast for Tesla's share price is 2,000 in 2027. (By the way, Tesla closed 213.97 on Friday.) That's almost 10 times the current price.

Before you start to think she's making these seemingly unbelievable projections for headlines, you might want to check Tesla's share price. Even though they have fallen from their peak of 400, they are actually up 910% in the past 5 years (according to Google).

In summary, my choice is really from perspective of learning and experiencing the ups and downs and ins and outs in the investment funds. And I would reiterate that this is not financial advice, so please don't go jumping in ARKK. You might earn 152% (if 2020 repeats) but you can lose 66% (if 2022 repeats)! Hehe!

So that's all for my sharing this week! Hope you enjoyed reading and let me know if you have any comments! Have a pleasant week ahead!