Controversial Investment Guru Cathie Wood Wants to Help You Trust the Stock Market Again

(To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.)Cathie Wood is CEO, CIO and founder of ARK Invest, a closely watched investment fund known for its prescient high risk, high reward strategy (Wood was early on Bitcoin and Tesla) and radical transparency (she explains her decisions to buy and sell in a public newsletter). We wanted to bring transparency and democratization into investing in innovation; we consider ourselves the closest you’ll find to a venture capital firm in the public equity markets.I would ask the same thing about the people shorting our strategies. Maybe those people are going to be wrong.’ That’s what makes a market now. I also think that allocating capital to innovation increases the probability of success, that this innovation will reach many more people. So in my book, the more we can allocate capital to innovation, the better we can make people’s lives around the world.I think our industry is a wonderful industry for women, if they can move into a situation where their performance is measured objectively. Our faith, I suppose, was that we could attract people who would want to do this, because we have not hired, with a rare exception, anyone from the traditional financial services industry, except for [director of research] Brett [Winton] and me. The people who do not end up working well in our firms are those who think they have to know everything. It has not been extreme at ARK because of that five year investment time horizon.In 2021, I started a foundation focused on education through the lens of innovation. My parents sacrificed everything they had to give us our education—they’re Irish immigrants—and I think I’m taking a leaf from their book and just saying, ‘Okay, how can I give back?’ I’m funding this completely right now.We’re going to do this until it works. If we can, we’d love to roll this out throughout the country, if not the world, you know, because innovation does inspire people. I think that any position that involves human relationships—like handling people’s money, and especially high net worth wealth advisors—any relationship-driven job is going to be very difficult to displace, because in that relationship, many advisors are playing part psychologist. But I think also that the opportunities are so great, that if we do train people and retrain people and get them on the right side of change, their lives are going to be so much better than what otherwise would have been the case.I think parents know, inherently, that the ground is shifting underneath them and their children.