Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood kept buying shares of Tesla on the first trading day of 2023 even as the brutal rout in her electric vehicle darling has put massive pressure on her flagship fund. Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF added 144,776 shares of Tesla on Tuesday, while snapping up 31,336 shares for ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF , according to Ark’s daily trading data. These purchases were worth $19 million based on Tesla’s Tuesday close of $108.10. Tesla suffered its biggest sell-off since September 2020, down 12% after the company reported fourth-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers for 2022 that fell shy of analysts’ expectations and the company’s stated goals. Wood has been buying the dip in Tesla since the fourth quarter, when the stock dropped 53%. It now makes up 6.55% of ARKK, the third-biggest holding behind Zoom and Exact Sciences . CEO Elon Musk has blamed Tesla’s sell-off partly on rising interest rates, but analysts and investors also point to his rocky $44 billion Twitter takeover as another culprit. Musk sold tens of billions of dollars of his Tesla shares last year to help finance the buyout. Tesla fell 65% in 2022. ARK Innovation ETF slid 2.5% on Tuesday, adding to 2022’s 67% decline amid rising rates. High interest rates hurt the value of future earnings for growth companies. Wood has been a longtime Tesla bull, seeing shares hitting a split-adjusted level above $1,500 by 2026. Her conviction centered around the shift to electric vehicles. She previously said there will be almost 8 million electric vehicles sold around the world this year and that number will rise to 60 million in five years.
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