When someone plays with fire, that person eventually gets burned. Most of the stocks Cathie Wood puts in her ETFs are the equivalent of playing with a blow-torch near puddles of gasoline.
In 1999, retail “day traders” partied until 1999 ended. A year later most retail traders had lost 95% of their stock account equity. Cathy Wood invests and trades like a retail stock jockey. The flagship ARK Innovation ETF (NYSE:ARKK) fund is down 40% from its all-time high earlier this year. Little known is that her Tupelo Capital fund in the 1990s was closed after an 84.8% loss. I am highly confident that this history will repeat.
The CEO of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) unloaded 50% of his holdings a few weeks ago. Not 25% or 33%, but half of his holdings. This is a strong statement about his view on the value of MSFT and on the stock market generally. Insiders are selling shares at a record pace and smart money is raising cash on every market rally.
Once again retail and Cathie Wood have been set up as the exit strategy for insiders and professionals.
Lee Justo, formerly of Wall Street Silver, invited me onto a new RISK podcast (see video below) to discuss the markets, specifically gold, silver and mining stocks as well the systemic risks building up that will undermine financial assets.
Despite the ebullience of the broad stock indices, there’s been a bloodbath in many unprofitable and highly overvalued “crap” stocks. Just 43% of all NASDAQ Composite stocks are above their 50 dma’s. It’s only 40% for the S&P 500.
Over the last several months I have recommended shorts in Zillow (NASDAQ:Z), Opendoor (NASDAQ:OPEN), Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD), DraftKings (NASDAQ:DKNG), Penn National Gaming (NASDAQ:PENN), MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR), and others.
Most have been highly successful shorts—home runs if you used puts.