- Cathie Wood's ARK Invest purchased $88 million worth of Tesla shares in the fourth quarter.
- The famed money manager has been on a dip-buying spree, also scooping $11.2 million of Coinbase last week.
Cathie Wood's Ark Invest has been on a dip buying-spree, loading up $88 million worth of Tesla stock in the fourth quarter of 2022. The purchases are worth roughly $88 million based on Tesla's average trading levels from October 3 to December 20.
The famed money manager's investments come as Tesla suffers its worst decline since going public over a decade ago. The electric vehicle maker is down over 60% year-to-date.
Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK), the manager's $6.7 billion flagship fund, has Tesla as its third-largest holding. ARKK notched a five-year low on Tuesday, dragged in part by the EV maker's decline to over a two-year low.
Twitter CEO Musk has blamed the drop in the company's share price on the Federal Reserve, adding that the central bank's aggressive rate hikes to combat near 40-year high inflation have deterred investors.
Musk tweeted that "Tesla is executing better than ever!" in a response to a shareholder who blamed Musk for the $800 billion wipe out of Tesla's market cap this year.
"We don't control the Federal Reserve," the chief exec of Tesla and SpaceX said on Friday. "That is the real problem here."
Last week, Tesla's third largest individual shareholder, KoGuan Leo, said that it may be time for the EV maker to find a new CEO as Musk shifts his focus to overseeing embattled social media platform Twitter.
"Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO. Tesla needs and deserves to have working full time CEO," Leo tweeted on December 15.
Despite the pain, ARK Invest continues to pile into Tesla shares, and investors don't seem to be giving up on Wood's growth-focused strategy just yet. Net fund flows into the ARKK ETF are around $1.5 billion since the start of the year, according to VettaFi data on Tuesday.
ARK Invest has scooped up other ailing stocks as well. The firm bought $11.2 million of Coinbase Global Inc. stock last week and is one of Coinbase's largest shareholders, per Bloomberg data, holding a 4.3% stake as of September 30.
ARKK holds 5.9 million shares of the crypto exchange, valued around $207,903,853.82 on Wednesday. It's Coinbase position comprises 3.27% of the fund.
ARKK is down about 66% year-to-date, trading at $32.94 Wednesday morning.
Wood has said that the companies ARKK holds are "sacrificing short-term profitability for exponential and highly profitable long term growth," according to the Wall Street Journal.