Cathie Wood’s Top 10 Stock Picks

Published March 6, 2021 at 9:26 am EST Updated September 7, 2026 at 1:24 pm EDT

In this article we discuss Cathie Wood’s top 10 stock picks.

Ark Investment’s Cathie Wood has become one of the most popular hedge fund managers and investors, thanks to her successful bets on technology, EV companies, biotech and DNA sequencing. The 65-year-old is, however, facing a difficult time as tech stocks begin to lose value and small biotech companies in which Ms. Wood’s ETFs have big positions are posting heavy losses. According to data from FactSet, two main ETFs of Cathie Wood posted their biggest losses since the stock market’s crash of March 2020. ARK Innovation Fund is also down 5% over the last 30 days.

Why Is Cathie Wood’s ARK ETF Suddenly Losing Value?

Rising bond yields and a much-feared correction for tech stocks are causing the latest troubles for Cathie Wood’s favorite stock picks. The 10-year Treasury yield ticked up 1.5% after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell in an interview showed no intention to hike interest rates.

High yields often hammer growth stocks. In a Yahoo Finance program in January, Charles Schwab’s strategist Kathy Jones had said that we should expect higher inflation down the road and also mentioned her outlook about growth tech stocks. Here’s what she said:

“We actually moved from Overweight to Neutral [on tech stocks] a couple of months ago. Mainly because valuations were so stretched and we thought that there was room for a correction.”

Cathie Wood’s Dramatic Rise

With a bachelor’s degree in finance and economics from the University of Southern California, Ms. Wood started her career as an assistant at the LA-based financial services company Capital Group. After serving at senior positions at Jennison Associates, Tupelo Capital Management and AllianceBernstein, Ms. Wood founded ARK Investment Management in 2014 and quickly became successful due to her prescient investments in disruptive technology companies. ARK’s most famous Innovation ETF returned an impressive 152% in 2020, defying the struggling hedge fund industry and gaining Ms. Wood the best stock-picker of the year title from Bloomberg.

Cathie Wood talked about several important topics during a recent talk on her ARK’s YouTube channel. We will mention some of the most useful commentary from the video.

Taina Sohlman / Shutterstock.com

Cathie Wood on Monetary Policy

“With chairman Powell’s testimony this week in front of congress, we see that the Fed is nothing but supportive. We see M2 growth still up in the mid-20s. A very rapid rate of growth. The chairman emphasized once again that they’re focused on two things. Full employment, and we are far away from that. Then inflation, above 2% and consistently above 2% on a year-over-year basis. We are not there yet. We’re in the 1.5% to 2% range so nothing right now suggests that the Fed is going to tighten except for maybe the markets themselves. We see other indicators perhaps calling for some changes at the Fed in terms of tightening up monetary policy. We see commodity prices really moving up very rapidly especially copper relative to gold. Copper is the commodity with the PHD as many people often say. Gold is more of the safe haven or inflation hedge. So to see copper going up that rapidly against gold suggests there are animal spirits out there. The dollar is going down, housing prices are moving up at a double-digit rate, which is pretty astonishing. We’ve seen very strong asset market prices when it comes to stocks, generally we’re still up for the year even after the recent turmoil.”

Cathie Wood on Value Stocks

“When president Trump was elected, value stocks took-off just like they’re taking off now, responding to this idea that this economy is developing ahead of steam. So the value stocks have taken off and in fact if you look at year-to-date, I think financial stocks are up 11%, and energy stocks are up 27%. I think technology stocks, if I’m not mistaken are up basically 1% and health care, which is another area to which innovation strategies are exposed. Traditional value stocks are having a nice run here and how do we feel about that? We feel really good, just like we did in 2016 when we said value is up. Actually the market was up, value up even more, and growth strategies like ours were down… What would be very negative for innovation-based strategies is if the market continued to narrow. Only innovation strategies worked because that’s what happened during the tech and telecom bubble.”

About Bitcoin

“Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in the last two weeks, has gone out of her way in an answer to telegraph how speculative Bitcoin is and how it’s not environmentally friendly or sustainable, and how it helps elicit activity or encourages. I’m not quite sure why she’s saying this. All I know is that she does not understand the crypto space. I say this with all due respect. I just don’t think it is what she does. She’s responding to a movement in price that I understand, which has been very rapid. Think about it. I think up five-fold, since the end of the third quarter. That’s pretty extreme so I can understand her saying that… If you compare the energy use of Bitcoin in particular compared to the energy it would take to mine gold, for bitcoin is digital gold. It’s a fraction of it. If you want to think about it a little bit more broadly because the Bitcoin blockchain and other blockchains are going to enable much more rapid settlement of trades and transactions than the traditional financial institution… I think the most important thing that we as investors need to do is be very supportive of those who are evolving this ecosystem. We at ARK are thinking about ways to help the community in terms of bitcoin developers to secure the network. It is right now the most secure blockchain technology out there, and so for a very high value transaction, think a million dollar transaction, it does take 10 minutes and that seems to be a complaint and it is a complaint relative to other blockchains that involve smart contracts that are instantaneously settled… Our confidence in Bitcoin and the block bitcoin blockchain has continued to grow over the years.”

Cathie Wood on Electric Vehicles, DNA, Good and Bad Deflation

“As we’ve told you before in the electric vehicle space for example, that deflation rate is 28% for every cumulative doubling in the number of units produced. We’re only 2.2 million units of EVs right now. It’s not going to take long to double that 2.2 million units. In the DNA sequencing space, it’s 40% for cumulative for every cumulative doubling and we’re at a very low base there as well. Those low bases are going to move up pretty quickly. We think electric vehicle sales will move from 2.2 million to 40 million, almost 20-fold increase in the next five years, but they’re at a low base right now and they will only begin to impact economic statistics as they scale during the next few years. In the meantime, what’s going to happen there, this disruptive innovation is going to cause creative destruction in the traditional world order. It’s not just electric vehicles and DNA sequencing, it’s robotics, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology. There is so much innovation taking place right now and I don’t think that investors appreciate how these S-curves are feeding one another as these innovations converge. The best example of that, we believe will be autonomous taxi networks, the convergence of robots, autonomous vehicles are robots. Energy storage, they will be electric. That’s going to be the cheapest form of transportation and artificial intelligence… The bad deflation is associated with the disintermediation and disruption to the traditional world order. It’s going to put a lot of companies who thought they were steady at ease, and nothing would ever change, whether it’s in the financial services sector or the auto related sector and maybe the rail sector. Almost any company associated with the internal combustion engine and suppliers around. These are massive parts of the economy. Many of those companies have adopted short-time horizons themselves and catered to these shareholders. They have consistently leveraged up to buy back their shares and pay dividends. We’re seeing the result in ‘informally’ blue chip stocks. GE is one, IBM is another. There are going to be many more of these. Many are highly leveraged because they did not understand how quickly the world was going to evolve. In fact their time horizon was not five or ten years. It was two years or until then the end of the CEO’s term. What’s going to happen, we believe is they are going to be forced to cut prices in order to service their debt. So that’s the bad deflation… Then we have this question about how money will cause inflation. I don’t know. I would say these two deflationary forces are pretty wonderful in the short-term. They’re going to cause a lot of confusion and it’s somewhat esoteric. All it means is, the rate at which money turns over if there’s a lot of confusion, will continue to fall. The reason that the monetary easing globally during the 2008 and 2009 meltdown and afterwards, it never ignited. Inflation was this velocity, the money went up, but the rate at which it turned over per year in the economy slowed down as people held back, they were risk-averse, concerned about their futures, concerned about their company’s futures. I think that probably will continue as these dueling deflationary forces, good and bad, duel with one another.”

Cathie Wood has really surprised the markets with her sterling gains, because overall, the hedge fund industry is apparently struggling. Its reputation has been tarnished in the last decade during which its hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. On the other hand, Insider Monkey’s research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 111 percentage points since March 2017. Between March 2017 and February 5th 2021 our monthly newsletter’s stock picks returned 187.5%, vs. 75.8% for the SPY (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that significantly underperformed the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 13% through November 16. That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to. You can subscribe to our free newsletter on our homepage to receive our stories in your inbox.

Let’s start our list of Cathie Wood’s top 10 stock picks.

10. Spotify Technology S.A. (NYSE: SPOT)

Value: $741,445,000
Change in Position Size: 110%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 2%

Spotify is a Sweden-based audio content company which boats a subscriber base of about 155 million as of the end of 2020. As of the fourth quarter of 2020, the company had 345 million monthly active users, up 27% from last year. However, average revenue per user fell 8% to $5.13 in the period, mainly because of discounts and the company’s foray into new markets like Russia.

With a $741.4 million stake in Spotify, ARK Investment Management owns 2.4 million shares of the company as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. Our database shows that 48 hedge funds held stakes in SPOT at the end of the fourth quarter, versus 44 funds at the end of the third quarter.

Guardian Fund, in their Q4 2020 Investor Letter, said that they acquired a position in Spotify Technology S.A. (NYSE: SPOT) because they believe that the company has a long runway of growth ahead.

Here is what Guardian Fund has to say about Spotify Technology S.A. in their investor letter:

“At the current share price, Spotify basically only represents a fraction of the value they will be able to unlock in the growing market of audio entertainment. The key for Spotify is to change a variable cost base into a fixed cost base just like Netflix has. As the market share of the big labels, measured by the daily hours of engagement of the big labels, is declining, Spotify will be able to adjust its business model and create enormous operational leverage meaning that profitability will grow faster than expenses.

The music catalogue is not the business model. The value lies in the machine learning that drives discovery and engagement, the original content from people like Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian, and Joe Rogan, the data analytics and distribution for artists, the direct and social relations artists can have with fans through music and videos. We believe that Spotify will be worth at least five times more in 2030.”

9. Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST)

Value: $830,357,000
Change in Position Size: 86%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 2.2%

Ranking 9th on the list of Cathie Wood’s top 10 stock picks is DNA and biotech company Twist Bioscience. The company makes synthetic DNA for clients in the biotechnology industry. It makes hardware like chips and robotics technology services, as well as software for biotech companies. In 2016 the company bought Israel-based software company Genome Compiler, which makes software to design synthetic DNA.

The stock is up 245% over the last 12 months.

As of the end of the fourth quarter, 23 hedge funds in Insider Monkey’s database of 887 funds held stakes in TWST, compared to 21 funds in the third quarter. Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management is the company’s most significant stakeholder, with 5.9 million shares worth $830.4 million.

8. Zillow Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: Z)

Value: $841,260,000
Change in Position Size: 32%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 2.2%

Zillow is one of the biggest real estate services companies in the U.S., offering web and mobile services to facilitate renting, buying and home financing. The company is operating Zillow, HotPads, Trulia, StreetEasy, Naked Apartments and RealEstate.com. Zillow shares recently gained value after the company posted better-than-expected Q4 results. The company said traffic to its mobile apps and websites reached 201 million average monthly unique users, a record.

There were 83 hedge funds in our database that held stakes in Zillow Group at the end of the fourth quarter, compared to 69 funds in the third quarter.

7. Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE: PSTG)

Value: $930,656,000
Change in Position Size: 61%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 2.5%

Pure Storage ranks 7th on the list of Cathie Wood’s top 10 stock picks. The company makes all-flash data storage hardware and software products. In February, KeyBanc reiterated its Overweight rating on Pure Storage and upped its price target to $32 from $23, citing upbeat earnings and strong demand. Credit Suisse also recently increased its price target for the stock to $21 from $18 citing the most recent quarterly results. The firm said the company’s momentum is expected to continue through 2021.

According to our database, the number of PSTG’s long hedge funds positions decreased at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. 21 hedge funds hold a position in Pure Storage by the end of December, compared to the 22 funds in the third quarter. The company’s biggest stakeholder is ARK, with 41.2 million shares worth $930.7 million.

6. Invitae Corporation (NYSE: NVTA)

Value: $1,128,918,000
Change in Position Size: -3%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 3%

Ranking 6th on the list of Cathie Wood’s top 10 stocks picks is Invitae, a DNA processing and genetic sequencing company. The stock is up 93% over the last 12 months. In February, Oppenheimer analyst Kevin DeGeeter downgraded the stock to Perform from Outperform. In the fourth quarter, Invitae’s losses increased by 85% on a year-over-year basis. However, the company reiterated its outlook for revenue growth targets of 50%-60% for the next few years.

As of the end of the fourth quarter, 35 hedge funds in Insider Monkey’s database of 887 funds held stakes in Invitae Corp., compared to 24 funds in the third quarter. ARK Investment Management is the company’s biggest stakeholder, with 27 million shares worth $1.1 billion.

5. Square, Inc. (NYSE: SQ)

Value: $1,541,416,000
Change in Position Size: 21%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 4.1%

Founded in 2009 by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, mobile payments company Square has grown to become a $99 billion market cap company. The stock has gained about 200% over the last 12 months. But Cathie Wood is bullish that Square will keep getting bigger.

Last month, she tweeted:

“#Square business model illustrates that vertical integration can create moats, or barriers to entry, and deliver superior financial results.”

Square recently said it will buy a majority stake in rapper Jay Z’s music streaming service Tidal by paying $297 million in cash and stock.

According to our database, the number of Square’s long hedge funds positions increased at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. 89 funds hold a Square Inc. position compared to 73 funds in the third quarter. The company’s most significant stakeholder is ARK, with 7.08 million shares worth $1.5 billion.

4. Teladoc Health, Inc. (NYSE: TDOC)

Value: $1,566,153,000
Change in Position Size: 289%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 4.2%

Texas-based Teladoc Health is operating in the lucrative telemedicine market that is poised to grow, especially after the coronavirus crisis, as people and doctors are starting to prefer treatment discussions remotely to avoid costs, health risks and time consumption. Teledoc bills itself as a software company, with a variety of platforms, video conferencing and teleconferencing tools to connect patients and doctors. The company also has a team of doctors who treat patients with minor diseases remotely.

As of the end of the fourth quarter, 50 hedge funds in Insider Monkey’s database of 887 funds held stakes in Teladoc, compared to 47 funds in the third quarter. Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management is the company’s biggest stakeholder, with 7.8 million shares worth $1.6 billion.

3. CRISPR Therapeutics AG (NASDAQ: CRSP)

Value: $1,594,331,000
Change in Position Size: 23%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 4.2%

Crispr Therapeutics is a Swiss company which is working on technologies to make genome editing easier and faster. The company’s CRISPR-Cas9 is based on RNA-guided targeting. The technology can modify DNA with greater precision as compared to the existing solutions in the market. The stock is one of the top holdings of Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF (NYSEARCA:ARKK) as the fund is betting that the shares of the biotech company will post big gains as early as 2021.

As of the end of the fourth quarter, there were 34 hedge funds in Insider Monkey’s database that held stakes in CRISPR Therapeutics, compared to 26 funds in the third quarter. ARK is the company’s biggest stakeholder, with 10.4 million shares worth $1.6 billion.

2. Roku, Inc. (NASDAQ: ROKU)

Value: $1,785,212,000
Change in Position Size: 36%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 4.8%

California-based Roku ranks 2^nd on the list of Cathie Wood’s top 10 stock picks. The media company in January said that its total subscriber count stands at 51.2 million, up by 14 million accounts in 2020. Roku’s platform saw about 17 billion streaming hours in the fourth quarter, a 55% increase on a year-over-year basis. Roku recently signed a deal to acquire Nielsen’s video ads business. Investment firm Susquehanna, which is bullish on Roku, said that the deal will help the media company with dynamic ad insertion. It has a price target of $530 for Roku.

With a $1.8 billion stake in Roku Inc., ARK owns 5.4 million shares of the company as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. Our database shows that 60 hedge funds held stakes in ROKU at the end of the fourth quarter, versus 59 funds at the end of the third quarter.

Saga Partners, in their Q4 2020 Investor Letter, said that Roku, Inc. (NASDAQ: ROKU) is one of the most attractive opportunities they currently own.

Here is what Saga Partners has to say about Roku, Inc. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:

“Roku has been on my radar since its 2017 IPO given our significant investment in The Trade Desk. While I admired the company from afar, I never was comfortable with how it would successfully compete with the tech giants, particularly Amazon’s Fire TV, Google’s Chromecast, Apple TV, and to a lesser extent, the large TV manufacturers (OEMs) such as Samsung and LG trying to build their own TV operating systems. I also did not quite grasp Roku’s competitive position in the advertising value chain relative to the Trade Desk. Would Roku, being another middleman in the advertising/content value chain, be able to earn attractive profits with The Trade Desk in the power position?

I watched from the sidelines as Roku’s market share in streaming devices and TV operating systems continued rise. Roku has since increasingly become the default operating systems for TV and the largest aggregator of third-party TV streaming content in North America based on streaming hours with its 51 million active accounts. It has the largest market share of smart TVs in North America with 38% in the US and 31% in Canada. 49% of all programmatic connected TV ads go to Roku devices. When COVID opened the floodgates for the inevitable consumer and advertiser adoption of connected TV, I sharpened my pencil to better understand the dynamics that seemed to continue to play in Roku’s favor.

Roku is winning market share from Google for a few reasons. Google has not made strong inroads in TV operating systems with OEMs for the same reason that Microsoft could not transition its dominance in the personal computer operating system to the mobile phone operating system. They were trying to reconfigure an operating system that was built for a completely different product, thereby making it less effective than if starting from scratch. Google’s Android TV is primarily a phone platform that was stripped down to create a TV version. TV manufacturing is very price competitive. Google’s stripped-down mobile operating system for a TV has a higher cost structure and puts them at a price disadvantage to Roku which has been purpose built for TV from the ground up. The lower cost of materials required to run the Roku OS enables TV brand license partners to build more competitively priced products.

Amazon and Apple have also faced difficulties. Amazon has been successful in selling Fire Sticks but has not gained a lot of traction in licensing their TV operating system to OEMs. This is largely because retailers (most notably Walmart a significant seller of TVs) view Amazon as a direct competitor and do not want to carry Amazon consumer electronic products. The Apple TV is now a distant fourth in terms of streaming player unit sales. Apple has traditionally been resistant to licensing their operating system and has gone to market with a premium hardware product and therefore has not made a lot of inroads in TV.

Most TV OEMs are beginning to license an operating system from a company such as Roku. However, there are TV OEMs such as Samsung and LG trying to build their own TV OS. Despite having sizeable TV sale market shares both have been facing consumer adoption headwinds. One reason is that TV OEMs historical core competency has been designing and manufacturing tangible products. Like what happened with mobile phone OEMs when the Android mobile operating system came out, it’s difficult for an OEM to also focus on writing software to build a proprietary OS that competes with a company whose only focus is licensing its software. Additionally, there is a benefit to being TV OEM agnostic and therefore being available on any potential TV.

Roku is experiencing the operating system virtuous cycle; as Roku enters more households, it collects more data on viewers which helps advertisers target viewers, drawing in more content that can access users and monetize via ads better on Roku, which provides more content and better viewer experience, repeat. Increasingly, people will prefer TVs that come with a Roku OS because they will have the best consumer experience which then motivates more OEMs to license the Roku OS.

Whoever controls the TV operating system is going to be in a powerful position in the TV value chain. Before streaming, the legacy cable operator was in that power position, controlling distribution and the direct-to-consumer relationship. With the power of the Internet, Roku increasingly looks like the dominant company that is aggregating consumer demand, controlling the direct-to-consumer relationships, and displacing the legacy cable company position in the value chain.

Connected TV is a much better experience for both consumers and advertisers. Viewers can watch what they want when they want, and advertisers are better able to target viewers with the data Roku can collect. While cable operators monetize by collecting money each month from the consumer and then slicing it up among different content providers, Roku monetizes by taking a piece of the advertising, transactions, and subscriptions that occur over their platform.

The next question was what Roku’s relationship would eventually look like relative to a potentially powerful player like The Trade Desk. As I’ve discussed many times in the past, The Trade Desk will eventually be the ultimate aggregator of advertising demand, helping allocate ad dollars across the global supply of ad inventory. They own the customer relationship (the advertiser) and are able to aggregate the highly fragmented supply of ad inventory around the world. The Trade Desk helps advertisers make the best return on their ad dollar based on their specific needs.

In the advertising sense, Roku will technically be a supplier of inventory as they help content owners monetize via advertising. As it becomes increasingly evident that Roku is winning as the TV operating system, they will still be in a power position for any advertiser that wants to monetize via TV, which has historically been a significant share of total ad dollars.

This may be a controversial comment for all the Netflix bulls out there, but I expect that at end state, content owners will increasingly be commoditized, Roku will be a powerful aggregator of TV viewers, and The Trade Desk will be an even more powerful aggregator of total advertising dollars. There’s still a lot of steps before this dynamic unfolds and I will be watching closely. Companies like Netflix and Disney will likely continue to be powerful content owners because of the supply side economies of scale, but I suspect will lose their direct-to-consumer advantage. Subscription content services like Netflix will eventually try to monetize their content via advertising as paid subscription growth slows which they will then have to share with whoever owns the TV operating system direct-to-consumer relationship. No single company, not even Netflix, will be able to control/own the entire world’s supply of TV content; and viewers will want help filtering all of the increasingly accessible content on demand.

The Trade Desk will be in the power position to allocate ad dollars to Roku based on the attractive ROI to advertise on TV. Advertisers will still go straight to The Trade Desk because only The Trade Desk will be able to compare the entire universe of available ad inventory on their platform. Advertisers will want to know what the ROI is on Spotify vs. Google vs. Roku vs. any other place to advertise in the world. Roku will never turn down demand from the Trade Desk since it will likely be a material amount of ad spend. If advertisers only want to advertise on TV, they will be able to bypass The Trade Desk and go straight to Roku; however, they will likely earn lower ROIs on their spend since similar ads can be sent outside of TV and only the Trade Desk will be able to provide the data/analytics on the most effective places to show those ads. Owning demand is a powerful place to be in the internet economy.”

1. Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA)

Value: $2,917,399,000
Change in Position Size: 21%
Percent of Cathie Wood’s 13F Portfolio: 7.8%

Tesla ranks 1^stin our list of Cathie Wood’s top 10 stock picks. Tesla shares have gained 341% over the last 12 months but the stock is under pressure amid a broader decline in EV stocks. But some analysts believe that the recent selloff is a buying opportunity. Wedbush analysts Daniel Ives and Strecker Backe said in a note that the latest EV selloff is caused by the risk aversive mood in the market and soft sales reports coming from China. The analysts said that the EV “party” is just getting started.

As of the end of the fourth quarter, 68 hedge funds in Insider Monkey’s database of 887 funds held stakes in Tesla Inc., compared to 67 funds in the third quarter. Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management is the company’s most significant stakeholder, with 4.1 million shares worth $2.9 billion.

Bireme Capital, in their Q4 2020 Investor Letter, said that they are short Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA). Bireme Capital stated that Tesla may have the most unrealistic expectations among the companies they treat as great contenders.

Here is what Bireme Capital has to say about Tesla, Inc. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:

“Of all the contenders, Tesla may have the most unrealistic expectations. Now Tesla inarguably deserves a ton of credit for driving forward the frontiers of electric vehicles, car design, and consumer adoption of autonomous driving. However, as we said in Part I, “There’s a difference between a great company and a great investment.”

Tesla’s worldwide market share is only about 1%, but its market cap is higher than the nine largest car companies combined. Growing into this market cap is going to be impossible. Bending metal just isn’t that good of a business: car manufacturers generally earn single-digit net margins. Hopes of recurring high-margin revenue from software sales and robotaxis are pipe dreams — in a third-party ranking, Tesla’s much-ballyhooed autonomous driving system recently came in dead last out of 18
competitors.

Tesla did eke out a profit for the first time this year, but only because of $1.5b in pure-margin revenue from sales of automotive regulatory credits to other car manufacturers that did not meet emissions standards. This pure-margin revenue will disappear shortly as competing EVs enter the market. Nearly a hundred EV models are set to debut in the next few years, from large and established industry players like Ford, Toyota and GM, as well as upstarts like NIO, Fisker, Lucid, Rivian, and many, many others.

Tesla does have a market share lead in the EV market, but we find it hard to believe that the technology lead is insurmountable — Tesla’s latest annual report revealed that it spent more on bitcoin than on research and development. (We would be remiss not to mention the incongruity of a company focused on sustainability buying bitcoin, the energy-intensive mining of which produces more greenhouse gases than many medium-sized countries.)

We suspect that for many stockholders a share of Tesla is more of a collectible than an investment. Jim Cramer recently tried to explain Tesla’s astonishing stock gains (up 13x in the past two years). He said, “The analysts couldn’t understand that Tesla is more than just a vehicle. It’s a vehicle of hope in a miasma of gloom.” That may be true, but if you are looking for a solid investment rather than a manifestation of optimism, we suggest you look elsewhere.

We are short Tesla.”

You can also take a peek at Chuck Akre’s Top 10 Stock Holdings and Billionaire Mario Gabelli’s Top 10 Stock Picks.

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