Faithful Investing by Amy Kerr
oldest child in her family, Wood felt she had to carry the mantle for her family and approached her time at the University of Southern California feeling pressured to succeed. She needn’t have worried. She graduated from USC and began her career at the tender age of twenty. Her college mentor Art Laffer, the celebrated economist, introduced her to the Capital Group, one of the world's oldest investment management organizations. She became an assistant
WALL STREET TRADERS WHISPER Cathie Wood’s name with reverence held for titans like Warren Buffett and Jack Bogle. The sixty-five-yearold has made a name for herself by staking huge investments in innovative technologies—and having an unwavering faith. Wood is the founder, CEO, and CIO (Chief Investment Officer) of ARK Invest, an investment management firm focused on companies transforming how the world lives and works. The companies in Wood’s portfolios are household names—Tesla, Square, Roku, Teladoc Health, Shopify. She openly shares her research on social media, unheard of in the investing world, believing the rising tide of information will strengthen her company, the companies in her portfolio—and even her competitors. Her embrace of innovation isn’t new. Wood’s been doing things a little differently for decades. She was born in 1955 to Irish immigrants who had settled in Los Angeles. Her father was a successful radar system engineer in the U.S. Air Force, an extremely detail-oriented thinker who pushed his daughter to think about how two things that seemed unrelated could be connected. While she was introduced to faith in her childhood home, “when I was on my own, faith took on a completely different dimension,” she remembers. “It deepened as I was going through college.” As the
Cathie at work, c. 1980 34
