What happened
Caught up in the tech sell-off, shares of digital payments company PayPal Holdings dropped more than 6% in early trading Friday before recovering to about a 2.1% loss as of 12:30 p.m. EST.
And one of its most famous backers may be part of the problem.
So what
Shares of PayPal stock have more than doubled over the past year, helping to boost the returns at uber-popular tech investment fund ARK Invest. As PayPal and other tech stocks have tumbled this past month, however, ARK CEO Cathie Wood has been snapping up more shares of the stocks that she likes best — and lightening up on shares of stocks she (presumably) sees as relatively less attractive.
PayPal, it appears, is one of the latter today.
According to ARK’s latest tally of stocks sold on March 4, the investment fund sold more than 890,000 shares of PayPal Thursday, representing about 1% of all the assets it owns and reducing PayPal’s weight in the various ARK portfolios to 1.7%.
Now what
Put another way, it looks like ARK sold more than one-third of its PayPal shares yesterday. That might not mean that ARK has lost confidence in the stock — but it does seem to imply that Wood is relatively less confident in PayPal stock than she is in, say, Square (NYSE:SQ), a different financial services company that ARK was seen buying during the sell-off.
Investors who are tracking ARK’s moves, and hoping to imitate its success, might want to bear that in mind.