Cathie Wood's Strategic AI Stock Purchases Amid Market Volatility

These are the 3 stocks Cathie Wood buys when everyone else runs

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest made strategic moves this Monday, capitalizing on market volatility to increase its stakes in Nvidia, Baidu, and Iridium Communications, all of which have seen their stock prices dip significantly from recent highs. Wood, known for her aggressive growth investment strategy, isn't shy about buying when stocks are down; these purchases highlight her confidence in these companies' long-term prospects despite recent market fluctuations. The market experienced its widest swing in five years the same day Wood increased her stakes in these companies. Nvidia shares, after a period of explosive growth, have cooled off, dropping 27% this year and 36% since hitting an all-time high three months ago. Despite this, Nvidia remains the country's third most valuable company by market cap. While Nvidia's revenue growth has decelerated from over 100% to 78% in recent reports, the company still dominates the AI chip market and benefits from booming trends like autonomous driving and virtual reality. The company faced a stumble in January after China's DeepSeek announced it was able to produce AI results using older Nvidia chips. Nvidia's stock is trading at attractive multiples of 21 times this year's earnings and 16 times next year's target, making it a compelling value for growth investors. Despite potential cyclical challenges in the semiconductor industry, Nvidia is projected to maintain robust double-digit growth for the next few years. Watch these 2 chip stocks riding the AI wave Baidu's stock has fallen 31% from its October peak and a staggering 78% from its all-time high four years ago. Like Nvidia, Baidu is involved in cutting-edge industries such as autonomous driving and AI. Baidu has struggled to achieve consistent growth, posting only one year of double-digit revenue growth in the last six years, with top-line declines in half of those years. Despite these challenges, Wood is adding to her Baidu position, trading at just 8 times this year's profit target and 7 times the 2026 forecast. The company's enterprise value is just $23.5 billion, a discount from its $27.4 billion market cap, reflecting its strong net cash position. Iridium, a satellite communications specialist, has seen its shares fall 35% from October highs. Similar to Baidu, Iridium has struggled to translate its market position into strong financial results, with only one year of double-digit revenue growth in the past six. Iridium's subscriber base has grown by 8% to 2.5 million over the past year, and the company has been profitable for the last three years while paying a quarterly dividend, yielding 2.4%. Despite competitive pressures, analysts predict continued single-digit revenue growth. Iridium trades at less than 18 times next year's earnings forecast, making it more expensive than Nvidia on a bottom-line multiple basis but still appealing to Wood following the recent pullback. Disclaimer: The content of this article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. We do not endorse any specific investment strategies or make recommendations regarding the purchase or sale of any securities.

3 Stocks That Cathie Wood Is Buying During the Stock Market Sell-Off | The Motley Fool

The aggressive growth investor kicked off the new trading week with a few notable purchases. There is opportunity in the volatility. Cathie Wood is a widely watched growth investor who has steered her Ark Invest family of exchange-traded funds to success when equity prices are rising. She's also not afraid to put money to work when stocks are sliding. Wood added to her stakes in Nvidia (NVDA 4.49%), Baidu (BIDU -0.45%), and Iridium Communications (IRDM 2.15%) on Monday, a day that featured the market's widest swing in the last five years. The three stocks are trading well below their recent highs. Let's take a closer look at the growth prospects from these three investments at current levels. Shares of Nvidia have cooled down after more than tripling in 2023, and tacking on another 171% jump last year. The chipmaker has fallen 27% this year as of Monday's close, down a blistering 36% since hitting an all-time high just three months ago. Nvidia is the country's third most valuable company by market cap. Its pole position in graphics processing units with gamers has widened over the years, and now it's the undisputed top dog in artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The surge in demand for data centers to crank out generative AI is making Nvidia one of the world's fastest growing megacaps. Nvidia is also at the intersection of other booming trends from autonomous driving to virtual reality. Revenue more than doubled for five consecutive fiscal quarters, decelerating to 94% and then 78% in its last reports. Most companies would love to be delivering year-over-year top-line gains of 78%, but tailwinds are bumping up against headwinds here. Against the backdrop of booming demand, Nvidia took an initial stumble in January after China's DeepSeek announced that it was able to crank out AI results with seemingly outdated Nvidia chips. The pullback has intensified on the impact of what the tariff-fueled trade war will do to global demand for Nvidia's industry-leading solutions. There is good news for opportunistic investors. Nvidia entered this volatile week trading for just 21 times this year's earnings and 16 times next year's target. It's a compelling value proposition for a company growing as quickly as Nvidia. Sure, the semiconductor industry itself is historically cyclical. However, there should still be a couple of more years of robust double-digit growth as long as the tailwinds don't overcome the headwinds. Baidu stock has fallen 31% from its October high-water mark, but the math grows more unkind if you scroll back to its all-time high. China's leading search engine operator has plummeted 78% since peaking four years ago. Like Nvidia, Baidu is also at the leading edge of buzzy industries. More than just a search engine, Baidu is a player in autonomous driving, machine learning, robotics, computer vision, and naturally AI as well. Unfortunately for Baidu, it hasn't been able to deliver the kind of growth that one would expect for a company that's in the right place at the right time. Baidu has posted just one year of double-digit revenue growth in the last six years. Making matters worse, it has seen its top line decline slightly in half of those six years.

Cathie Wood Goes Bargain Hunting: 1 "Magnificent Seven" Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock She Just Couldn't Pass Up During the Nasdaq Sell-Off | The Motley Fool

Cathie Wood is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Ark Invest, which offers a small catalog of innovation-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Those funds' portfolios tend to be dominated by smaller, speculative companies in emerging industries. While these investment preferences may suggest that Wood has an appetite for risk, her funds also hold a number of blue chip stocks -- including one "Magnificent Seven" stock she just scooped up more of amid the Nasdaq's sharp sell-off. Wood has an interesting relationship with semiconductor behemoth Nvidia (NVDA 2.91%). Although she's held positions the chipmaker for years, she actually has been a seller of the stock more often than a buyer. Ironically, she dumped nearly all of her Nvidia position around November 2022 -- right around the time ChatGPT was released and artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as the next big megatrend. Since the start of 2025, Nvidia's stock price has been under a lot of pressure due to a host of factors: China's DeepSeek models, rising competition in the GPU space from Advanced Micro Devices and cloud hyperscalers designing their own custom AI chips, and most recently, macro uncertainty around President Donald Trump's tariff and trade policies. Now, with Nvidia shares down by 24% from the all-time high they hit just a few months ago, Wood may have a second chance. Between April 7 and 8, her funds purchased roughly 341,000 shares of Nvidia, essentially doubling Ark's stake in it. From a macro perspective, the secular tailwinds continue to support the growth of the data center industry, and Nvidia remains well positioned to continue capturing a large proportion of the expanding market for AI accelerator chips. Consider what AI's biggest spenders have up their sleeves. Cloud hyperscalers Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft all announced earlier this year that they intend to continue investing heavily in infrastructure to support AI. Meta Platforms expressed a similar outlook during its fourth-quarter earnings call. On a combined basis, these four Magnificent Seven companies' AI capital expenditures could top $320 billion in 2025 alone. Each is a major customer of Nvidia, so I'm optimistic about its prospects relating to their data center build-outs. In addition, Nvidia recently released its newest GPU architecture, Blackwell, sales of which have so far outperformed management's expectations. And while the early indicators for Blackwell are encouraging, Nvidia is on track to deliver its successor GPU architecture in a couple of years. This all positions Nvidia well for robust long-term growth as the AI narrative continues to unfold. Even in the face of encouraging business trends, Nvidia stock has gotten decimated during the ongoing Nasdaq sell-off. It trades at a price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of about 39. It has only rarely been this low in more than five years. While Wood's purchases of Nvidia aren't necessarily large compared to her core holdings, I find her decisions to buy the stock on consecutive days this week pretty interesting. Nvidia's underlying business looks solid, and with the stock now trading at a historically cheap valuation, it's just too hard to pass up -- even for a more speculative investor such as Wood. I think growth investors with long-term time horizons should consider following Wood's lead here and take advantage of Nvidia's slide. The long-term outlooks for the company and the AI narrative in general still look positive. In that context, the current sour sentiment in the stock market looks to have created a potentially lucrative opportunity here for patient investors who can stomach some volatility.

Cathie Wood Goes Bargain Hunting in the Market Crash. 2 AI Stocks She Just Bought. | The Motley Fool

The stock market has crashed, but that hasn't prompted famous investor Cathie Wood to flee. Instead, the chief executive officer of Ark Invest is shopping for bargains as many innovators -- the type of companies she favors -- have seen their valuations plunge. Wood is known for going against the crowd and making long-term bets on potential future winners. The stock market may look like a scary place today amid the declines. President Donald Trump's tariffs on imports from countries worldwide have stirred up concerns about rising prices for consumers and higher expenses for U.S. companies. That could lead to consumers spending less -- and companies feeling the pressure on earnings. All of this has even prompted economists to say a recession may be on the way. Yet against this backdrop, Wood continues to invest -- and so should you. And here's why. No one knows how long this turmoil will last, but history shows that indexes always have recovered after crashes and gone on to gain -- and quality companies across industries have led the way. This means that now, while prices are down, is the time to buy and hold on for the long term, well beyond the current crisis. Technology companies, especially those in the high-growth area of artificial intelligence (AI), look particularly cheap today. I'm going to consider two that Wood bought this week. Wood added 188,980 shares of Nvidia (NVDA 18.34%) to her flagship Ark Disruptive Innovation ETF, as the shares traded for about 21x forward earnings estimates, which is down from more than 50x earlier in the year. Nvidia is far from Wood's largest position -- it's actually No. 31 out of 37 holdings and has a weight of 0.7%. However, the company, as a major AI innovator, clearly merits a spot in this fund that's focused on disruptive technologies. Nvidia dominates the AI chip market, sells the highest-performance chip around, and pledges to update its technology on an annual basis. The company has expanded well beyond just chips to offer customers complete AI systems, offering everything from networking to enterprise software. This has helped Nvidia's revenue soar to record levels, finishing last year at $130 billion -- and at a high level of profitability on sales, which had gross margin of more than 70%. Nvidia aims to become a force in what could be the next big thing: quantum computing. The company is building a quantum research center in Boston to integrate quantum hardware with AI supercomputers, so it's likely to benefit from a possible boom in quantum computing, too. All of this means that even if today, Nvidia's stock is in the doldrums, the company has what it takes to continue growing over the long term in two key growth areas. That makes it a fantastic opportunity at today's levels for investors, like Wood, who seek great innovators for dirt cheap prices. Wood made a smaller purchase of Amazon (AMZN 11.98%), buying 7,520 shares, but the company already represents a much larger position for the investor. The e-commerce and cloud computing giant is Ark Disruptive Innovation's 14th largest holding, with a weight of more than 2.4%. Though you may know Amazon best as a seller of groceries, mass merchandise, and even books and entertainment, the company's biggest profit driver is a business heavily involved in AI today. And that's the cloud business, called Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers users everything they need for their AI platforms: premiums chips from the likes of Nvidia, as well as lower-priced chips developed by AWS, a fully managed service that allows customers to tailor large language models to their needs, and a wide variety of AI apps. All of this helped AWS reach a $115 billion revenue run rate last year. Considering we're still in the early stages of AI buildout and investment and AWS is the world's biggest cloud provider, Amazon is well-positioned to benefit in the future. Today, Amazon stock is trading for 26x forward earnings estimates, down from more than 38x a couple of months ago. Wood is seizing this bargain on a well-established company that's proven itself over time and could go on to win again over the long term.