Wood's Ark funds added 34,080 Meta shares as the stock surged 14.8% in a week. The purchase reflects her deflation thesis and Meta's push to monetize AI models.
Cathie Wood added to one of the biggest tech positions she already owns, even after a 14.8% weekly surge. Her Ark funds bought 34,080 shares of Meta Platforms on July 9, worth about $22.8 million at the latest closing price of $669.21.
The purchase fits a macro call Wood has been pressing for months. In a June post on X, she argued the bond market is already discounting deflation from artificial intelligence, not the inflation most investors still fear. She pointed to the flattening Treasury yield curve despite rising oil prices. "The next phase of this cycle could be characterized by accelerating growth, declining inflation, falling interest rates, and a strengthening U.S. dollar," Wood said. That combination, she wrote, would favor innovation-led equities.
Meta has been a laggard in the tech rally this year – up roughly 1.4% year to date against the Nasdaq Composite's 13% gain – as investors weighed whether its heavy AI spending would ever pay off. Sentiment shifted this week. On July 10, Meta shares jumped 6% to their highest level since April, extending a move that began after the company said it would sell excess AI computing capacity. A day earlier, Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1, an AI coding model, the first paid AI product from the company. BNP Paribas analyst Nick Jones called it Meta's first real monetization of its AI work, MarketWatch reported.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been candid about how slow the AI rollout has been. During an internal town hall, he told employees that the company's AI agents "haven't really accelerated in the way that we expected" over the last four months, according to a Reuters report on July 2. He still expects meaningful returns within three to six months.
Meta plans to spend up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, making it one of the biggest corporate spenders on the technology. The company reports second-quarter earnings later this month. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski raised his price target to $767 from $765 while keeping an overweight rating, expecting "another quarter of robust ad growth" and a reaffirmation of spending plans, according to The Fly.
Wood's flagship Ark Innovation ETF has had a turbulent run. It returned 35.49% in 2025 but is up just 3.05% year to date, trailing the S&P 500's 10.66% gain. Over five years, the ETF has an annualized return of -8.42%, according to Morningstar, while the S&P 500 has returned 11.63% annually. A Morningstar analysis published in March 2025 calculated that the Ark Innovation ETF wiped out $7 billion in investor wealth from 2014 to 2024, ranking it the third-biggest wealth destroyer among U.S. mutual funds and ETFs.
Wood's AlphaScala Alpha Score for META is 69 out of 100, a Moderate reading. The stock rose 5.97% in the session covered by the purchase.
Beyond Meta, Wood's latest trades included adding shares of Space Exploration Technologies, Coinbase Global, X-Energy, and Recursion Pharmaceuticals. She trimmed positions in Advanced Micro Devices, Deere, 10x Genomics, Twist Bioscience, and Strata Critical Medical.
Meta is not among the top 10 holdings of the Ark Innovation ETF. Wood's largest position is Space Exploration Technologies at 4.33% of the fund.
Meta will report earnings later this month.
Prepared with AlphaScala editorial tooling from the source reporting linked above. Indexable analysis may include a cited Alpha Score value. Publishing checks screen each story before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.