Cathie Wood's ARK Innovation ETF: How Tesla has fueled gains
The ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), Cathie Wood's Tesla (TSLA)-heavy fund, is in focus after the ETF sold roughly $17 million worth of the stock ahead of the robotaxi event. Despite the sale, Woods remains a major Tesla bull on Wall Street.
Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre, who also hosts Yahoo Finance's Stocks in Translation podcast, takes a closer look at the Ark Innovation ETF and how its largest holding, Tesla, has fueled its moves.
Twice a week, Stocks In Translation cuts through the market mayhem, noisy numbers and hyperbole to give you the information you need to make the right trade for your portfolio. You can find more episodes here, or watch on your favorite streaming service.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Catalysts here.
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CNN
25 minutes ago
- CNN
Musk fires up the robotaxi hype machine as his MAGA spotlight dims
Elon Musk has two key strengths: a bottomless well of money and an unmatched ability to hypnotize Wall Street with promises of a whizz-bang technological future. He's starting to run into the limits of both. On the hypnosis front, Musk is busy hyping the tentative launch on June 22 of Tesla's long-awaited robotaxi pilot program in Austin, Texas. Tentative, Musk said, because the company is being 'super paranoid about safety.' When even Musk says the date is iffy, do not hold your breath. The guy can deliver a game-changing EV, to be sure, but many of his more ambitious projects are notoriously behind schedule. In the meantime, Alphabet went ahead and began a taxi service using driverless Waymo cars in 2020, and now provides 250,000 paid rides a week in San Francisco, LA, Phoenix and Austin. (It is still a money-losing operation, sure, but the losses are essentially a rounding error for the tech behemoth.) If playing catch-up on robotaxis were Tesla's only problem, that'd still be a tall order. But the company is trying to usher in the future of transportation at the same time it is doing damage control on its reputation. What began as a kind of aspirational luxury car brand popular among well-to-do liberals has, for many, become synonymous with its erratic, authoritarian-adjacent CEO. Musk's MAGA turn wasn't the only reason Tesla sales started tanking globally, but it certainly didn't help. Chinese competitors have been eating Tesla's lunch in key markets around the world. The Cybertruck is — relative to Musk's original high-flying predictions — a flop, and the rest of the company's lineup is dated. Some disappointed drivers say they can't offload their Teslas because demand and resale prices have fallen so dramatically. In sum: Tesla, whose stock (TSLA) has tumbled 30% since its all-time high in December, needs its robotaxi event, whenever it happens, to really knock investors' socks off. Of course, in the past, Musk has been known to lean into the flash and somewhat gloss over the substance. Last fall, Tesla shares fell 9% the day after its 'Cybercab' unveiling, which offered few details about how Tesla plans to improve its still-unfinished 'Full Self-Driving' tech and featured robot staff that, unbeknownst to people who attended, were being operated remotely by humans. The Austin event will be a 'proof of concept exercise, not a rollout or a testing of a commercial asset for sale,' GLJ Research analyst and prominent Tesla critic Gordon Johnson said in a note this week. Part of the Musk mystique has to do with just how unfathomably rich he is — like, how could he possibly fail with all that wealth? And to be sure, Musk's money affords him a boundless budget to buy just about anything and sue just about anyone, in perpetuity. But Musk's foray into politics has shown that even Muskian wealth has its limits when Elon Musk is involved. For example, Musk dropped nearly $300 million on campaign spending for Donald Trump and other Republicans last year, only to blow up his relationship with the president a few months later with a series of outbursts on social media. He shelled out $44 billion on Twitter with the intent of building it into some kind of 'everything app' — an internet hub for commerce and a global town hall. The platform saw an exodus of users and advertisers as Musk took down speech guardrails, and it now more closely resembles the notorious message board 4chan. Musk's $20 million gamble on a conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court was seen as a test of his newfound political power. But that one also backfired, putting Musk and his unpopular DOGE layoffs at the center of the narrative and enabling the liberal candidate to secure a 10-point victory. Bottom line: After torching Tesla's brand with his MAGA turn, Musk went and did something even more unthinkable and turned on Trump, straining (if not dooming) his status as 'first buddy.' Musk is now in damage control mode, and he's reviving an old playbook, revving up the self-driving hype machine, for a bit of redemption. 'He's got a problem,' President Trump told CNN's Dana Bash last week. 'The poor guy's got a problem.'
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Robotaxi wars: How Waymo got the edge on the competition, and Tesla (so far)
'We are being super paranoid about safety." That's what Tesla CEO Elon Musk said after revealing the company's robotaxi test would start on June 22, later than expected, adding that the date could 'shift' beyond that. Meanwhile, betting site Polymarket lists only a 30% chance that Tesla (TSLA) launches the service before July, highlighting Musk's rosy predictions on self-driving that have been constantly pushed back. While Tesla is on the verge of starting a new chapter for the company, Alphabet's (GOOG) Waymo has been quietly racking up mile after mile, trip after trip, providing actual paid robotaxi rides to customers in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin — where Tesla's test will begin. At stake is a huge opportunity for companies like Waymo, Tesla, and others. Goldman analyst Mark Delaney estimates the market for traditional ride-hailing in the US is worth approximately $58 billion currently, but could be worth more than $330 billion by 2030, with robotaxi-type services pushing the industry forward and reducing costs by — among other factors —not requiring a human driver. Waymo has an early lead, and it seems a big one. Rivals like Argo AI and GM-backed Cruise are gone, leaving only smaller players like Zoox (backed by Amazon), China's Pony AI (PONY) and WeRide (WRD), and of course Tesla. Waymo (before it was even called that) started off as an in-house startup as part of Google's X initiative way back in 2009. After some testing and securing of permits, the project officially became Waymo in 2016, and it started testing its Pacifica hybrid vans kitted out with cameras, LIDAR laser sensors, and radar. In 2018 Waymo and Jaguar paired up, using the British automaker's I-Pace EV for its testing; these are the vehicles most users are accustomed to seeing. Waymo's combination of vision, radar, and LIDAR, which the company calls its 'multimodal' approach, has the company claiming it has the best, and safest, robotaxi solution. Since 2020, anyone in a service area can download the Waymo app and hail a fully autonomous car. Waymo says it has the most robotaxi miles driven and that the company performs around 250,000 trips a week. A Waymo spokesperson said that the company has not yet seen a vision-only system that can achieve the levels of safety its current system has achieved, asserting that multiple sensors with overlapping fields of view are the best solution. Experts tend to agree. 'Waymo is undoubtedly the leader in autonomous driving technology, with their self-driving software (SDS) being widely regarded as best in class,' said University of San Francisco engineering professor William Riggs, an expert in autonomous technology. 'They have been around the longest, had patient capital and have the most miles on the road proving that self-driving tech works.' Riggs believes Waymo's software strategy combined with its diversified sensor suite, along with its manufacturer partnerships such as Chrysler, Hyundai, Zeekr, and Toyota, allowed Waymo to maintain a strong presence in the market and adapt to different vehicle platforms. Autonomous expert Katie Driggs-Campbell of University of Illinois' Grainger College of Engineering agrees. 'Initially, I believe their strength came from the computer vision/learning and compute expertise from Google,' Driggs-Campbell said, noting that Waymo has now 'blended real-world experience, recorded data, and simulation [generated] data to form a reliable system.' Waymo also touts its safety record, as well as how open it's been with data. 'We have an incredibly rigorous safety framework in place, and our safety record speaks for itself,' Waymo's spokesperson said, adding that the company has been voluntarily sharing safety performance data with the public, which goes beyond regulatory requirements. Waymo's approach could not be more different from Tesla's, and that has contributed to the dominant lead it sees currently. Tesla did not immediately respond to Yahoo Finance when seeking comment. But per Musk biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk was enamored with Tesla's vision-only, neural network-powered self-driving system when it was presented to him. He deemed it superior to Tesla's prior system, which ran on millions of lines of code using a rules-based system fed by data coming from radar and LIDAR sensors. Tesla's current FSD (full self-driving) and robotaxi software use only a vision-based system powered by a neural network 'brain' that is constantly training itself using videos collected by millions of Tesla vehicles. (And as opposed to Waymo, Tesla has reportedly asked the city of Austin to block release of safety records related to its robotaxi launch.) While Waymo holds a big early lead, what could stop the pioneer from growing more could be its operations and manufacturing ability. Riggs believes building vehicles at scale remains a significant hurdle for Waymo. 'Currently, they operate between 700 and 1,000 vehicles in their major markets and are producing roughly 1,500 vehicles annually. This relatively modest production volume could become a bottleneck for scaling their operations further,' he said. The other challenge for startups like Waymo in general versus Tesla is that their costs per vehicle are higher. Waymo's self-driving tech and sensors reportedly cost $100,000 plus the cost of the vehicle itself (for example, the Jaguar I-Pace retails for $73,875 in the US). While some of those costs have come down, scaling to new cities and providing enough vehicles to take on Uber, for example, will require more than the 1,500 vehicles currently produced a year. Tesla, meanwhile, has the ability to produce 2 million or more EVs a year, which include the hardware necessary for its FSD and robotaxi software. Tesla also has millions of vehicles on the road that could be converted for robotaxi use, though that would require the company's Hardware 4 autopilot software, which only started rolling out in early 2023. 'AI runs off of data. Waymo is trying to close that data gap with more sensors per vehicle; Tesla is looking to win with more vehicles with targeted data specific to their vision-only approach,' said Ken Johnston, vice president of data and analytics at tech consulting firm Envorso and former exec at Ford and Microsoft. 'Companies like BYD and Tesla also cannot be ruled out, as they continue to innovate and expand their capabilities in this space,' Riggs added. Xiaomi is also testing autonomous driving in China, but the company has suffered from safety issues in early trials. Johnson is bullish on Tesla's robotaxi offering, but the company faces a big challenge in surviving its safety test. Uber's self-driving unit and GM's Cruise could not overcome high-profile accidents. Testing the service without any accidents in a semi-urban environment is not easy. And unlike Waymo, Tesla is under federal investigation for its autonomous software. It also still needs to provide NHTSA with answers to how it plans to roll out its robotaxi program. Meanwhile, Waymo is plugging along, adding more cities to its list of current operations, with Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C., coming online in 2026. Being backed by Alphabet helps too, giving Waymo capital runway for growth, investment, and long-term community outreach. Waymo's technological lead and strong backing from Alphabet clearly have the service in pole position. But this race is far from over. Pras Subramanian is the lead auto reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong: Ballooning government debt may make bitcoin the world's reserve currency
More government debt, more potential opportunities for the crypto bulls. "One thing that is clear is that democracies around the world are having trouble getting deficit spending under control. If you study history ... once you decouple currency from hard commodities the inevitable story is they get overprinted and extended, right?" said Coinbase (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong at the Coinbase Annual Summit in New York City on Thursday. Armstrong said it's not a coincidence that bitcoin prices are hitting records as US debt reaches all-time highs. "I want the US to remain the reserve currency status," he added. "But if the debt situation doesn't get fixed, I do think that eventually bitcoin will have to become the reserve currency for better or worse. It's not going to be the Chinese RMB because I think they have their own debt problems." Armstrong joins Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk in warning about the ramifications of rising government debt. Musk is fresh off a dust-up with President Trump on the matter, slamming the debt projected to emanate from the administration's signature "big, beautiful" tax bill. The crypto industry has seen a host of catalysts this year that have fed the bull narrative. The Trump administration has moved to create a bitcoin strategic reserve (though its framework remains TBD). Companies such as GameStop (GME) and Strategy (MSTR) have been big buyers of bitcoin to diversify their cash holdings. Trump Media & Technology (DJT) recently announced a plan to raise $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin. Stablecoin legislation is navigating its way through the government. And Circle's (CRCL) IPO was met with resounding enthusiasm. Morningstar data on 294 crypto funds revealed they hauled in more than $7 billion in net inflows in May, the highest since December. Bitcoin funds attracted net $5.5 billion and ether funds a net $890 million in May. Despite the positive news, Coinbase shares are only up 3% year to date — relatively in line with the S&P 500 (^GSPC). The company's first quarter sales fell 24% from the prior year amid a slowdown in trading activity. Analysts went on to warn of a more challenging transaction environment for the balance of the year. "We still struggle to identify the next cryptocurrency catalyst that deeply engages retail and thus powers Coinbase earnings," JPMorgan analyst Ken Worthington said in a note. Worthington rates Coinbase shares a Neutral with a $215 price target, suggesting 16% downside from current levels. Of the 30 sell-side analysts that cover Coinbase, Yahoo Finance data shows 30% rate the stock a Buy, while 535 rate it a Hold. Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
