We recently compiled a list of the Cathie Wood’s Stock Portfolio: 2025 Stock Picks. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX) stands against the other stocks in Cathie Wood’s portfolio.
Cathie Wood is one of Wall Street’s most contentious figures. She founded ARK Investment Management around ten years ago and has over three decades of experience in the financial sector, including a notable spell as chief investment officer of AllianceBernstein Holding LP’s global thematic strategies unit. An 87.4% return in the fund, driven by a 1300% growth in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, made it one of the fund’s best years since its debut in 2017. This performance came about at a time when Bitcoin’s price had reached a record high of $20,000.
Cathie Wood’s investing strategy is pretty straightforward: her ARK ETFs invest in developing high-tech firms in artificial intelligence, blockchain, medicinal technology, and robotics. Wood believes these firms can transform sectors, but their volatility causes significant fluctuations in ARK’s valuations. Although supporters of Wood hail her as a tech visionary, her detractors call her a run-of-the-mill fund manager. Additionally, despite achieving a 153% return in 2020, her long-term performance has raised questions regarding the viability of her high-risk, high-reward investment style. With $6,269 million under management, the ARK Innovation ETF has returned an annualized 14.24% over the last five years and a 12.16% year-to-date. The Nasdaq Composite, on the other hand, has an average return of 106.84% over five years.
Big Ideas 2025
Following recent changes in technology markets, Cathie Wood and her ARK research team released the yearly blockbuster report “Big Ideas 2025.” Wood seems optimistic about the future of AI computing power and AI agents. She added that from the dawn of artificial intelligence in 2018, computer performance has multiplied 40 times, and by 2023, it will have exceeded 48 times. Computing performance is predicted to hit a new high by the end of this century, mainly due to the rapid growth of AI. Specifically, Cathie Wood believes that AI agents are the central subject of future development, with the potential to accelerate the adoption of digital applications and spark unfathomable changes in human-computer interaction. Narrowing it down to specific industries, these agents will also press for an increase in the use of digital wallets in e-commerce. According to ARK research, digital wallets powered by AI purchasing agents are gaining market share from traditional payment methods such as credit and debit cards, with digital wallets anticipated to account for 72% of all e-commerce transactions by 2030.
Our Methodology
For this article, we scanned ARK Investment Management’s Q3 portfolio and chose its top 15 stock picks. The stocks are ranked in ascending order of the fund’s stakes in them.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A person taking lessons through Roblox Education, expanding their knowledge and skills.
Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX)
ARK Investment Management’s Q3 Stake Value: $524.1 million
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 52
Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX) is a video game developer located in California, USA. With 88.9 million active users each day, 2.9 million developers, and 6 million active experiences, Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX) goes beyond the standard definition of a video game by combining its digital currency and providing a wide range of unique virtual experiences.
On January 28, Piper Sandler increased its price target for Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX) to $72 from $65 due to strong user engagement and bookings momentum ahead of the company’s results. Bookings are expected to be $1.41 billion in the fourth quarter, up 25% year on year and approximately 3% higher than Wall Street projections, despite management’s 20% growth guidance, which it considers unduly conservative. The firm also upgraded its full-year 2025 bookings and EBITDA projections by 1.4% and 6.3%, respectively, noting strong momentum and a predicted 1Q25 bookings range of $1.12 billion to $1.15 billion.
Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX) announced impressive Q3 results on October 31, 2024. Revenue was $919 million, up 29% from the previous year and above the $860 million to $885 million projection set at the end of Q2. In addition, virtual currency sales were estimated to have reached $1.13 billion, above predictions of $1 billion to $1.025 billion.
SaltLight Capital stated the following regarding Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“Roblox Corporation (NYSE:RBLX) has firmly established itself as the dominant player in user-generated gaming within Western markets. Meanwhile, Tencent has developed a similar ecosystem in China with its WeChat Mini-games platform. Owning both gives us a unique vantage point to assess the evolving landscape of user-generated gaming platforms globally.
At its recent investor day, Roblox set an ambitious target of reaching 10% of gaming content revenue, of which it estimates the total pool is around $180bn (for context, in the last twelve months, it made $4bn in bookings).
We think this will be a challenging target, but it will be positive for the business directionally. The reason is that Roblox has spent the last three years heavily investing in re-engineering its game platform to be high fidelity, performant and widely available across platforms. They also share economics with their creators to the point now that the absolute numbers in highly engaged games are enough to support a small game studio. The result is that the quality of games has materially improved, attracting additional engagement – particularly from older users…” (Click here to read the full text)
Overall RBLX ranks 4th on our list of Cathie Wood’s top stock picks for 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of RBLX as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that certain AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than RBLX but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.