Cathie Wood is returning to one of her most familiar plays, in buying a high-conviction growth stock while other investors remain indecisive.
On Sept. 22, ARK Invest scooped up Rocket Lab (RKLB) shares worth $25.13 million. The move came with the space stock near $70, roughly 53% below its $151 high.
The steep drop has legitimate causes.
Rocket Lab has softened its timeline for Neutron’s first flight, issued disappointing gross-margin guidance and committed to an ambitious $8 billion acquisition of Iridium that introduces financing and dilution risk.
But Wood rarely waits for uncertainty to disappear.
Her strategy is built around accumulating disruptive companies when near-term fear collides with a five-year investment thesis.
ARK scooped up CrowdStrike during the 2024 outage selloff and has repeatedly trimmed soaring winners to finance beaten-down favorites. This time, it sold Alphabet while adding Rocket Lab across three ETFs.
That approach flourished when the Federal Reserve cut rates near zero in 2020 and Washington unleashed $2.2 trillion through the CARES Act. Cheap money allowed investors to pay aggressively for distant profits, helping the Nasdaq-100 surge close to 48% that year.
Today’s rate backdrop is far less forgiving.
Rocket Lab must now convert its $2.36 billion backlog, Neutron program and Iridium strategy into profitable growth.
Wood’s purchase signals she believes the selloff has discounted more execution risk than Rocket Lab’s expanding space platform deserves.
Cathie Wood turns Rocket Lab’s collapse into conviction bet
Cathie Wood is using Rocket Lab’s weakness to make one of ARK Invest’s clearest space bets.
On Sept. 22, ARK scooped up 359,612 Rocket Lab shares worth $25.13 million. The flagship ARK Innovation ETF purchased 277,573 shares, while ARKQ added 59,746 and ARKX bought 22,293.
The presence across ARKK, the autonomous-technology fund and the dedicated space fund shows Wood views it as a disruptive platform spanning launch, satellite manufacturing, defense and communications.
More importantly, this hasn’t been a one-day wager.
ARK bought 705,102 shares worth $44.4 million across two early-September sessions, followed by another smaller purchase. In July, it bought 62,497 shares while selling 184,670 shares of Rocket Lab’s acquisition target, Iridium.
More Cathie Wood:
- Cathie Wood buys $50.1 million of tumbling megacap stock
- Cathie Wood makes $20.5 million bet on sliding tech stock
- Cathie Wood buys $8.7 million of beaten-down AI stock
Moreover, the wider rotation from her has become apparent over the past few weeks. ARK trimmed Alphabet, AMD and Palantir while directing capital toward beaten-down innovation companies. On September 22 alone, it sold $5.83 million of Alphabet.
Rocket Lab gives Wood the pullback she typically wants.
At $70.31 on September 23, the stock sat 53% behind its $151 high after Neutron delays, a wider-than-expected quarterly loss and disappointing gross-margin guidance.
The $8 billion Iridium acquisition adds dilution, integration and financing risk. Rocket Lab secured a $3.6 billion bridge facility and completed a near-$2 billion equity raise.
But the upside case is powerful.
Q2 sales shot up 62% to a record $234 million, the backlog reached $2.36 billion and Electron completed its 96th launch in September. Iridium adds global spectrum, an operating satellite network and more than 2.5 million subscribers.
Rocket Lab fits ARKK’s five-year disruption thesis. Still, Wood is buying future execution, not present profitability.
Cathie Wood sees tech boom outlasting rate shock
Wood’s Rocket Lab purchase suggests she believes investors are underestimating how profoundly the technology can effectively reshape economic growth.
In her latest investor letter, Wood argued that the current technology revolution is “likely to dwarf the Industrial Revolution.”
ARK expects innovation across AI, robotics, energy storage, genomics, and blockchain to push real GDP growth above 7%, while productivity could deliver “sustainable productivity gains in the 5-6% range.”
That’s why Wood is relatively relaxed about higher interest rates. Her thesis is that rates could remain elevated because real economic growth is accelerating, not because inflation is becoming entrenched.
Technology should simultaneously lower production costs, expand margins and create new markets.
“The current Technology Revolution is impacting the global economy in many ways like the Industrial Revolution did,” Wood said this week, predicting growth will accelerate significantly beyond the historical 2% to 3% range.
However, that isn’t an endorsement for every tech stock.
ARK recently trimmed Alphabet, AMD and Palantir while buying Rocket Lab, Nvidia, Archer Aviation and other companies where Wood sees more asymmetric upside.
The risk is timing.
Higher yields punish long-duration stocks immediately, while productivity gains may take years to appear. Rocket Lab captures that tension perfectly, where there’s a ton of potential, demanding execution and considerable financial risk before the bigger vision becomes reality.
Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest buys $25 million of battered Rocket Lab shares.
Tesla leads ARKK’s top 10 holdings
- Tesla (TSLA): 9.38%.
- Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX (SPCX): 6.01%.
- Tempus AI (TEM): 5.58%.
- Circle Internet Group (CRCL): 5.04%.
- Coinbase Global (COIN): 4.62%.
- CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP): 4.44%.
- Robinhood Markets (HOOD): 4.16%.
- Twist Bioscience (TWST): 3.64%.
- 10x Genomics (TXG): 3.25%.
- Shopify (SHOP): 3.07%.
- Source: ARK Invest’s daily ARK Innovation ETF holdings file, dated Sept. 24, 2026.
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