Cathie Wood's Ark buys $15M more Block stock as shares slide

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest bought $15.4 million worth of Block Inc shares — 191,671 of them at $80.20 apiece — through its flagship ARKK and ARKF funds, after the Jack Dorsey-led payments company's stock slid 3.2% following its second-quarter results, The Block reported.

Block is already one of ARKF's largest positions, ranking as the fund's second-biggest holding at 6.47% of the portfolio, and this is Ark's second recent purchase rather than its first: the firm bought roughly $21 million in Block shares after an earlier, sharper 6% single-day drop that followed the same Q2 report. The pattern reads as a deliberate buy-the-dip strategy rather than a one-off trade, betting on a stock that's still up nearly 50% over the past six months even after the recent slide. Block's own guidance gives the bet some backing: the company forecasts $12.51 billion in full-year profit, roughly 21% annual growth, even as it works through the aftermath of a 40% workforce reduction back in February. That combination — double-digit profit growth guidance alongside a stock trading well below its own recent highs and a workforce that's a fraction of what it was six months ago — is exactly the kind of gap between a company's stated fundamentals and its share price that Ark's strategy is built to exploit, at least on paper.

Ark disclosed a second, much smaller purchase the same day: $1.02 million in Securitize shares, 189,796 of them at $5.39, a stock down almost 3.9% on the day and roughly 20% since Securitize's own second-quarter results, where revenue came in at $14.4 million — down 5% year-over-year and well short of the $20.6 million analysts had expected — alongside a $21.7 million net loss. The pairing says something about how Ark approaches crypto-adjacent equities generally: buying weakness in names it already holds a meaningful position in, rather than waiting for a turnaround to be confirmed first. Block fits that description closely — it's one of several bets Wood has doubled down on even as broader sentiment toward it wobbles, the same instinct that's shown up repeatedly across Ark's crypto-adjacent holdings this year, where near-term price weakness has tended to draw more capital rather than less. It also sits in a similar spot to the public bitcoin-treasury companies trading through their own bitcoin-linked swings: Block's exposure to bitcoin through Cash App has made it, alongside Strategy and a handful of others, one of the stocks investors reach for when they want crypto exposure wrapped in equity-market liquidity rather than holding the coin directly — a wrapper that comes with its own set of earnings-driven price swings that have nothing to do with bitcoin's own price on any given day. Whether Ark's latest purchase turns out to be well timed depends on whether Block's Q3 numbers close that gap between guidance and price, or whether the market keeps discounting the stock regardless of what the forecast says — a question the fund's earlier, similarly-sized purchase after Block's first post-earnings drop hasn't yet answered either way.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.