Ark Invest buys $37M in Block, $3.4M in Circle as both stocks swing

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest bought $37.4 million worth of Block Inc. shares on Monday as the stock dipped, The Block reports, while separately adding $3.36 million of Circle Internet Group as that stock jumped.

• Block (XYZ): 456,059 shares bought across three Ark ETFs, ARKK, ARKW, and ARKF
• Block's stock fell 1.85% Monday, closing at $82.02
• Circle (CRCL): 35,192 shares bought, worth $3.36 million
• Circle's stock rose 9.65% Monday to $95.55, after a 7.5% drop the previous Friday
• Circle is up 52.6% over the past month

Ark's diversification rule caps any single holding at 10% of a fund's portfolio, so this purchase spreads across three separate funds rather than concentrating in one. It's also a repeat: last month Ark bought roughly $15 million more of Block after the company's second-quarter results pushed its full-year profit forecast to $12.5 billion, 21% growth. Mizuho's analysts aren't fully convinced: even after a 40% staff cut in February as part of Block's shift toward AI, they've flagged rising operating expenses, a caution flag that hasn't stopped Ark from adding to the position twice in three weeks.

Circle's rally has its own tailwind. Bernstein gave the stock an Outperform rating last week and set a $140 price target, citing macro regime shifts, real-world blockchain capital markets, stablecoin payment adoption, and the emerging use of stablecoins for agentic payments. The stock's Monday jump followed a rougher stretch: a Morgan Stanley downgrade weighed on shares earlier in August, before this month's rebound.

Both bets sit in the same lane for Ark: fintech companies wired into crypto rails. Block runs Cash App and the Bitcoin-focused Spiral division alongside its Square payments business, and Circle issues USDC, the stablecoin increasingly built into the same agentic-payments narrative Bernstein cited. Buying both on one day reads less like a single high-conviction call and more like Ark topping up two existing positions on the days each looked cheap or newly validated. Ark files these trades daily, so the market gets a same-day look at where Wood's funds are adding exposure, unlike most fund managers, who only disclose holdings on a quarterly lag.

Two funds, two directions on the same day: Ark bought a stock that fell and a stock that rose, betting on both a fintech company mid-restructuring and a stablecoin issuer riding a ratings upgrade. Whether either position pays off won't be clear from a single day's move in either direction.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.