Cathie Wood bought a ton more Tesla amid Tuesday's sell-off, possibly sparking turnaround

Published Tue, Feb 23 20217:24 PM ESTUpdated Tue, Feb 23 20218:08 PM EST

Jesse Pound @/in/jesse-pound @jesserpound

Ark Invest's Cathie Wood scooped up more than $120 million worth of Tesla shares during Tuesday's rout and subsequent comeback. The electric car maker is the biggest holding of Wood's flagship Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK), with a 9.1% weighting as of Monday end of day. The ETF, with $26.6 billion in assets under management, fell 3.3% on Tuesday, paring its 2021 gains to 11.7%. Ark's website showed that the flagship fund bought an additional 177,214 shares of the stock on Tuesday, worth roughly $123.8 million based on the stock's closing price for the session. Wood also added more shares of Tesla to other Ark funds. Tesla tumbled as much as 13% in Tuesday's volatile trading, but ended the day just 2.2% lower. Wood's funds took a big hit during the earlier sell-off in high-growth tech stocks on concerns about rising interest rates. Wood's buying may have helped spark the Tuesday turnaround in Tesla. CNBC's Jim Cramer remarked on Twitter that "Cathie puts the bottom in Tesla!" Wood gained a wide following after a banner 2020 that saw ARKK rally nearly 150%. She is one of the biggest Tesla bulls on Wall Street, seeing shares reach $7,000 apiece by 2024. With her big investment in the Elon Musk-led company, Ark Invest become the 15th largest shareholder of Tesla, according to FactSet. Ark discloses its top holdings every day, including a breakdown of what the ETF bought and sold during Tuesday's session. CNBC Pro broke down all the trades. While Ark added to its biggest position, the fund lightly trimmed several of its other largest stakes, including Roku , Square , Teladoc and Baidu , according to its updated holdings list. Notable increases beside Tesla include additional buys of Spotify and Unity Software and Ark nearly doubling its position in Twitter . Here are some of Ark's buys on Tuesday: Increased stake in Spotify by 123,311 shares Increased stake in Unity Software by 346,800 shares Increased stake in Twitter by 911,113 shares Increased stake in Beam Therapeutics by 279,494 shares Increased stake in Fate Therapeutics by 154,781 shares Increased stake in 10X Genomics by 66,786 shares. Wood explained her decision to buy Tesla to Bloomberg Radio after the closing bell on Tuesday. "We bought a lot of Tesla today across any strategy that holds Tesla," Wood said, adding that she's particularly bullish on Tesla's ride-hailing service as a bridge to autonomous driving. "Now that Waymo is on the road autonomously. We know it can be done. Tesla has so much more data than Google or anyone else or everyone else combined," Wood told Bloomberg Radio. "We do not think many analysts are giving Tesla credit for autonomous. If they were, the stock would be a lot higher." She added that the autonomous market will be a $7 trillion revenue opportunity. Tesla shares shot up 743% in 2020 to become one of the biggest pandemic winners. Investors piled into the stock amid the company's positive earnings growth momentum as well as its historic inclusion into the S & P 500 benchmark, "What we do think they are giving Tesla credit for increasingly is its electric vehicle franchise and how far ahead of the competition Tesla is when it comes to battery technology to artificial intelligence," Wood said. Many argued that Tesla's meteoric rally has pushed its valuations to unsustainable levels, while investors started to favor beaten-down value and cyclical stocks to bet on an economic comeback. (Tesla buying amount was updated to reflect new trade info from Ark's website.) Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Ark's daily move in Spotify.

Cathie Wood, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of ARK Investment Management LLC, speaks during the Sooner Than You Think conference in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018.

Alex Flynn | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Ark Invest's Cathie Wood scooped up more than $120 million worth of Tesla shares during Tuesday's rout and subsequent comeback.

The electric car maker is the biggest holding of Wood's flagship Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK), with a 9.1% weighting as of Monday end of day. The ETF, with $26.6 billion in assets under management, fell 3.3% on Tuesday, paring its 2021 gains to 11.7%.