When we think about the early invention of the car we have to give credit to a number of individuals from Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot in 1769 for a 3-wheeled steam contraception through to Charles Edgar Duryea in1993 to the first gas powered vehicle. What these men I suspect were not thinking at the time nor could predict was that their primitive inventions would later create an entire sector chock full of global investment in hundreds of companies responsible for the production, manufacture, distribution, and sale of their early inventions.
We might say that the invention of the car, after the Model T Ford was able to get under the buttocks of more people, was disruptive innovation: a technological innovation that created a new market and disrupted an existing market. The rest is stock market history.
Fast forward 100 plus years and we are once again disrupted. This time not by a vehicle that will take us down the road but by a vehicle that will take us in the words of Gene Roddenberry, “ where no man has gone before.” And this time the stock market is on board, suited up, and ready to go.
And they are taking off through ARK Innovation. Ark Innovation is the exposure to investing in the most promising growth areas of the economy through Exchange Traded Funds – a type of investment fund – rather than investing in individual stocks. Exchange Traded Funds are like mutual funds except they are traded throughout the day on the stock exchange while mutual funds are bought and sold based on their price at the end of the day.
Why are space stocks taking off for the cosmos in the midst of earthly disasters? Cathie Woods, the CEO of ARK Invest, a global asset manager specializing in thematic investing -investing that identifies large directional shifts – in disruptive innovation, filed documents on January 13, 2021 to operate a new space ETF and the investors hopped on the Starship Invest with this announcement.
“Late Wednesday, Ark Invest filed to operate “Space Exploration ETF” under the ticker ARKX. Space is a red-hot area right now, attracting significant investor interest, and on Thursday investors piled into the stocks most likely to be included in the ETF.”
“Wood and ARK have garnered plaudits for their early, and prescient, bullish stance on Tesla , which helped propel the ARK Innovation ETF to a gain of almost 150% in 2020. The Innovation ETF raked in more than $11 billion in new assets this past year, according to Bloomberg.”
Companies like Virgin Galactic are hoping to climb on the launching pad and shuttle the rich and ” been there done that crowd ” out of the earth’s atmosphere for the bargain price of a quarter mil for a jaunt around the stars. Lets just hope they don’t run into any UFO’s the CIA has kept under wraps until now. Unless of course Mr. Spock is on board.
“ By way of the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of the CIA documents on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as the government calls them — are now accessible via download at the Black Vault, a website operated by author and podcaster John Greenwald Jr .”
Author: Sherri Margolin
Disclaimer: Absolutely nothing you read in here should be taken as investment advice. The discussion of securities and ideas is never to be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any. Always do your own due diligence.