Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation Sees Outflows. It Still Bought Deere Stock.

Coming into Tuesday trading, Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF was up about 36% year to date. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund is having quite a year, which might be leading investors to take some profits.

Bloomberg reported there were fund outflows of $2.7 billion for the technology-heavy ETF at the end of last week, the “most in at least a year.” ARK Invest didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Total assets in the fund amount to about $13 billion, according to Bloomberg.

To be sure, the fund has seen its share of inflows, too. The net inflow over the week was $2.8 billion, according to Bloomberg. It described that as a “record one-week haul” for the ETF and the highest since 2021.

Having some money leave an ETF after so much flowed in might be expected. Still, net outflows of cash can lead to a fund offloading stocks. The top positions in the ARK Innovation ETF are Tesla, Roku, Coinbase , Roblox, Tempus AI, Shopify, and Palantir.

The outflows, however, didn’t generate any material changes to the composition of the portfolio on Monday. Instead, ARK’s disclosures indicate Wood was in a buying mood.

ARK Innovation increased its holdings of GeneDx, Robinhood Markets, CRISPR Therapeutics, Beam Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, Twist Bioscience, PagerDuty, 10X Genomics, Deere , and Pacific Biosciences of California on Monday.

Most of those are healthcare names. Deere sticks out as the only relatively slower-growing industrial company, but its investments in artificial intelligence and automation to improve crop yields have caught ARK’s attention.

Wood has added Deere stock for three consecutive days since the stock dropped 6.8% on Aug. 14 after the company reported its fiscal third-quarter earnings. Deere beat Wall Street’s earnings estimates, but cut the midpoint of its range of forecasts for full-year net income to $5 billion from $5.15 billion.

Net income at Deere peaked in fiscal year 2023 at $10.2 billion. It declined to $7.1 billion in fiscal year 2024 and will be around $5 billion in fiscal year 2025. Wall Street expects a rebound to about $5.7 billion in fiscal year 2026.

It’s always worth watching when notable fund managers make changes to their portfolios. The overall impact of ARK adding to Deere stock, however, should be small. ARK has bought some 75,000 shares over the past three days. That’s less than 1% of the total Deere stock traded over that span.

It’s anyone’s guess as to precisely what drove ARK Innovation’s recent outflows. One reason could be profit-taking: Coming into Tuesday trading, the ARK Innovation ETF was up about 36% year to date and up 75% over the past 12 months.

The ARK Innovation ETF dropped 4% Tuesday, while the S&P 500 fell 0.6% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished flat.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com