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Cathie Wood Goes Bargain Hunting: 3 Stocks She Just Bought
Momentum is starting to roll Cathie Wood's way. The Ark Invest co-founder, CEO, and chief investment officer is losing to the market for the third time and has had a couple of choppy years since her breakout performance in 2020, but her portfolio is bouncing back now. Not one to coast, Wood is making moves across her aggressive growth exchange-traded funds.
Ark Invest added to existing positions in The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD), Pacific Biosciences of California (NASDAQ: PACB), and Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH) on Thursday. Let's take a closer look at some of Wood's latest investments.
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1. The Trade Desk
Sometimes a blowout quarter isn't enough. Shares of The Trade Desk slumped 6% on Friday last week, despite delivering a "beat and raise" performance. The stock fell despite at least eight analysts raising their price targets on the programmatic advertising leader following the third-quarter update.
Let's make sense of the slide. For starters, the stock has been racing higher lately. The Trade Desk has soared 80% this year, and most of those gains have happened in just the last three months. When the shares sold off on Friday they still closed higher than they did just two days earlier. The Trade Desk is moving sharply higher for the fourth month in a row. With big upticks come the expectation of big beats.
The Trade Desk's third quarter was still applause-worthy. Revenue rose 27% to $628 million. Wall Street pros were looking for top-line growth of nearly 26%. This is The Trade Desk's second strongest year-over-year quarterly revenue growth in the last two years. It was also a beat on the bottom line. Adjusted earnings climbed 24% to $0.41 a share, comfortably ahead of the 18% gain that analysts were expecting. This isn't a surprise. The Trade Desk has topped market profit targets in each of this year's first three quarters.
Guidance calls for the adtech leader to grow its revenue by at least 25% for the seasonally potent fourth quarter. This would be decelerating growth, but The Trade Desk has a history of lowballing with its analyst-facing outlooks.
The Trade Desk continues to thrive as the leader in the future of advertising. It continues to gain market share, and it's a leader in connected TV and other ad platforms that are growing in popularity. It continues to check in with a customer retention rate of at least 95%, something that has been the case over the past decade. The Trade Desk is helping marketers get their messages heard by a wide audience, and that's usually a good business to stand behind as an investor.