Arm may have enjoyed the biggest IPO of the year last week, but there’s one big name on Wall Street who isn’t lining up to jump on the bandwagon: legendary investor Cathie Wood.
In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, the ARK Invest CEO said ARK didn’t take part in Arm’s New York debut because the wealth management firm believed the company was overvalued.
On Thursday, U.K. Chip designer Arm listed on the tech-heavy Nasdaq in a blockbuster IPO that valued it at $55 billion—making it the biggest IPO of the year.
The SoftBank-owned company’s shares rose 25% in their first day of trading, with the IPO reportedly being 10 times oversubscribed in the days leading up to the share sale.
However, Wood said she felt investors had given too much clout to Arm’s position in the red-hot AI space.
“I think there might be a little bit too much emphasis on AI when it comes to Arm and maybe not enough focus on the competitive dynamics out there,” she explained. “So we did not participate in that IPO, and we also compare it to the stocks in our portfolios.
“Arm came out, we think, from a valuation point of view on the high side, and we see within our portfolios much lower priced names with much more exposure to AI.”
Arm declined to comment on Wood’s comments when Coins2Day contacted the firm on Wednesday.
Is Arm overvalued?
Wood may have been onto something. Arm’s shares have shed around 13% of their value since their first day on the Nasdaq, with the now-public firm’s shares seeing consecutive daily price declines.
It isn’t the only hyped-up AI semiconductor stock Wood has swerved in recent months.
ARK Invest has also taken a cautious approach to Nvidia, despite Wall Street pouring billions of dollars into the company on the back of surging demand for its AI chips.
Wood said in May that the firm dumped its Nvidia shares in January, defending that decision as part of a wider strategy in which ARK was “pivoting to another set of plays that most people have not discovered yet.”
ARK’s position on Nvidia, much like its stance toward Arm, went against the grain.
Unlike Arm, however, Nvidia stock has enjoyed a major rally since ARK cut its holding in the firm—gaining more than 200% since the beginning of the year—although shares have cooled off in recent weeks.
Still, the company is now part of the exclusive trillion-dollar club, which puts it in the same elite mega cap league as the likes of Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.
Back in May, a bullish outlook from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saw the company land one of the largest single-day gains in value in U.S. History, adding nearly $200 billion to its market cap. Its shares went on to touch a record high in August around the release of its quarterly earnings report.
Until 2022, Nvidia had hoped to acquire Arm in a deal that would have been valued at $40 billion.
However, the takeover—which would have been the biggest in the semiconductor industry’s history—collapsed last year after coming under huge regulatory pressure from China and both sides of the Atlantic.