Growth investors feast on volatility, but the turbulence has proved challenging for Cathie Wood. The founder and CEO of Ark Invest has taken a hit in the current climate. Her largest exchange-traded fund has plummeted nearly 20% in 2025, but it’s still trading higher over the past year.
Wood publishes her firm’s daily transactions. She was particularly busy with the market moving higher yesterday. Ark added to its existing positions in Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices(NASDAQ: AMD), and Baidu(NASDAQ: BIDU) on Monday. Let’s take a closer look at the Wood’s three fresh purchases.
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Shares of Nvidia have fallen 26% this year, and that’s after a bounce in Tuesday’s trading. It’s a laggard in the near term for Ark’s performance. Zoom out, though, and the artificial intelligence (AI) chip leader starts looking a lot better. It’s up 24% over the past year, a dazzling 14-bagger over the past five years.
Nvidia has come a long way since its early days, when the top dog in graphics processing units was appreciated largely by fans of PC gaming. Nvidia now finds itself at the intersection of buzzy trends, but the strongest is clearly the AI revolution. Developers need a lot of computing power to train and run their AI models, and Nvidia is the leading provider in the chips that make these language learning models fly.
Image source: Getty Images.
There have been some headwinds lately. In January came the announcement from China’s DeepSeek that it could deliver respectable AI results with older Nvidia chips. Lately, the trade war has been leaving its mark. Between the effective shipment ban to China and fears of an economic slowdown, investors have soured on Nvidia’s near-term prospects.
Two different analysts slashed their profit targets ahead of Tuesday’s open. Vivek Arya of Bank of America lowered his price goal from $160 to $150. Tom O’Malley at Barclays took his target down $20 to $155. Estimates remain roughly where they were three months ago, when the shares trading much higher. Wall Street pros seem to think valuation multiples should contract to account for consumer risk and one-time hits on China. The silver lining is that both analysts are still bullish on the shares, and even the new price points offer more than 50% of upside from today’s levels.
There are a lot of companies riding Nvidia’s coattails, but AMD is no Nvidia. This chip stock is down 42% over the past year. It’s barely halfway to doubling over the past five years. AMD is naturally susceptible to U.S. export controls, and now its once promising MI308X processor is banned from being sold into China. Last week it warned that it could take a charge of roughly $800 million.
Revenue growth of 24% in its latest quarter is less than a third of the 78% year-over-year jump that Nvidia posted in its latest update. However, this is AMD’s healthiest revenue jump in two years. Nvidia’s results were its weakest move in more than a year.
Despite the wide gap in growth rates, AMD is trading for 19 times this year’s earnings. This is marginally lower than the forward multiple of 22 that AMD is commanding. AMD is expected to continue topping 20% revenue growth in the next two years, but Nvidia should continue to grow even faster.
Let’s end with a stock that’s actually trading higher in 2025. China’s leading search engine is barely positive this year, but it is trading lower over the past year. Chinese stocks have been surprisingly resilient in 2025, despite the trade tiff with the U.S. government. It probably helps that Baidu generates most of its revenue on its home turf.
Baidu isn’t perfect, though. Growth has been stagnant. Unlike the double-digit percentage increased for Nvidia and AMD, Baidu has pieced together three straight quarters of small year-over-year declines. It should return to top-line gains starting in the current quarter, but there are clearly some growing pains. Despite its search dominance, and even though it’s dipping its toes into everything from autonomous driving to computer vision and and AI, Baidu’s revenue is lower than it was three years ago.
The good news for Baidu is that’s it the relative bargain in this shopping list. The stock is trading for just eight times this year’s net income target. Sometimes Wood can be a value investor, too.
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Bank of America is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Rick Munarriz has positions in Baidu. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Baidu, Bank of America, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Barclays Plc. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Cathie Wood Goes Bargain Hunting: 3 Stocks She Just Bought was originally published by The Motley Fool
