Cathie Wood Keeps Buying Circle Stock Through a 42% Slide
“Wall Street can’t fathom it.” That’s roughly the case Cathie Wood has been making to defend one of the more contrarian equity bets in her flagship fund, and she’s been backing the claim with actual purchases rather than just commentary. As Circle Internet Group’s stock has slid 42% over the past year, ARK Invest has kept buying, not selling — a pattern that now shows up clearly in the fund’s disclosed holdings.
ARKK, ARK’s flagship fund, held 3,931,968 shares of Circle as of a recent Friday close, a position worth roughly $329 million and representing about 5.14% of the fund’s total portfolio. That makes Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, ARK’s single largest crypto-related equity holding — larger, notably, than its long-running position in Coinbase. The stake didn’t arrive all at once. Recent regulatory filings show ARK adding to it in a string of smaller tranches even as the stock kept falling, including one purchase of roughly $17.8 million made while Circle shares were down nearly 41% over the trailing month, and another batch of about 109,000 shares worth roughly $6.8 million picked up after Circle secured a New York trust charter.
Wood’s argument, in essence, is that analysts trained on payments-network models like Visa and Mastercard are applying the wrong valuation framework to a stablecoin issuer whose economics don’t look anything like a card network’s. Whether Wall Street agrees is genuinely split, and not in a subtle way. Of the 21 analysts currently covering Circle, 11 rate it a strong buy and two rate it a buy, while five say hold and three say sell — a spread that on its own signals real disagreement rather than a consensus with a few outliers. Price targets range from $37 to $173 per share, a gap of roughly 4.7 times between the most bearish and most bullish calls on the same stock. That’s not a rounding-error disagreement; it’s a sign that nobody covering Circle has settled on a shared model for what the company is actually worth.
What makes ARK’s continued buying notable isn’t the amount by hedge-fund standards — $329 million is a modest slice of a fund managing considerably more — but the conviction it represents against a full year of consistent share-price decline. Buying more of something as it drops 42% is either disciplined contrarian investing or a stubborn refusal to recognize a bad thesis, and which one it turns out to be will depend heavily on where stablecoin issuance and regulation head from here. Circle’s business is directly tied to USDC’s circulating supply and the yield it earns on the reserves backing it, both of which are sensitive to interest-rate cycles and to how aggressively banks and fintechs decide to compete in the stablecoin space themselves.
Equities and crypto-adjacent stocks like Circle carry substantial price risk, and nothing here is investment advice. For background on how stablecoins and their issuers actually work, coin680’s Bitcoin Academy covers the fundamentals.