Cathie Wood recently struck at these two cheap stocks

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• Cathie Wood buys cheap stocks in the first quarter
• Joby Aviation is planning an air taxi service
• Genius Sports as an interface between sports, betting and media in the sports sector

Cathie Wood relies on disruption with her investment company ARK Invest, but especially with the flagship ETF ARK Innovation. The investor has high hopes for the electric car manufacturer Tesla, which she believes is capable of great things at all levels. It is true that Wood recently dumped around $26 million worth of Tesla shares from the portfolio and at the same time stocked up on Coinbase and Block titles, her belief in Elon Musk and this does not detract from the potential of his company.

Increased participation in cheap stocks

While Tesla, Coinbase and Block are big names in the market and most market participants should be familiar with them, two other stocks that Wood recently grabbed are far less well-known to investors: Joby Aviation and Genius Sports Limited, both stocks with a price from under $5.

The two publicly traded companies are active in completely different industries, but seem to have great potential for Wood in their respective segments.

Joby Aviation stock

The fact that the star investor relies on Joby Aviation and its business model comes as no surprise when you take a closer look at the company’s business area. The US-based aviation company is in the middle of developing an electrically powered, vertical take-off and landing aircraft. The goal: an air taxi service.

When it was founded in 2009, the company said it wanted to “explore the limits of technologies such as electric motors, flight software and lithium-ion batteries and develop almost every component from scratch”. With this concept, Joby convinced NASA just 3 years after its founding, which chose the company as a partner to work together on “several groundbreaking electric flight projects”, as the company website says.

Joby has been testing his prototype in test flights since 2019 and was able to win the Japanese automobile giant Toyota as an investor and bag a partnership with Uber. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, and a year later the company acquired a certificate that allows Joby to operate a commercial air taxi service.

The company has clearly defined the goals for the coming years: “In the coming years we will focus on three main goals: the certification of our aircraft, the scaling of our production and the preparation for operations”.

Cathie Wood appears to have confidence in Joby to create breakthroughs in his business and become a disruptor. In the first quarter, she acquired 574,301 Joby shares for the two ETFs ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF and ARK Space Exploration & Innovation ETF, doubling her existing stake to a total of 1,286,772 shares.

The positive assessment of the share is apparently shared by analysts and market participants alike. Since the start of the year, the Joby share certificate has already increased by around 26.8 percent, the average target price of USD 7.67 is well above the current share price of USD 4.25 (as of April 4, 2023).

Genius Sports Limited stock

The second sub-$5 company in which Cathie Wood increased her holdings in the first quarter is Genius Sports Limited. The sports data and technology company offers services such as data management, video streaming and integrity services. “We help organize, optimize and enrich experiences for hundreds of sports, betting and media brands around the world,” the company’s website reads.

Genius Sports Limited was founded in London in 2001 as a specialist in betting data. Today the company claims to be one of the world’s largest sports technology providers and is active on five continents with 1,800 employees.

According to Genius Sports, it is committed to a “more sustainable sports data ecosystem”. Genius provides the technology to connect all aspects of a sport: “From leagues taking control of their official data and videos, to brands creating immersive fan experiences”.

Genius can already rely on well-known partners: In addition to British Airways and pringles The Telegraph and the LA Clippers are also mentioned as partners in extremely different projects.

For Cathie Wood, these are apparently enough reasons to increase her holding by 385,001 shares in the first quarter of 2023. The star investor acquired the titles for the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF, and ARK now holds a total of 5,106,674 Genius titles with a total value of around 20 million US dollars.

The stock has tumbled since going public in 2021, arguably owing to the increasingly less optimistic mood that has hit loss-making companies in the market over the past year and a half. So far, however, the balance sheet for 2023 has been positive: since the start of the year, the share has increased by 30.53 percent. And analysts also see potential: the average target price of USD 7.30 is significantly higher than the current price of the share on April 4th, 2023 (USD 4.66).

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