Josh Brown Is Wrong About Cathie Wood’s Trolling Wall Street

I’m a big fan of Josh Brown. I’ve read and listened to his stuff for almost 15 years. But I think he’s missing the point, or potential influence, of the now infamous Ark troll video.

With just $9 billion of assets under management her philosophy is still a tiny minority on Wall Street.

It’s not enough. And I don’t say that from a seat of “we need to make more money”. What we need is more money flowing into things that solve the big problems, not 7% per year safe havens. The latter is wasted potential.

Bringing the "we need to innovate and move forward" mindset and the money that comes with it to more of Wall Street is better for everyone. The more money that moves into next-generation technologies, the faster we'll make major progress on things like climate, education, and health.

Vote with your wallet applies to owning stock in a company just as much as it does to purchasing its products.

In August we saw Tesla do a $5 billion secondary offering simply because it could. The rabid stakeholders Musk and company have created had increased the value of the company so much that the float could support an additional 1% without wavering. What can that 1% buy? One new Gigafactory.

Just like that. And it’s due to money flowing into the company from people that support the Tesla mission.

Support for edge companies like this will increase as investing becomes more democratized via the likes of zero-commission trading and fund managers like Ms. Woods who opens her research vault to the public.

The ad will get the attention of three groups of people. Under 40's. Let It Burn types. And those that don't see a reason why legacy companies should be considered the right investment. That’s always been her target audience, she just needs more of them to know Ark exists.

An ad that gets booed all around Wall Street? Only two words matter there: all around. Josh played right into the game.