I don't know, nor do I care how you did last year. My point is, ARK was up 200%,150% and I think 125% last year. I don't think a couple down days is reason to take shots. You say it was just a little humor, so I apologize if I jumped. But I notice there tends to be a group of people here who if someone posts of investing in something they're not in, they'll be quick to jump if it goes a bit sideways. Be it indexers vs. stock pickers or whatever.
I think many of these funds will end up like Janus 20 and other hot funds of years ago. Having said that, it doesn't mean that they can't go higher - much higher and I too have been [-]speculating[/-] investing in these kinds of companies.
Does that mean it is a waste? No. In the 1800's and early 1900's a lot of America's railroad infrastructure was built as the result of British investment, and even in England in the 1840's there was a "Railroad" stock mania. The net result was that most of the investors lost money, but America ended up with a great infrastructure for growth.
Similarly, there will be lots of failures in terms of genomics, electric vehicles, 3D printing, and other "ARK" like companies. But a few of them will make it and I don't doubt we are on the cusp of vast changes in these fields.
I teach computer science (retired from mega-corp and now teaching CS in a college full-time). One of the things I try to drive (repeatedly) into new CS students is that each "crank" of the technology wheel (smaller->faster) processors, increased storage, faster communications results in new applications that are possible. It isn't that people 30 years ago weren't thinking of AI, speech recognition, vision systems, AR, VR, medical uses of chips/technology, gene research using computational devices, and so on. They were...it is just that in 45 years (when I learned to program) with a doubling of processing speeds and storage capacity every 2 years we have processors that are 2**22 = 4
million times faster, and it is THAT which makes these once far-fetched things possible. Even more important, I try to impress on them that IT HASN'T STOPPED, so what applications and use cases will THEY be able to work on in 4, 10, 20, 30 years.
But between now and then there will be a lot of run ups, new companies, but many failures and many hot funds that are no longer so.