Cathie Wood’s ARK sells Coinbase stock for the first time in 2023

Cathie Wood’s investment management firm ARK Invest is moving to take profits from its Coinbase shares, selling its first batch of Coinbase stock in 2023.

On March 21, ARK sold 160,887 Coinbase shares from its ARK Fintech Innovation exchange-traded fund (ARKF) for $13.5 million, according to an investor notification seen by Cointelegraph.

The transaction became ARK’s first sale of Coinbase stock in 2023, following three months of active buying. The amount sold accounts for 23% of all Coinbase stock acquired by ARK so far in March and about 9% of all Coinbase shares bought by the firm so far this year.

After the sale, ARK holds nearly 1.6 million Coinbase shares bought in 2023. The shares are worth more than $132 million at the time of writing.

The latest sale comes amid Coinbase stock, which trades as COIN, seeing a significant surge in price, with the shares touching multimonth highs this week.

On March 21, COIN stock closed at $83.99, hitting the price level for the first time since September 2022, according to data from TradingView. The stock has recovered more than 130% since the beginning of the year but is still down about 54% over the past 12 months.

*Coinbase stock one-year price chart. Source: TradingView*

The upward movement of the Coinbase stock price aligns with a more positive trend in the cryptocurrency market, with Bitcoin (BTC) hitting multimonth highs amid the ongoing global banking crisis. On March 22, Bitcoin hit nine-month-highs above $28,000, significantly recovering price levels triggered by the industry crisis triggered by collapses like FTX.

The news comes soon after ARK made its biggest Coinbase stock purchase in 2023. On March 9, Wood’s investment manager bagged 301,437 Coinbase shares for its ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) and 52,525 shares for the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW). At the time of the purchase, the stock batch was worth about $20.5 million, while its current value is nearly $30 million.