Cathie Wood: ARK Invest, the Tesla Conviction Trade, and the Disruptive Innovation Thesis

In the autumn of two thousand and thirteen, in a corner office on Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan, a fifty-eight-year-old chief investment officer named Catherine Duddy Wood walked into a meeting with the senior leadership of AllianceBernstein and pitched them an idea. The idea was that AllianceBernstein, which managed approximately five hundred billion dollars in assets through traditional mutual funds and separately managed accounts, should launch a series of actively managed exchange-traded funds focused on what she called disruptive innovation. The funds would invest in companies building artificial intelligence, gene-editing platforms, autonomous vehicles, blockchain payment networks, and energy-storage technologies. The funds would be transparent in a way that no actively managed product had ever been: every position, every change, published daily for retail investors to read.

The senior leadership listened politely. They told her the idea was too risky, too speculative, too far outside the firm’s core competence. The post-two thousand and eight regulatory environment was hostile to anything that sounded like disruption. Their compliance team would not approve it. Their distribution channels would not market it. The proposal was rejected.

Wood, who had spent thirty-six years working her way up the corporate hierarchy of American asset management, who had managed five billion dollars at AllianceBernstein for twelve years and another eight hundred million as co-founder of Tupelo Capital Management before that, who had served as chief economist of Jennison Associates for eighteen years and started her career at the Capital Group in 1977 under the mentorship of the supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, made a decision in that meeting that would define the rest of her career. She would leave. She would launch the firm she had just been told she could not launch. She would do it without the AllianceBernstein name, without the AllianceBernstein distribution platform, and without any of the institutional protection that had defined her professional life until that moment. She was fifty-eight years old. She had three children, a husband who was ill, and a track record that was respectable but not extraordinary. She had never run her own firm.

In January two thousand and fourteen, Wood registered ARK Investment Management with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The acronym, she would later say, stood for Active Research Knowledge, and it was also a deliberate biblical reference for the devout Christian who had named it. The firm launched its first four exchange-traded funds in October two thousand and fourteen. The flagship product, the ARK Innovation ETF, ticker ARKK, gathered exactly twenty million dollars in assets in its first six months. By two thousand and seventeen the fund was up over eighty percent on the year, mostly because of a single position: Tesla, which Wood had bought aggressively when most of Wall Street considered the company a probable bankruptcy. By two thousand and twenty, in the year of the COVID-nineteen pandemic and the fastest equity bull market in American history, ARKK returned one hundred and fifty-2.8 percent and Wood was named the best stock picker of the year by Bloomberg. ARK Invest’s total assets grew from approximately three billion dollars at the start of two thousand and twenty to a peak of approximately sixty billion dollars by February two thousand and twenty-one.

By twenty twenty-three, ARKK had given back almost all of those gains. Morningstar, in a much-discussed twenty twenty-four ranking, named the ARK Innovation ETF the third-largest wealth-destroying mutual fund of the previous decade, estimating that despite the fund’s spectacular gains in twenty twenty, the late-arriving capital that had piled in at the peak had collectively lost more than seven billion dollars by twenty twenty-three.

The story of Cathie Wood is the story of conviction-based investing carried to its logical extremes, in both directions. It is also the story of what happens when retail-investor flows, social-media fame, a once-in-a-century macroeconomic environment, and an actual investment thesis converge in the same vehicle and then diverge. The episode you are about to hear is an honest accounting. Not a hagiography, not a takedown. An attempt to understand what she did, what she got right, what she got wrong, and what a retail trader watching from a distance can take from her record.

Los Angeles, Notre Dame Academy, and the Laffer Internship

Catherine Duddy was born on the twenty-sixth of November, 1955, in Los Angeles, California, the eldest child of Gerald and Mary Duddy, both Irish immigrants. Her father had served in the Irish Army before emigrating to the United States, where he joined the United States Air Force as a radar systems engineer. The family was working-class, devout Catholic, and academically ambitious in the way that first-generation immigrant families often are. Catherine, her brothers, and her sister grew up in a household where education was treated as the only reliable path out of the working class.

She attended Notre Dame Academy in West Los Angeles, an all-girls Catholic high school, graduating in 1974. From Notre Dame she went to the University of Southern California, where she enrolled in the undergraduate economics program. At USC she came under the influence of Arthur Laffer, the supply-side economist who would later achieve national fame as the architect of the Reagan tax cuts and the namesake of the Laffer Curve. Laffer, who taught at USC throughout the 1970s, became Wood’s mentor. He gave her her first significant exposure to economic forecasting, the role of monetary policy, and the long-cycle dynamics of inflation and asset prices. He also gave her, after her undergraduate years, an introduction that would shape the rest of her career.

Wood graduated from USC summa cum laude in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science in finance and economics. She had already, four years earlier in 1977, started working as an assistant economist at the Capital Group, the Los Angeles-based investment management firm that managed the American Funds family of mutual funds. The job had come to her through Laffer’s introduction. She would spend three years at Capital Group, learning the basics of fundamental equity research and developing the long-cycle macroeconomic framework that would define her later thinking.

In 1980, while still finishing her degree, Wood moved from Los Angeles to New York City to take a position at Jennison Associates, a growth-equity manager that was at the time one of the dominant active equity firms in the country. She would stay at Jennison for eighteen years, eventually rising to chief economist, equity analyst, portfolio manager, and managing director. The Jennison years are where her professional voice developed. In the early 1980s, when the prevailing Wall Street view was that interest rates would continue rising and inflation would remain entrenched, Wood publicly debated the bond strategist Henry Kaufman, then the most famous interest-rate forecaster on Wall Street, on the proposition that rates had peaked and would decline. Kaufman was, at that point, predicting continued tightening. Wood predicted the opposite. The thirty-five-year bull market in bonds that began in 1981, the same one that defined Bill Gross’s career at PIMCO as the previous episode of this season described, vindicated Wood’s call. She was twenty-five years old.

Tupelo, AllianceBernstein, and the Idea That Would Not Stay Down

In 1998, after eighteen years at Jennison, Wood left to co-found a hedge fund with the philanthropist and investment manager Lulu Wang. The fund was called Tupelo Capital Management, after the tupelo tree, and it operated as a global thematic strategy. Tupelo grew to approximately eight hundred million dollars in assets at its peak. The structure of the fund, in retrospect, was an early prototype of the strategy Wood would eventually launch at ARK: identify long-term thematic trends, build concentrated positions in the public-equity beneficiaries of those trends, and hold them through the volatility that thematic positioning inevitably produces.

In two thousand and one, Wood left Tupelo to join AllianceBernstein, the New York-based asset manager that had recently been formed by the merger of Alliance Capital and Sanford C. Bernstein. AllianceBernstein offered her a larger platform, a five-billion-dollar mandate, and the title of chief investment officer of global thematic strategies. She would spend twelve years at AllianceBernstein, building the thematic franchise into a substantial book of business and developing the disruptive-innovation framework that would later become ARK’s foundational thesis.

The two thousand and seven to two thousand and nine financial crisis was, for Wood’s AllianceBernstein performance, a period of significant underperformance. Her thematic portfolios, heavily exposed to growth equities, declined more than the broader market through the crisis. AllianceBernstein’s senior leadership was unimpressed. By the early twenty tens, the underperformance had been compounded by a regulatory environment that was structurally hostile to thematic active management and by the rise of passive index investing, which was siphoning assets out of every actively managed franchise on Wall Street. Wood, who had been quietly developing a counter-proposal during the post-crisis years, brought her ETF idea to the firm’s leadership in late two thousand and thirteen. The proposal was that the firm could fight back against passive investing not by competing with index funds on cost but by building actively managed ETFs around the kind of thematic, high-conviction strategies that index funds could not by their nature replicate.

The proposal was rejected. Wood resigned. In January two thousand and fourteen she registered ARK Investment Management with the SEC and began raising the seed capital to launch four ETFs. She used a substantial portion of her own life savings as the seed money. Her husband Robert was suffering from a serious illness that would eventually take his life in two thousand and eighteen. She had three children. The decision was, by any reasonable measure, the riskiest financial choice she had ever made, and she was making it at fifty-eight, an age at which most asset-management executives are managing their retirement transitions rather than founding new firms.

The Tesla Call: 2018 to 2021

The trade that built ARK Invest into a household name was Tesla. Wood began buying the stock in two thousand and fourteen, almost immediately after launching ARKK, when Tesla was trading at the equivalent of approximately twenty dollars a share on a post-split basis. The company at that point had recently delivered the Model S, was operating at a substantial loss, and was the subject of an ongoing short-seller campaign that argued the company would either go bankrupt or be forced to issue dilutive equity that would crush the stock.

Wood’s thesis was different. She argued, in research that ARK Invest published openly on its website, that Tesla was not really a car company. It was a vertically integrated platform combining manufacturing, software, energy storage, and autonomous driving, with the structural potential to become the dominant player in a transportation industry that would inevitably electrify. ARK’s published five-year price targets for Tesla, which began at four hundred dollars per share in two thousand and seventeen and were eventually raised to four thousand five hundred dollars per share by two thousand and twenty-two, were widely mocked at the time. The Wall Street consensus, when Tesla was trading at three hundred dollars in two thousand and eighteen and the stock was being battered by Elon Musk’s funding-secured tweet and the SEC investigation that followed, was that Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy.

ARK Invest, in two thousand and eighteen, doubled its Tesla position. Wood, who had built the position to roughly ten percent of ARKK’s portfolio by mid two thousand and eighteen, increased it to fifteen percent over the following months. She published detailed research notes explaining the underlying mathematics of why the position was being increased rather than decreased. She gave interviews on financial television in which she defended the trade against host scepticism. She appeared on YouTube channels that traditional money managers would never have appeared on, talking directly to retail investors about the fundamentals of the position. She tweeted research updates publicly, breaking with every convention of institutional asset-management discretion.

The trade played out, over the next three years, as one of the most successful equity calls in modern asset-management history. Tesla, on a split-adjusted basis, rose from approximately twenty dollars when Wood began buying in two thousand and fourteen to over four hundred dollars at its November two thousand and twenty-one peak, a return of approximately twenty times the entry price. ARK’s flagship fund, which held Tesla as its largest single position throughout the run, returned over thirty percent annualised from inception through two thousand and twenty, peaking at one hundred and fifty-2.8 percent in two thousand and twenty alone. The fund’s assets grew from approximately three billion dollars at the start of two thousand and twenty to approximately sixty billion at the February two thousand and twenty-one peak.

“When everyone told me I was crazy for buying Tesla at two hundred, I knew I was on the right track. Innovation isn’t safe, but it’s where fortunes are made.”
— Cathie Wood, in interviews and ARK Invest research notes

The Pandemic, the Retail Mania, and the View from $60 Billion

Wood’s emergence into mainstream financial fame in two thousand and twenty was the product of a coincidence between a genuine investment thesis and an extraordinary moment in American retail-investor behaviour. The COVID-nineteen pandemic, the federal stimulus checks, the Robinhood-driven democratisation of brokerage, and the lockdown-induced surge in time spent online all combined in two thousand and twenty to create the largest retail-investor mobilisation in American financial history. Millions of new accounts were opened. Trillions of dollars of stimulus money flowed into the equity markets. Online communities formed around individual money managers in ways that had no precedent.

Wood became the figure around whom the largest of those communities formed. ARK’s published daily trade disclosures, broadcast publicly through the firm’s website, became required reading for the retail-investor community that called itself the buy-the-dip generation. Her appearances on YouTube channels and Twitter, which traditional asset-management executives still treated as second-rate distribution channels, gave her a direct line to retail investors that no firm of her size had ever cultivated. Her published five-year price targets, which were stated in absolute dollar terms rather than the cautious analyst hedges of the broader Wall Street tradition, gave retail investors specific numbers to anchor their convictions to. By the late autumn of two thousand and twenty, Wood was a celebrity in the way that almost no asset-management executive had ever been before. Bloomberg’s Matthew Winkler named her the best stock picker of the year. Forbes profiled her as the leading thematic investor of her generation. The financial-television networks featured her commentary in regular weekly slots.

The flow of retail capital into ARK’s funds during this period was extraordinary. ARKK, which had managed approximately three billion dollars at the start of two thousand and twenty, peaked at approximately twenty-eight billion dollars by February two thousand and twenty-one. Total ARK assets across all funds peaked at approximately sixty billion dollars in the same month. The flows were predominantly retail. Institutional allocators were largely absent. The vehicle’s investor base, in other words, was a population of late-arriving retail investors who had bought in primarily on the basis of two thousand and twenty’s spectacular returns and Wood’s media presence.

By March two thousand and twenty-one, the rotation had begun. The ten-year Treasury yield, which had bottomed at approximately half a percent in mid two thousand and twenty, rose sharply through the first quarter of two thousand and twenty-one, putting pressure on the long-duration growth equities that dominated ARKK’s portfolio. The Federal Reserve’s signalling, through the spring and summer of twenty twenty-one, that monetary tightening was coming put further pressure on the same names. By the time the Fed actually began raising rates in March twenty twenty-two, ARKK had already lost over half its value from the February twenty twenty-one peak. By late twenty twenty-two, the fund was down approximately eighty percent from peak. Many of the retail investors who had bought in during the late twenty twenty rally had collectively lost the majority of their investment.

The Morningstar Verdict and What It Actually Says

In twenty twenty-four, Morningstar published its widely cited ranking of the fifteen largest wealth-destroying mutual funds of the previous decade. ARKK was ranked number three on the list. The estimate was that despite the fund’s spectacular gains in twenty twenty, the late-arriving retail flows had collectively lost approximately seven point one billion dollars over the ten-year period of two thousand and fourteen to twenty twenty-three. The number is, in absolute dollar terms, one of the largest single-fund wealth-destruction figures in mutual-fund history.

The number is also, in fairness, somewhat misleading on its own. The fund’s reported total return from inception in two thousand and fourteen through twenty twenty-three was positive. An investor who had bought ARKK at inception and held it through the entire period would have made money, though substantially less than the same investor would have made by holding the Nasdaq-100 over the same period. The seven-billion-dollar wealth-destruction figure reflects not the fund’s underlying performance but the dollar-weighted experience of the actual investor base, which was disproportionately weighted toward investors who bought near the February twenty twenty-one peak. This is a pattern common to all dramatic-return funds: the late-arriving capital is always the largest, the late-arriving capital is always the most likely to sell at the bottom, and the dollar-weighted experience of the average investor is always worse than the time-weighted return of the fund itself.

What Morningstar’s number actually documents is something specific and worth naming clearly. It is not that Wood’s investment thesis failed. The companies ARKK held in two thousand and twenty are, in many cases, larger and more dominant in twenty twenty-six than they were then. Tesla is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Coinbase has survived multiple crypto cycles. Roku, Block, Palantir, and CRISPR Therapeutics are all serious operating businesses with market capitalisations in the tens of billions. The thesis that disruptive technologies would dominate large segments of the economy was, in the broad sense, vindicated. What failed was the marriage between that long-cycle thesis and the short-cycle structure of an exchange-traded fund whose investor base was disproportionately retail and disproportionately performance-chasing. The vehicle attracted capital at the worst possible moment in the cycle and lost most of that capital when the cycle turned. The same thesis, executed in a private partnership with a five-year lock-up and a sophisticated institutional investor base, would probably have produced a very different distribution of investor outcomes.

What We Cannot Know

Wood’s record contains the same kinds of ambiguities that the previous episodes’ subjects’ records contain, and several that are particular to her.

The first concerns whether ARKK will recover. Through twenty twenty-five, the fund regained a portion of the ground it lost in twenty twenty-one and twenty twenty-two, returning over twenty percent year-to-date through the third quarter of twenty twenty-five against an S&P five hundred return of single digits. Wood has continued to publish bullish five-year price targets, including a four hundred and ninety-thousand-dollar target on Bitcoin and a two thousand six hundred dollar target on Tesla. Whether those targets are realised, whether the fund’s long-term performance ultimately rivals the Nasdaq-100 over a fifteen or twenty-year horizon, is genuinely unknown. She is seventy years old. The track record will continue to be written for as long as she continues to manage the firm.

The second concerns the cost-of-capital question. Wood’s investment thesis depends on a structural assumption that disruptive technologies will continue to attract capital at favourable cost. The ten-year zero-interest-rate environment from two thousand and ten to twenty twenty made this assumption easy to satisfy. The post-twenty twenty rate environment, with the federal funds rate approaching five percent for an extended period, made it much harder. Whether the long-term cost-of-capital regime that prevailed from twenty twenty-three onward is the new normal or a temporary anomaly will determine, in significant part, whether her thesis works going forward. The honest answer is that nobody knows.

The third concerns the gap between the fund’s narrative and its actual experience. Wood’s marketing message, which has been consistent since two thousand and fourteen, is that ARK funds are venture-capital-style exposures available to retail investors through a public-market vehicle. The framing is, in some ways, accurate. The actual investor experience, however, has been considerably more punishing than venture-capital investing for the late-arriving cohort, because the daily liquidity of an ETF and the social-media-amplified flow dynamics make the round-trip much more violent than a private-fund structure would. Whether this gap is the result of Wood’s marketing, of structural problems with the ETF wrapper itself, or of retail-investor behaviour in general, is genuinely contested. There is some truth in all three explanations.

The fourth concerns the personal cost. Wood has spoken candidly in interviews about the loss of her husband Robert in two thousand and eighteen, four years after she had founded ARK using their joint savings. She has described the years that followed, during which she was simultaneously running a startup asset-management firm, raising three children alone, and grieving, as the most difficult period of her life. The visibility she gained during the two thousand and twenty rally came alongside a degree of personal scrutiny and online vitriol that almost no female asset-management executive had previously experienced. The trolls, the wealth-destruction memes, the gendered hostility, the social-media campaigns against her, all of it landed on a single person who was simultaneously trying to manage what had become one of the most-watched portfolios in America. She has handled it, by the accounts of those who know her, with more equanimity than most observers would have expected. The cost, however, has been real.

What Wood Teaches: Four Lessons in Order of Depth

1. The most important lesson is structural: conviction-based investing requires the right vehicle for the right investor base, and the wrong vehicle can destroy the right thesis. Wood’s underlying thesis about disruptive innovation was, in significant part, correct. The companies she identified in the mid twenty tens have, over the subsequent decade, grown into some of the largest and most consequential public corporations in the world. What failed was the marriage between that long-cycle thesis and a daily-liquidity ETF wrapper marketed to retail investors who were performance-chasing rather than holding through cycles. The retail trader’s analogue is the same. A trading thesis with a multi-month or multi-year horizon needs a structural setup that protects against the trader’s own behavioural reactions to short-cycle volatility. Position sizing, stop discipline, account separation, the willingness to ignore daily price movements when the thesis is intact, are not separate from the trade. They are part of the trade. A correct thesis executed without the right structure is approximately equal to a wrong thesis.

2. The deeper lesson is timing-related: the worst time to attract capital is at the peak of your visibility, and the discipline to refuse it is rare. ARK’s assets grew from approximately three billion to approximately sixty billion in roughly twelve months across twenty twenty and early twenty twenty-one. Most of that capital arrived from retail investors who had been watching the previous year’s returns and buying into the narrative. A more disciplined firm would have closed the funds to new capital somewhere along the way, recognising that the late-arriving flows would suffer the worst dollar-weighted outcomes. ARK did not. The retail trader’s analogue is the same: when your strategy is producing its best returns and other people are asking how to copy it, the structural fact is that the strategy is more crowded than it has ever been, the easy money has already been made, and the discipline of refusing additional size, additional leverage, and additional positions you would not normally take is precisely what protects you from the regression that is statistically about to come. Easy money is always a warning, not an opportunity.

3. The deeper lesson still is intellectual: thematic conviction is a real edge, and so is the discipline to hold a position through the period in which it appears wrong. Wood’s Tesla position from two thousand and fourteen through November two thousand and twenty-one returned approximately twenty times the entry price. The position was wrong, in the sense that it was substantially underwater, for several extended periods over those seven years. Most of Wall Street thought she was wrong. The position required holding it through the funding-secured episode, the SEC settlement, the production-hell quarters of two thousand and seventeen and two thousand and eighteen, and a public short-seller campaign of unusual intensity. The retail trader’s analogue is harder to execute and structurally identical. Real thematic edge requires holding the position through the period in which it appears wrong. The discipline to do that is rare. The investor who has it, when paired with a correct thesis, captures returns that are not available to anyone who is rebalancing on quarterly performance reviews. The investor who has it paired with an incorrect thesis simply loses money slowly. The art is in distinguishing which one you are looking at.

4. The deepest lesson is moral: the obligation to think honestly about your investor base is part of the work. Wood’s defenders argue, correctly, that she has been more transparent than almost any other asset manager of her generation, publishing daily trade disclosures and detailed research notes that allowed any retail investor to understand exactly what she was doing. Her critics argue, also correctly, that the marketing message attached to those disclosures, the consistent five-year price targets and the venture-capital-like-returns-for-retail-investors framing, contributed to the late-arriving flows that ultimately suffered the worst outcomes. Both things are true. The honest reading is that an asset-management firm has obligations to its actual investor base that go beyond the obligation to deliver returns. It has an obligation to think carefully about who is buying the product, why they are buying it, what they think they are buying, and whether the structure of the offering matches their actual needs and time horizons. Wood, by her own later acknowledgment, did not think hard enough about that question during the twenty twenty rally. The retail trader operating with their own capital faces the same question one layer deeper: what story am I telling myself about what I am doing, and does that story match what I am actually doing? The discipline of asking the question honestly, and revisiting it during the periods when the trade is working, is itself a form of edge. Most traders do not ask it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Cathie Wood leave AllianceBernstein?

In late 2013, Wood proposed to AllianceBernstein’s senior leadership that the firm launch a series of actively managed ETFs focused on disruptive innovation. The proposal was rejected on the grounds that it was too risky and outside the firm’s core competence. Wood resigned shortly afterward and registered ARK Investment Management with the SEC in January 2014. She used a substantial portion of her own savings as the seed capital for the new firm.

What is ARK Innovation ETF?

ARKK is the flagship actively managed ETF of ARK Invest, launched in October 2014. It invests in public-equity companies Wood and her team identify as leaders, enablers, or beneficiaries of disruptive innovation, with a focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, DNA sequencing, and blockchain. The fund publishes daily disclosure of all holdings and trades, an unusually transparent practice for actively managed mutual funds. Its largest holdings have historically included Tesla, Coinbase, Roku, and Block.

What was Wood’s Tesla call?

Wood began buying Tesla aggressively in 2014, when the stock traded at the equivalent of approximately $20 per share on a post-split basis. She doubled the position in 2018 during the funding-secured episode, when much of Wall Street was predicting bankruptcy. ARK’s published five-year price targets reached as high as $4,500 per share. Tesla peaked at over $400 per share on a split-adjusted basis in November 2021, returning approximately 20x the original entry price. The position was the single largest contributor to ARKK’s lifetime returns through 2021.

How big did ARK Invest get?

ARK total assets under management grew from approximately $3 billion at the start of 2020 to a peak of approximately $60 billion by February 2021. ARKK alone peaked at approximately $28 billion. The growth came predominantly from retail-investor flows during the COVID-19 pandemic bull market. As of late 2025, total ARK assets had recovered partially from the 2022 lows and stand at approximately $15 to $20 billion across all funds.

Why did ARKK fall so much?

From its February 2021 peak through the end of 2022, ARKK fell approximately 80%. The decline reflected a combination of factors: the rotation out of long-duration growth equities as Treasury yields rose; the Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle; the deflation of the broader pandemic-era retail-investor mania; and concentration in unprofitable companies whose valuations had become structurally vulnerable to higher discount rates. The fund recovered some of its losses in 2023 and 2025 but remains well below its February 2021 peak.

What is the Morningstar wealth-destroyer ranking?

In its 2024 ranking of the largest wealth-destroying mutual funds of the previous decade, Morningstar named ARKK number three on the list, estimating that the dollar-weighted investor experience had collectively lost approximately $7.1 billion over the 2014-2023 period. The number reflects the gap between the fund’s time-weighted return (positive) and the dollar-weighted experience of the actual investor base (negative), which was disproportionately weighted toward late-arriving capital that bought near the February 2021 peak.

Is Cathie Wood actually a good investor?

The honest answer is mixed. She has demonstrated genuine ability to identify long-term thematic trends, including her early bullish call on interest rates in the early 1980s, her early aggressive Tesla position, and her early adoption of Bitcoin as a portfolio asset. She has been less successful at managing the timing and sizing of those positions in a vehicle whose investor base was disproportionately retail and performance-chasing. The thesis-level work is serious. The vehicle-level execution has been more vulnerable than the thesis-level work would suggest.

What is Wood’s connection to Arthur Laffer?

Laffer was Wood’s economics professor at USC in the late 1970s and became her professional mentor. He introduced her to the Capital Group in 1977, where she got her first job as an assistant economist at age 21 while still completing her undergraduate degree. The supply-side framework Laffer taught, with its emphasis on long-cycle tax and monetary effects, shaped Wood’s later thinking about thematic investing. She has continued to credit Laffer publicly throughout her career.