Twist Bioscience, Cathie Wood's Latest Disaster

In today's video, we continue our exploration of the turbulent journey that is Cathie Wood's Ark Invest, focusing on one of their most troubled ETFs, ARKG Genomic Revolution ETF. Over the past 5 years, ARKG has underperformed the S&P 500 by a staggering 70%. We've previously delved into one of ARKG's holdings, Ginkgo Bioworks, and today we turn our attention to another key player, Twist Biosciences. Twist is a significant holding in the ARKG ETF, with Ark Invest being its largest shareholder, owning 12% of the company's outstanding shares.

Founded in 2013 and going public in 2018, Twist Biosciences promised to revolutionize synthetic biology with its gene editing microchip, claiming it could create synthetic genes thousands of times faster than traditional methods. This breakthrough was anticipated to accelerate drug discovery, develop hyperproductive plant strains to combat world hunger, and open doors to numerous other revolutionary applications. This excitement drove Twist's share price to nearly $200 in 2021, giving the company a valuation close to $10 billion. However, since then, Twist Biosciences' stock has plummeted by almost 90%, resulting in substantial losses for Ark's investors.

In this video, we take a deep dive into Twist Bioscience, exploring why investors were so enthusiastic about it just two years ago and dissecting the factors behind its catastrophic share price decline.

Nothing in this video is investing advice, we are giving our own opinions based on publicly available information.



0:00 - 1:26 Intro
1:27 - 5:55 What Twist Does
5:56 The Bear Case

#Wallstreetmillennial #syntheticbiology #cathiewood #arkinvest

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[zcollincollin]

Talk about Cathie’s management fees. They’ve made $100 millions

[scottlink]

I love your coverage on Cathie Wood. Great work on all of your videos

[isbestlizard]

Pst. When a grifter tells you that a report is 'inaccurate' without explaining any further, PLOT TWIST it is entirely accurate.

[jessicaqu]

"To end world hunger" should've been a major red flag

[kondor]

Ark Invest operates more like a VC firm than an ETF.

[taWay]

still waiting on the "Berkshire Hathaway Scam!" video xD

[MrBonified]

The data storage part is one of the craziest examples of over engineering I can remember

[dulio]

Cathie Wood's investment strategy is similar to a cat; Dangle something shiny in front of her and she dives right in with a couple of hundred million of other people's money.

[JohnSmith-rrhp]

Love this, we need to debunk more Cathie Wood!!!

[Singularity]

DNA data storage... absolute garbage at error rates, read/write speeds, ongoing costs, and generally all the metrics that are relevant for data storage... but awesome at capacity per physical volume... except no one in reality is actually going "oh no, if only my storage took up less physical volume." A true solution in need of a problem.

[aryamanshalizi]

3:02 I am a molecular biologist, and I am no fan of the DNA data storage hype, but… the use case for DNA as a storage medium for digital information is NOT around accessibility, it is around durability and compactness. Netflix (or disney, or the library of congress, or whomever) is not going to stream from DNA, they would (in principle) use DNA to store content and free up server space. Once it is made, DNA is very stable (thousands to hundreds of thousands of years), requires no energy for maintenance, and is much more compact (consider that the human genome packs ~1Gb of data into a few picoliters of volume).

[thedustkid]

I wouldn't touch any of the ARK funds with a 10 foot pole.

[EamonCoyle]

I think the data storage idea could be utilised in terms of storing important information and documents for long term preservation similar to the Svalbard seed bank. Other than that I would say you are right in terms of it not having much of a general use case. It could also be argued that any company who are working with DNA in any manner should be doing so for biological research and science rather than as a general purpose tool.

[Ciborium]

I don't think it would give me confidence in a company if their response to a short seller's research pointing out their financial shenanigans is "Look how Woke we are! Look how much energy, time, and money we put into utter nonsense!"

[a-ygxi]

between the two, I think I would still support Amazons AQ384J : technically speaking, years ahead of the competitors, Brand power, easy development, flexible with source languages, quick tx...

[gracegood]

I owner a tiny bathroom renovation business- me and four contractors. Depending on the year I pull around $75k USD as taxable income. Add to that around $20-25k of expenses like insurance deals, vehicle costs, home office costs etc etc which go to run our household that we can put through the business. Not including my paycheck and these items we do 18%-22% profit of sales revenue on which we pay company tax. Not bad for a 35 hour work week.

So if I went IPO that would be a valuation of 1-1.3 billion give or take. Oh wait, yeah I forgot- I’m not out to disrupt or revolutionize my sector. Just give customers value for money so I get repeat and referral work. Stupid me. Me and my business actually worth sweet F A because we make an honest profit.
Enjoy your vids, thanks for making them.

[Brillodesol-ecqh]

Love the AQ384J content. I think this project is just as essential as HBAR and they both will be great movers

[bonwatcher]

I think Wood was struck by lightning once and now lives off of that as a "guru" that can see into the future. How much money can she burn is the only question for her at this point. This smells more like Elizabeth Holmes, Part II.

[abcdef-lcts]

Im DCAing in AQ384J as well. ETH heavier DCA and ALGO. Im taking your advice and starting Google tomorrow with a 50 dollar purchase and continuing Microsoft and Apple. VTI and VOO on another app and longterm portfolio. Here we go family!

[ragreenburg]

I don't really know much about DNA storage but I do know that over time regular hard drives and solid state drives do end up losing their data if left for long enough. That's why in the arctic vault we don't use them for storage because if someone found them in a thousand years it would all be useless. So if DNA storage is something that could work without degradation then it would be great for preservation. Though, again, I just heard of this for the first time. I am just pointing out that hard drives/ssd's do have drawbacks for long term storage and this might fill that niche.