2 High-Risk, High-Reward Stock Bets Cathie Wood Is Taking Into 2023

The tech-heavy Nasdaq represents a collection of more risky stocks than the other major indexes and that is reflected by a poorer performance in bear markets and a better display during bull runs.

But the risks associated with the Nasdaq are mere child play compared to edgier funds such as Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF. Now that really hit the skids during last year’s bear, but the fund is also up 37% year-to-date, putting the Nasdaq’s 15% gain in the shade.

In fact, throwing more shade the Nasdaq’s way, after January represented its best ever monthly performance, the risk tolerant Wood recently said the ARKK ETF is “the new Nasdaq,” and offers investors much better exposure to the disruptive stocks she supports.

So, let’s go down that route and dig up the details on a pair of disruptive, high-risk, high-reward names the Ark CEO has been loading up on in recent times. Using the TipRanks database, we can see whether the Street’s analysts are also backing Wood’s picks. Here are the details.

Verve Therapeutics, Inc. (VERV)

The first Cathie Wood pick we’re looking at is Verve Therapeutics, a biotech company with one mission: to offer protection against cardiovascular disease. This it intends to do by developing medicines using cutting edge techniques — human genetic analysis, gene editing, messenger RNA (mRNA)-based therapies and lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery — to realize its vision and disrupt the present care model by which cardiovascular disease is treated.

Verve’s pipeline has two programs still in the early stages of development. Leading the way is VERVE-101, designed as a single-course in vivo liver gene editing therapy and initially intended to treat heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH), an autosomal dominant disease defined by noticeably raised plasma concentrations of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (LDL-C).

The program, however, has run into some issues. In November, the FDA placed a clinical hold on the company’s Investigational New Drug application (IND) for the candidate, citing the need for more clinical and preclinical data plus a modification to a U.S. study.

Nevertheless, a Phase 1 study for VERVE-101 titled heart-1 is currently taking place in New Zealand and the U.K. An early data readout from the dose-escalation portion is anticipated in H2 2023.

Cathie Wood is evidently not too concerned about the clinical hold; she bought 691,589 shares via…