From left to right: Cathie Wood of Ark Investments, Nancy Zevenbergen of Zevenbergen Capital Investments, and Karina Funk of Brown Advisory. These investors and many other female-led funds have thrived in 2020.n an investment industry known for big egos, overconfident analysts and “activists” who routinely tell CEOs how to run their companies, investor Nancy Zevenbergen and her team of four portfolio managers differentiate themselves by simply listening.
Seattle-based Nancy Zevenbergen calls investing with a less than five-year time frame"truly speculative." Case in point: She's owned Amazon since it traded in the $60s and still holds shares after a 90-fold rise.With stock-picks like these, Zevenbergen’s Innovative Growth Fund and Genea Fund are up a staggering 126% and 154%, respectively, in 2020. Of over 1,000 peer funds tracked by Morningstar, the two mutual funds rank in the top percentile.
Six years later, Ark manages nearly $44 billion in assets, up from just $300 million at the end of 2016. This year, Ark funds have pulled in over $10 billion in new assets, led by extraordinary returns. Her flagship Ark Innovation Fund has seen assets soar to $17 billion, fueled by a 154% gain in 2020 and a 46% average annual return over the past five years. Her $6 billion Ark Genomic revolution ETF is up even more this year.
Long before sustainable investments became a prolific buzzword, Karina Funk, an MIT-educated engineer at Baltimore-based mutual fund giant Brown Advisory, was a pioneer in bringing sustainable investments mainstream.
Other female-led funds that have done well include Capital Group’s $128 billion American Funds New Perspective , led by a team of managers including Joanna Jonsson and Noriko Chen, and the $36 billion in assets JPMorgan Equity Income Fund , led by Clare Hart. The New Perspectives fund has beaten its benchmark by four percentage points annually over the past decade, while Hart’s Equity Income Fund has returned an annualized 11.