How do you buy Cathie Wood’s ARK ETFs in the UK?

ARK Invest and its high-profile CEO/CIO, Cathie Wood, are rarely far from the headlines, though not always for the right reasons. Cathie Wood made her name through her love of new technology and growth stocks, and the punchy positions that she and her fellow money managers at ARK Invest take in them

ARK runs 16 investment strategies from Innovation to cryptocurrency, and it puts these strategies to work in the market. through a series of actively managed ETFs that can be bought and sold on the stock market, just like companies. The most well-known of these is the ARK Innovation ETF, which trades under the ticker ARKK in the US.

However, you cannot buy the US-listed ARK Innovation ETF in the UK, you need to buy a different ETF still managed by ARK, but listed in the UK. The rest of this guide explains how to buy ARK ETFs in the UK, and if they are good investments.

How do you buy ARK ETFs in the UK?

If you are in the UK you can buy the ARK ETFs that are available to UK Retail traders and investors through a stockbroker or ETF platform like Interactive Brokers, AJ Bell, IG, Hargreaves Lansdown or interactive investor.

If you find that your current broker doesn’t seem to offer the ARK ETFs, then it’s very likely that if you ask them to add the funds to their list then they will do so.

This is because US fund managers can’t just offer their ETFs for sale in the UK and Europe.

Instead, they need to comply with some pretty specific regulations before they can market their offerings on this side of the Atlantic.

Firstly, their funds must conform with UCITs regulations. UCITS is the shorthand for Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities.

These rules govern the creation and operation of collective investment vehicles in Europe, and they cover areas such as diversification, liquidity, risk management, and investor protection.

So it’s not simply a case of offering an existing US ETF to a new audience.

In addition to creating a UCITs structure ,the fund manager also has to produce KIDs or Key Information Documents for each of the funds they wish to market in Europe.

Not every US Fund manager wants to jump through these hoops, however. ARK Invest have done so.

And as a result, it offers 9 ETFs to retail traders and investors in the UK, three under the ARK label 6 more under its ESG brand Rize.

The ARK Innovation ETF the firms flagship,  is one of the funds that UK private clients can access  using Ticker ARKK .L

The innovation fund seeks to:

 “Invest in companies involved in “disruptive innovation”, defined as the introduction of a technologically enabled new product or service that potentially changes the way the world works”

 And it  looks to make investments among:

“Companies that rely on or benefit from the development of new products or services, technological improvements and advancements in scientific research relating to genomics; automation and manufacturing, transportation, energy, artificial intelligence, financial services and materials.”

What does Cathie Wood’s ARK ETFs invest in?

 As to the fund’s largest holdings it’s no surprise that they are mostly US stocks, including Tesla, Coinbase, Palantir, ROKU, Robinhood and Roblox.

Name	Weight
TESLA INC COM USD0.001	9.31%
ROBLOX CORP COM CL A	7.55%
COINBASE GLOBAL INC COM CL A	7.54%
ROKU INC COM CL A	6.25%
CIRCLE INTERNET GROUP INC	5.76%
ROBINHOOD MARKETS INC	5.70%
CRISPR THERAPEUTICS AG COM CHF0.03	4.83%
TEMPUS AI	4.71%
SHOPIFY INC CL A SUB VTG SHS	4.32%
PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES INC CL A	3.90%

Source: ARK Invest

Are ARK ETFs a good investment?

Many of the companies that ARK invest in have enjoyed, or are enjoying a good run in 2025.

The innovation ETF itself  is up +14.37% year to date and by +32.00% over the last three months.

Well if we compare ARKK with QQQ, the Nasdaq 100 tracker, over 12 months.Then the results are very favourable.

With ARKK up by +49.37% in the time frame, and QQQ up by just +10.27% over those 52 weeks.

If we extend the time frame to two years, however, then the differential narrows sharply.

With ARKK up by +49.54% and QQQ  by +45.93%.

Source: Barchart.com

 That performance data suggests to me that ARKK’s active management style does contain an edge, however it’s not a consistent one, at least in the Innovation fund.

That makes an allocation to the ETF more of tactical tool in my humble opinion.

Over the longer term, that is a 10-year period.

QQQ has outperformed ARK Innovation by almost 100.00% up by +393.77% to ARKK’s +203.40% gain.

And here is ARKK versus Tesla TSLA (in blue) ,which remains its largest holding, but which has trounced the funds performance, over the last decade.

Source: Barchart.com

Diversification and stock picking expertise

Of course when you buy a fund like the Innovation ETF you do so because you want the benefits of diversification, and the perceived expertise of the managers behind the funds stock selection.

On that note how does ARKK stack up against passive factor rival, such as the iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF? (Ticker MTUM). That tracks the performance of US stocks with persistent price trends.

Source: Barchart.com

MTUM has outperformed ARKK over the last couple of years. However that’s nothing to be ashamed of, because MTUM has outperformed many of its peers, including the S&P 500, over that time frame.