Cathie Wood buys 33M of Canadian tech stock

Cathie Wood has never been shy about placing big bets on disruptive technology. And when Shopify reported a blockbuster first quarter on May 5, 2026, ARK Invest did not wait around.

The firm loaded up on the Canadian e-commerce giant in a move that signals Wood still sees enormous upside ahead, even as the tech stock has climbed sharply over the past decade.

For investors watching ARK's daily trading disclosures, the purchase was hard to miss.

ARK makes a $32.6M bet on Shopify

According to Investing.com, ARK Investsnapped up roughly 255,804 Shopify (SHOP) shares across its ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW), and ARK Blockchain and Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF) on May 5.

The total came to approximately $32.6 million. The bulk of that, around $20.7 million, flowed through ARKK alone and represented 7.8% of that fund's market value.

Related: Cathie Wood buys $12.9 million of tumbling tech stock

The day before, on May 4, ARKK had already picked up $6.6 million worth of Shopify shares.

Taken together, the two-day buying spree added more than 328,000 shares to ARK's Shopify position.

Shopify's Q1 results were hard to ignore

Shopify's first-quarter numbers were impressive.

• Gross merchandise volume, the total dollar value of goods sold across the platform, hit $101 billion.

• That is up 35% from the same period a year ago, making this the second quarter in a row above $100 billion.

• Revenue came in at $3.2 billion, a 34% year-over-year increase.

• Free cash flow stood at $476 million, indicating a 15% margin.

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein pointed out on the company's earnings call that few publicly traded companies at this scale can claim four consecutive quarters of 30% or more growth alongside consistent mid-to-high-teens free cash flow margins.

Finkelsteinstated:

"There are very few publicly traded companies today that are able to make that claim at anything like the scale. It is a very small club, and that is something we are very proud of. "

• Shopify Payments processed $67 billion in gross merchandise volume during the quarter, up 41% and now representing 67% of total volume.

• Shop Pay alone processed $35 billion in sales, a 59% jump.

• Business-to-business gross merchandise volumegrew 80%.

• Offline gross merchandise volume rose 33%.

The company also noted that artificial intelligence-driven traffic to Shopify stores grew 8-fold year over year, while orders from AI-powered searches increased nearly 13-fold.

For context, that kind of growth in AI-driven demand is precisely the trend ARK has been betting on for years.