Published 2026-09-08 · Theo Ledger
No announcement, no letter to shareholders. Just a steady drawdown in the daily files until two of ARK's best-known Chinese holdings were down to rounding errors.
Baidu survives only in ARKQ, at a 0.92% weight across 184,984 shares. Alibaba is down to 4,307 shares in ARKF — a 0.06% position, which is the kind of number that persists because closing it entirely is not worth the transaction cost. Between them, roughly $198 million of Chinese technology exposure has left ARK's funds in three months.
It is easy to forget how constructive ARK used to be on Chinese innovation. Baidu was framed as a credible autonomous-driving contender — its robotaxi programme was, for a period, further along in commercial deployment than most Western equivalents. That is precisely the kind of story ARKQ exists to own.
Alibaba fitted the fintech and e-commerce infrastructure thesis in ARKF. Neither position was incidental. Both were expressions of a view that innovation would compound in China roughly as it does in the US.
In this post
- The numbers
- This was once a real thesis
- Three plausible explanations
- What ARK owns instead
- What would reverse it