Cathie Wood remains bullish on Shopify stock

18 May 2026, 20:17 · The Fresno Bee

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.

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.

Why ARK sees Shopify as a long-term buy

Wood built ARK around a simple thesis: companies transforming industries through technology will generate outsized returns over a five- to 10-year horizon.

Shopify fits that mold in a few ways that matter right now.

First, the platform is increasingly positioned at the center of how people shop online through AI.

Shopify is currently the only platform that enables product discovery and purchases within ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI, all managed through a single system.

Fund manager buys and sells

The company has structured more thanone billion products with real-time pricing and accurate inventory data, enabling AI agents to surface relevant results quickly.

Traffic from catalog-powered AI searches converts at twice the rate of general AI searches, according to Finkelstein.

Second, Shopify is not just riding the AI wave. It is building infrastructure to own it. The company co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, an open standard that covers the full commerce journey from product discovery through post-purchase.

Shopify CEO is expanding its AI moat

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe have all since joined the governing council.

Third, the company's cohort economics continue to improve. Nearly 90% of first-quarter revenue came from merchants who had been on the platform for more than a year.

The number of merchants generating over $100 million in annual gross merchandise volume on Shopify has nearly doubled over the past two years.

Is SHOP stock still undervalued?

Valued at a market cap of $130 billion, Shopify stock has returned 3,800% to shareholders since its initial public offering in 2015. Despite its market-beating gains, the Canadian tech stock is down 44% from all-time highs.

Analysts tracking Shopify forecastfree cash flow to expand from $2 billion in 2025 to $6.4 billion in 2030.

If SHOP stock is priced at 35x forward FCF, which is below its three-year average of 86x, it could deliver over 70% returns over the next four years.

Out of the 24 analysts covering SHOP stock, 20 recommend "Buy," and four recommend "Hold". The average Shopify stock price target is $157, indicating 56% upside from current levels.

For ARK, a firm that invests based on where technology is heading rather than where it has been, all of that adds up to a stock worth owning aggressively. Wood has trimmed and added Shopify positions over the years. Right now, she is clearly in adding mode.

The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.

This story was originally published May 18, 2026 at 1:17 PM.