According to Investor's Business Daily, when the tech sector suffered a sectorwide rout, Cathie Wood's ARK Invest moved the other way, executing roughly $437 million in trades on Thursday.

The firm scooped up shares of Nvidia, SpaceX, Advanced Micro Devices and Alphabet while selling what IBD describes as huge positions in Broadcom and CoreWeave. IBD frames the move with a striking line: "When others fled, ARK Invest rushed toward the fire."

The trades were documented in company records that ARK publishes voluntarily, a level of transparency The Motley Fool notes is unusual among fund managers.

The most eye-catching name in the buy list is SpaceX, whose ticker SPCX The Motley Fool's market data shows trading at $134.27, up 8.6% on the day.

A public trading vehicle for Elon Musk's rocket company reaching the buy lists of a flagship innovation ETF is the kind of development readers would not have expected even recently.

IBD separately reports that space stocks rebounded after a SpaceX land deal and a Tesla merger dealt an election blow, which contextualizes why the position was available to add during a dip rather than at a premium.

The reversal angle is that ARK bought tech into a rout while trimming the very AI names that had been market darlings. IBD reports the firm sold huge Broadcom and CoreWeave positions even as it added Alphabet and SpaceX.

The Motley Fool, for its part, reports that at the end of September the Ark Innovation ETF sold roughly $111.1 million worth of AMD and bought $81 million of Nvidia, arguing Nvidia's roughly 22 times forward earnings looked cheap against AMD's 63.5 times.

Readers should note the two outlets describe the AMD position differently, so the direction of that specific trade depends on which report and date you weight.

The stakes are high because the sell-off IBD covers wiped out weekly gains across the market, with the outlet's related coverage flagging stiff weekly losses for the Dow and a looming inflation reading plus CoreWeave earnings.

The Motley Fool reports Nvidia trades near a $4.38 trillion implied market cap with a 74.67% gross margin, and notes its new Vera Rubin server platform pairs next-generation GPUs with Nvidia's own CPUs, a move the outlet says could curb AMD's growth opportunities in AI compute.

Whether Wood's counter-programming bet ages well will likely become clear as the market digests the week's damage.