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(Bloomberg) -- Cathie Wood says the Trump administration will be even better for stock pickers than Ronald Reagan’s pro-business era — a period she called a “golden age” for investors.
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Lower taxes, deregulation and efforts to incentivize innovation will turbo charge financial markets, Wood said at the Bloomberg Invest conference in New York.
“The Reagan revolution — and I was there and it was so enjoyable — it was the heyday, the golden age of active equity management,” Wood said. “That’s coming back. I think it’s coming back big time. I think this will dwarf that, and that was pretty good.”
Wood said that the US economy is at the tail end of a “three-year rolling recession,” at which point the stock market will take off. Key to this will be the broadening out of gains. The so-called Magnificent Seven group of megacap tech stocks powered much of the bull market in recent years, gaining an average 67% in 2024 after a 107% advance the year prior.
“Regulation has been a menace,” she said during a live taping of the Odd Lots podcast Tuesday at the conference. Trump’s team “all want us to be number one in innovation, and they want to get all the bottlenecks away.”
Her comments come after a wild day on Wall Street that saw her $5.7 billion flagship innovation fund finish the session in the black after earlier falling as much as 5.4% as stocks whipsawed on the latest tariff news.
Wood catapulted to fame during the pandemic with her bold calls on speculative tech. But the shine has come off in recent years. Her ARK Innovation ETF (ticker ARKK) has underperformed the Nasdaq 100 in three of the last four years, and is down 6.3% year-to-date, while investors have pulled money from the fund for 14 consecutive months.
A big part of the recent underperformance has been the slump of Tesla Inc., the fund’s biggest holding, which is down 33% this year.
But when it comes to Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, Wood, a longtime backer of the billionaire, shrugged off any concern that he’s being stretched thin. The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, isn’t his full-time job, she said. What’s important is that he’s keeping his eye on the “technology balls.”
And if Musk sees a bottleneck, he will “blow it up,” she added, calling him “the inventor of our age.”