(Bloomberg) -- Cathie Wood is betting Donald Trump’s regulatory and growth agenda will revive the market for US initial public offerings.

“Regulatory changes will go a long way to bringing back public markets,” the founder of ARK Investment Management LLC said on Bloomberg’s ETF IQ Wednesday. “I understand why companies want to stay private. The regulatory quagmire that they enter in the public markets is really a lot of friction.”

Wall Street has been waiting on a bigger resurgence in equity debuts after 2024 notched a small rebound in new stock issues. US IPO volume was around $43 billion last year, well below the triple digit boom seen during the pandemic. 

Wood joins a growing chorus, including Citadel Securities LLC Chief Executive Officer Peng Zhao and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in recent months, lamenting over the challenges of going public in Corporate America.

Financial markets cheered the victory of Donald Trump who many believe will roll back red tape and power economic growth. Since taking office, he’s issued various executive orders in quick succession to make good on that promise. The Republican president is expected to unleash a fresh round of policies — tariffs, tax cuts, immigration crackdowns — that backers see as both a boon to the economy and a shield from an influx of low-cost, overseas goods and workers. Tariffs, however, can also be a double-edged sword for multinational companies. 

“What the new administration is doing is changing fear with optimism,” Wood said. It’s “highly underestimated how important deregulation is going to be to unleashing animal spirits. We are pretty excited about this. Our strategies are starting to break out.”

Wood has gained fame — and scorn — for her long-shot bets on the nascent technologies that have fed repeated boom-and-bust cycles in her most famous vehicle, the $6.5 billion Ark Innovation ETF (ticker ARKK). Last year, the flagship fund gained 8% — a little more than a third of the S&P 500’s rally. This year though ARKK has surged nearly 10%, outpacing the benchmark index’s 3.7% gain.

Apart from her active ETFs, Wood is known for her Ark Venture Fund, a closed-end interval fund launched in September 2022 that invests in both public and private firms. As issuers like State Street Corp. race to launch ETFs that will offer private credit investments, Wood said she is “happy” with her interval fund structure, for now.

“This is a 40 Act fund as well,” she said, referring to regulations governing publicly traded investment products. “An interval fund allows daily inflows and quarterly redemptions up to 5% of NAV. That seems to be a better wrapper, I would think, for these public-private funds.”

--With assistance from Eric Balchunas.

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