VettaFi’s 2025 Market Outlook Symposium Tuesday closed with a segment focused on dividend investing and 2025. Hosted by VettaFi Investment Strategist Cinthia Murphy, the segment, titled “Why Consider Dividend Strategies Given the Macroeconomy?”, saw O’Shares Investments Chairman Kevin O’Leary and SS&C ALPS Advisors’ Chief ETF Strategist Paul Baiocchi discuss the 2025 market outlook.
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Murphy invited the duo to discuss the overall macro outlook in 2025. While some market watchers have cited geopolitical risks as an issue, O’Leary shared his optimism regarding the coming administration. For him, deregulation and renewed tax cuts position the U.S. economy to do well.
“There’s going to be so much deregulation going on here for domestic companies,” O’Leary said. “It doesn’t even matter about the tariff stuff, because to me, that’s just a negotiation for NAFTA III.”
“This deregulation is a kind of release-the-hounds mentality,” he added, sharing an anecdote about a midcap firm in which he is a significant shareholder implementing a major investment as soon as election results came in.
Remarking upon risks in the new year, O’Leary shared that were President-elect Trump to follow through with tariffs, rather than use them as a negotiating tool alone, that could pose problems for the market. However, he noted, overall downside cases would involve “pretty extreme situations” which he doesn’t see happening, he noted.
From 2024 to the 2025 Macro Outlook
O’Leary and his colleague, Baiocchi, pointed to the ALPS O’Shares U.S. Small-Cap Quality Dividend ETF (OUSM) as a steady option. OUSM charges 48 basis points (bps) for its approach. O’Leary shared the origin of the fund’s approach, recalling an anecdote involving his mother. He explained that his mother kept a secret investment portfolio of her own for much of her life that helped pay for education and cars for her children, and only bought dividend-paying stocks. She limited, he added, exposure to a single stock to 5% and sectors to 20%.
“She outperformed everybody, absolutely everybody … and I said, why can’t we design an ETF based on what she did?” he said. “It’s a mandate that really focused on quality and long-term distributions. And that’s just my mom.”
That could, O’Leary mentioned, do well in the new year. He shared that while the market may not provide another 20% overall return, a steady dividend approach could still help investors.
VettaFi LLC (“VettaFi”) is the index provider for OUSM and IDOG, for which it receives an index licensing fee. However, OUSM and IDOG are not issued, sponsored, endorsed, or sold by VettaFi, and VettaFi has no obligation or liability in connection with the issuance, administration, marketing, or trading of OUSM and IDOG.
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