Dan Ives logs into the Zoom call in a loud, tropical shirt, the word “Margaritaville” splashed across the chest. He has spent the better part of 25 years as one of Wall Street’s most recognizable tech bulls — a go-to voice on everything from Apple to Nvidia, a prolific note-writer who repeated the phrase “fourth industrial revolution” and has been telling investors, through every dip and correction, that they’re still in the early innings. He has made a lot of people a lot of money by being consistently, loudly optimistic about technology stocks.
Now he is doing what he spent a decade and a half telling everyone else to do.
“Look, I’m an example of what I’ve preached over the years that AI will ultimately create more jobs than what it takes away,” he told me in an interview, several weeks after leaving Wedbush Securities to launch Yorkville Ives, what he calls a “modern merchant bank” with Yorkville Securities. “If it wasn’t for the AI revolution and it wasn’t for this period … I couldn’t do something like this.”
That’s the short version of what happened. The longer version, Ives told Fortune, is that after 25 years covering other people’s companies, he realized he had never actually built one himself — and he wanted to. “As an analyst I always talk about companies, whether good or bad, what they’ve done. But I’ve never built anything,” he said. He has helped institutional investors make money and CEOs shape narratives, he added, but he felt the itch. “I wanted to get off the treadmill and actually build something myself.”
What the treadmill looked like
The first question, though, is just what he is building, actually. Ives said he traces the merchant bank concept back to Thomas Weisel and the early Jefferies era of the 1990s — outfits that didn’t just publish research but put their own capital into transactions. “A lot of banks … they won’t put their own money [in], they don’t have the capital,” he said. “That to me is really the key in terms of the difference with a merchant bank versus a typical investment bank.”
The merchant bank model Ives is describing largely disappeared from Wall Street over the past three decades, though, and the aforementioned Wiesel saw his firm’s fortunes fluctuate along with the waves of tech boom and bust.
The big integrated banks — Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan — have enormous balance sheets but are governed by post-2008 regulations, particularly the Volcker Rule, that constrain proprietary risk-taking. The boutique advisory firms that emerged in their wake — Evercore, Lazard, Centerview, PJT — carved out strong advisory franchises but deliberately shed their balance sheets; their pitch to clients is independence, not capital. Private credit firms like Apollo and Ares have the capital, but they are lenders and owners, not research-driven advisors.
The gap Ives is betting on is the space in between: a firm that can write the research note, advise on the deal structure, and also put its own money in — all from the same address. He insisted that there will be a traditional division between research and banking nevertheless. “There’s a Chinese wall,” he said. “I’m going to be spending all my time in research—the same type of research that investors around the world have gotten to follow from me … that’s what I love.”
The platform he’s building with Yorkville is meant to cover the full spectrum — M&A advisory, debt and convertibles, trading, tech-heavy research — but the distinguishing bet is on who the clients will be. Nvidia, hyperscalers, and other names that dominate every conversation are already fully served, while others are starved.
Over the last few years, he said, whether he’s at the World Economic Forum in Davos or the Milken conference in California, he’s seen “a hole” in funding for many great companies. “Many companies look like the golden child of this market. They’re getting called so much by investors and others they can’t even pick up the phone. But then there’s so many other companies on the side of the public side, they’re sort in the corner saying, ‘Could anyone talk to us who could partner with us?’”
The same bullishness, new stakes
There’s a version of this story where Ives is the analyst who drank his own Kool-Aid — a famous optimist who convinced himself that the AI boom he’d been covering would make this the perfect moment to start a bank. He agreed, adding that “If you told me five years ago that we’d be having this conversation, that was not on the bingo card.”
The more charitable read is that after being paid for many years to be right about other people’s companies, now he has skin in the game in the literal sense that defines merchant banking. Ives said he knows the proof will be in the pudding. “This is not about doing it for a year, two years,” he said. “It’s about building something special for the next decade.”
The partnership carries one notable wrinkle: a subsidiary of Yorkville Americas has more recently become associated with President Donald Trump’s financial world, serving as the investment adviser to the Truth Social Funds — a suite of “America First” ETFs tied to Trump Media. Ives said the relationship predates that work and there is no connection to Yorkville Ives or Yorkille Securities: “I’ve known them for decades personally.”
The shirt, and what it means
When asked about his notable taste in shirts, Ives described something more like an investment philosophy. Ever since he grew up on Long Island in the 1980s, he’s been a “pretty funky dresser.” And although that was toned down when he got to Wall Street in the 1990s, “over time I kind of ripped a Band-Aid off and just went with whatever works in that morning.”
He offered something like a YOLO, or “you only live once” philosophy: “Sometimes you can make choices that might — you think they’re right and ultimately, you look back and you should have gone left instead of right or whatever … but I’m not gonna like live life like that.” Ives quickly added that it’s not like “jumping off a cliff to get some Instagram picture,” but when it comes to calculated risk, he likes to go for it.
The philosophy is more personal than the loud shirts and media clips would suggest. Ives said that losing his parents over the past decade gave him a tolerance for calculated risk — “I had great parents that passed away young and I’m not afraid to stumble.” From 2015 through 2025, he shared, he grappled with his father’s case of Alzheimer’s and his mother’s case of Parkinson’s — they died at 79 years old in 2025 and at 70 in 2020, respectively. The “agony and pain” his family endured “put things (and work) in perspective and only one life to live. I am 51 today but I view life through a different lens than I did when I was 40 years old after going through this nightmare.”
When asked about the remarkable half-decade since the pandemic in financial markets, including what The New York Times‘ memorably called “The YOLO economy” around the time of meme-stock mania, Ives didn’t disagree. “It’s still still kind of with us. We’re still in the you-only-live-once era.” Retail traders have a much bigger “seat at the table” than before that era, he said: “They’re so much more dialed in and and they’ve become a huge part of the market.”
He acknowledged that some of the excesses of this era have led to perception issues. “AI has a PR problem,” he said. “The average person looks at AI and [thinks] it’ll take away my job and it’s going to make my electricity bill higher.” And over the coming year, he added, there could be “some disruption on the job market, no doubt,” but he disagrees with what he called the “dystopian” narrative and “even some of the bubble talk.”
He still thinks AI is in the third inning. He still thinks the buildout will last 20 to 30 years. He still thinks the biggest beneficiaries haven’t surfaced yet. “We’re going to look back on this period,” he said, “and realize this is building the Vegas Strip in 1955.” I had to ask him: without the mobsters? Ives paused, “Without the mobsters.”
