Dan Ives left Wedbush to form Yorkville Ives & Co. The firm will do investment banking, equity research, institutional trading, and principal investing. That's four different ways to lose money under one roof.
Ives spent years telling retail traders which tech stocks to buy while working at a firm that made money whether those trades worked or not. Now he's cutting out the middleman. He gets to tell you what to buy AND take the other side of your trade AND charge you for the research that recommended it. Vertical integration for the modern age.
The press release probably calls this a boutique merchant bank. Boutique means small. Merchant bank means we're not telling you what we actually do. Combined, they mean Ives figured out he could keep more of the fees if he stopped sharing them with Wedbush.
Yorkville Ives will offer institutional trading. That's where institutions trade with each other while pretending retail order flow doesn't exist. They'll also do principal investing, which means they're trading against you with their own money while simultaneously publishing research about why you should trade. No conflict there.
The firm combines research and proprietary trading. In any other industry, we'd call that insider trading with extra steps. In finance, we call it a business model.
Ives made his name as a tech bull. He loved Apple. He loved Tesla. He loved anything Elon Musk touched, which in retrospect explains a lot. Now he's taking those same skills and applying them to a merchant bank, a business structure so outdated that most people think it's something from a Dickens novel.
The new firm launches with institutional clients who will pay for research they could get free from twelve other analysts saying the exact same thing. But this time it comes from a guy who had the vision to put his own name on the door.
Ives spent decades publishing price targets that moved stock prices just long enough for someone to make money. Now he gets to be that someone.
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