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."
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.
Source: Yahoo Finance Top News — This article was automatically imported from the source. Read full article at original source →
