Dan Ives leaves Wedbush after eight-year run

After eight years at Wedbush Securities, tech analyst Dan Ives says he is leaving to launch a merchant bank focused on technology, energy, infrastructure and financials—while investors and colleagues look back at his biggest calls and signature style.

For years, Dan Ives wasn’t just a name on a research note screen—he was the tech narrative with the clothes to match it.

Now. after eight years at Wedbush Securities. Ives says he’s leaving for a new chapter. and the timing feels like a clean break. In a widely shared email on Wednesday. he wrote: “I have truly enjoyed my time at Wedbush and proud of all we accomplished as a great tech franchise with awesome people across the board.”.

He also told Bloomberg he is leaving to launch a merchant bank—one that would primarily serve large corporations and high-net-worth individuals. In his plan, the company will focus on technology, energy, infrastructure and financials.

For investors, that next move lands beside a long record of bold calls—and a very specific kind of visibility that came with it.

Between 2016 and 2018, Ives pushed back on an old way of valuing Apple: not as something more than hardware. He said investors were treating Apple like a hardware company and missing the value of the app store and services. By 2020, Apple’s services revenue had doubled, and it later became a major driver of its $4.3 trillion valuation.

His AI argument arrived fast. Immediately after OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, Ives said Microsoft would be the biggest beneficiary of enterprise AI. The reason. as he framed it. was that Microsoft embedded AI across services like Office and Copilot. and backed it with infrastructure spend on Azure. Over the next two-plus years, Microsoft’s stock roughly doubled.

Then came his insistence that Nvidia wouldn’t just serve gamers. When many investors still viewed Nvidia primarily as a gaming chip company. Ives argued that AI infrastructure spending would create demand on a scale investors weren’t expecting. His early thesis was that every major company would need Nvidia chips to build its AI. He was right quickly enough to become obvious: since 2023. hyperscalers have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to AI infrastructure. helping make Nvidia one of the world’s most valuable companies.

The legacy many people associate with Ives is inseparable from the way he showed up in public. One of the sharpest memories dates to September. when he rocked a coral pink baseball cap and sports jacket with baby-pink pants and shoes as he rang the Opening Bell for Eightco Holdings Inc (ticker: $ORBS) at the Nasdaq. He chaired the company’s board until March.

Last August, Ives also launched a clothing brand reflecting his style in collaboration with the Brooklyn-based upcycled streetwear label Snow Milk.

There was more matchy-matchy flair at another Orbs event in October, when he wore a neon printed blazer under a colorful green hoodie. He paired it with multicolored sneakers that almost exactly matched his jacket, along with a printed baseball cap and sunglasses—indoors.

In September, he explained the point himself, telling Business Insider: “It’s definitely played a role in the global success, because of the way that I dress.” He added that even people who don’t know his stock calls recognize him as “the person who wears the funky shirts on CNBC.”

Taken together, the record is unusually clear: big calls on services, AI platforms, and chip demand—and the visibility that made those calls recognizable far beyond the people who read them for a living.

Dan Ives Wedbush Securities merchant bank technology banking Apple services Microsoft AI OpenAI ChatGPT Azure Nvidia AI infrastructure Eightco Holdings ORBS Snow Milk clothing collaboration