No. of Recommendations: 2
and disclosure. Terrific read. The good news is that if you are overweight brkb, its VERY unlikely we are going to be surprised by cons, swindles, pump and dumps, etc on a Barrons cover.
" “A big concern is the research that Ives does is going to be tainted because of an affiliation with the ETF that holds the stocks for which he’s doing research,” Bradshaw says. “There are different kinds of sources of bias. The obvious one is financial interest.”
Barron’s reviewed regulatory filings and interviewed more than a dozen people, including securities lawyers, researchers, and former regulators, about Ives’ overlapping roles. Wedbush declined to make Ives and other company executives available for an interview, and Ives didn’t respond to multiple emails. During the reporting of this article, he blocked two Barron’s reporters on X.
“Dan Ives has an exceptional 25-year record built on deep industry knowledge, credibility, a strong work ethic, and most importantly, unwavering integrity,” Wedbush told Barron’s in a statement. The firm said Barron’s reporting could be conflating distinct matters.
Ives has plenty of friends on X and on Wall Street. “Dan is a phenomenally good person,” said Gil Luria, head of tech research at D.A. Davidson, who was previously director of research at Wedbush. “He’s genuine and genuinely enthusiastic about what he does. He has been for a long time. He’s kind and generous to the people around him.”
Ives, in fact, seems happy to bring everyone into the fold. He often describes the latest tech developments as a party that’s just getting started, with plenty of time for revelers to join in. In 2024, Ives and his wife committed $100,000 to their alma mater, Penn State, to establish the Dan and Robyn Ives AI Innovation Initiatives Fund.
“This is not a bubble,” he said in one recent interview. “This is the start of the fourth industrial revolution.” " Along the way, Ives spent a year as head of investor relations for New Jersey–based Synchronoss Technologies. The company’s accounting practices were later investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Ives was part of a 2022 settlement with the commission. Ives was fired from the Synchronoss job in 2017, according to an SEC filing describing the settlement.
In his role at Wedbush, Ives appears to be blurring the lines between research and marketing. Last June, Wedbush launched a new exchange-traded fund, the Dan IVES Wedbush AI Revolution
IVES
-2.75%
ETF, which tracks 30 stocks that Ives sees as defining AI’s future. The ETF is up 30.5% since inception, versus 21.7% for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite.
The holdings include companies that Ives covers, like Apple
AAPL
+0.46%
, Microsoft, and Palantir. Nvidia is in the fund, though it’s covered by a colleague. Oracle, which Wedbush doesn’t cover, is also in the fund. The ETF crossed $1 billion in assets six months after being launched.
Attaching an analyst’s personal brand to an investment product linked to the analyst’s stock coverage is unusual, says Adam Gana, managing partner of New York law firm Gana Weinstein."
https://www.barrons.com/articles/dan-ives-webush-e... 