Dan Ives is a busy man.
He is chairman of a tech company that buys cryptocurrencies to fund OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's hopes of verifying humans on the blockchain. He advises another public company that competes with Salesforce to sell tech tools to marketers. He's the pitchman for a Dan Ives--branded exchange-traded fund of big companies in the artificial-intelligence business. And he's the face of a colorful clothing line.
Ives has a day job, too. Based in New York, he is the global head of tech research at Wedbush Securities, responsible for writing equity research on the biggest names in tech, often within minutes of news events.
Combined with his famously optimistic views on the sector and frequent media appearances, Ives has gone mainstream as Wall Street's highest-profile stock analyst, boosted by his prolific feed on X, where he has more than 230,000 followers. Ives' growing set of overlapping business interests -- and the potential impact on his research -- are less well known.
Ives' extracurricular roles -- with digital-assets firm Eightco Holdings and marketing-tech provider Zeta Global Holding -- and his connection to Wedbush's AI stock fund aren't regularly disclosed in research reports. The bio atop his X feed notes some of the roles, but individual posts -- where he regularly talks up the "AI revolution" -- often lack context. The details are missing at a moment when investors are scrambling to distinguish hype from reality.
Ives has varied incentives to maintain his bullish calls. He recently traveled to Capitol Hill in his capacity as Eightco chairman to express his support of AI and crypto, the same industries he's tasked with covering in an unbiased way for Wedbush clients. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, has rules prohibiting analyst conduct "where the conflicts are considered too pronounced to be cured by disclosure." Firms must also disclose analysts' conflicts and limit activities that could compromise analysts' objectivity.
Ives' business activities seem to have Wedbush's approval, though they are highly unusual for an analyst and seem to contradict Finra rules, experts note. Mark Bradshaw, chair of Boston College's accounting department, who has written a book and more than two dozen academic studies about sell-side stock research, says he has never seen a scenario like Ives' simultaneous roles.
"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."
Ives is hard to miss. He wears signature pastel- and highlighter-colored suits and sports baseball caps and sunglasses to host investor panels. He has made a cameo on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and appears on cable news broadcasts to talk tech. Barron's, like many financial news outlets, has regularly quoted Ives over the years.
"His insights have made him one of the tech sector's leading voices around the world, and is frequently sought out by media outlets globally, including Barron's, for perspective on complex industry developments," Wedbush said in its statement.
In the era of artificial intelligence, Ives, 51, has become so visible that his employer is now perhaps best known for employing Dan Ives. Wedbush, the privately held investment bank and brokerage based in Los Angeles, hired Ives from a marketing consultancy in 2018 to help expand tech research efforts. He had worked at capital markets firm FBR Capital Markets, now B. Riley Securities, for 16 years.
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 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, 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.
"Even if the analyst does not control the portfolio selection daily or at all, the structure creates the incentive to promote the investment favorably," Gana said in response to questions about Ives.
Wedbush told Barron's last June that Ives was prohibited from holding the ETF or the stocks within it, and that there was an "information barrier" between Ives and the unit running the fund. Ives receives a flat, annual fee for the use of his name and likeness.
Wedbush's ETF launch came as the terms of the settlement agreement between Ives and the SEC were expiring. On June 7, 2022, the SEC announced settlements with multiple former Synchronoss executives, including Ives, tied to accounting misconduct. Ives paid a $15,000 penalty, without admitting or denying the SEC's findings. He was prohibited from arranging transactions or contracts in a sales capacity for three years.
Wedbush unveiled the Ives ETF on June 4, 2025.
Ives spoke to Barron's that day for its article, "A Prominent Tech Analyst Adds a New Role: Pitching a Stock Fund."
Wedbush later asked Barron's to change the headline. A Wedbush lawyer said Ives had taken no role in selling or pitching the fund, though Ives' social-media feeds on X and LinkedIn linked to stories about the ETF, including the Barron's article . Ives also told Yahoo Finance, "I've started [this] ETF because it's about the second, third, fourth derivatives of AI playing out, and that's the important thing for investors."
Barron's didn't change the headline.
In its statement for this article, Wedbush said, "The framing of Barron's inquiry appears to group together several distinct matters in a way that may unintentionally conflate topics that are, in reality, separate -- particularly with respect to disclosure considerations. Presenting them as interconnected, risks creating a narrative that does not reflect the underlying facts and misrepresents our processes, controls, and oversight."
Soon after the ETF went live, Ives took up another role: chairman of Eightco Holdings, a public company that advertises itself as a solution to verifying human identity in a world awash in AI tech. Its share price surged 3,000% this past September after Eightco named Ives as board chairman and said that it would sell new stock to fund cryptocurrency purchases. After peaking with a market value of $7 billion, the stock quickly fell and has since shed 97% of its value.
Eightco's strategy centers on buying a cryptocurrency that supports World, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's metal orb operator meant to scan eyes and prove humanity. Eightco's success hinges on World's success and widespread AI adoption. The role puts Ives in one more influential orbit; Altman is among the AI industry's most influential executives.
Eightco has also given Ives a platform in Washington, D.C. Last year, he met with Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and "many" other senators, Ives wrote on LinkedIn. "Great to be driving the AI, ORBS, and Crypto vision on Capitol Hill," Ives wrote, referring to Eightco's ticker symbol. Cruz's office didn't respond to requests for comment about the meeting.
"Serving as the chairman of a public company connected to an area the analyst covers is a serious issue," said Gana, the attorney. "Leadership roles usually create fiduciary duties and reputational alignment that are hard to square away with claims of full research independence."
Ives is all in on Eightco, and he wants investors to be, too: "When we look at ORBS, we think it's an undervalued asset," Ives said in his year-end chairman message posted to YouTube. "We believe that investors are underappreciating the AI infrastructure tech piece."
In addition to its crypto purchases, Eightco operates a unit called Forever 8 that helps online sellers manage inventory. It has a stake in the videogame developer Mythical Games. One unnamed customer drove 86% of Eightco's total revenue in the first nine months of 2025 , securities filings show.
An Eightco spokeswoman said the company had two distinct business lines. She didn't answer questions about the identity of the large customer.
This is Eightco's latest incarnation -- and its third ticker symbol. In September, the company changed its Nasdaq symbol from OCTO. Before that, it operated as a blockchain tech business called Cryptyde, or TYDE, which itself spun out of a publicly traded media company called Vinco Ventures. Vinco, which was later delisted, was briefly led by former MoviePass executive Ted Farnsworth. Last year, Farnsworth pleaded guilty in the Southern District of Florida to federal charges of defrauding shareholders in Vinco and its parent company.
Kevin O'Donnell, Eightco's current CEO, was on Vinco's board. O'Donnell couldn't be reached for comment.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, regulators' investigations into Wall Street analysts revealed an industry culture of unbridled optimism, unmoored by facts. The reforms coming out of that period focused on ensuring that analyst recommendations could be trusted as unbiased and not as tools to win investment banking business.
To critics, analysts Henry Blodget and Jack Grubman became prime examples of Wall Street's recklessness. Regulators found that Blodget, then of Merrill Lynch, and Grubman, of Salomon Smith Barney, issued research that didn't reflect their honest views but rather flattered companies' leadership. Both men settled with the SEC in 2003, without admitting or denying the allegations.
Regulators, led by then--New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, instituted sweeping laws to mitigate conflicts of interest and create walls between bankers and analysts.
The main rules governing analysts today are maintained by Finra. When it comes to analysts, regulators focus on promoting transparency, says Val Dahiya, a partner in Morrison Foerster's broker-dealer compliance and regulation and capital markets practice groups.
Analysts are required to disclose conflicts such as financial interests in their research and in communication with the public when discussing investments, such as during media appearances.
"It's about transparency. It's objectivity. It's being able to identify the conflicts of interest, mitigate or eliminate the ones that are substantial, and then disclose -- because our federal securities rubric is a disclosure-based regime," Dahiya says. "However, there are conflicts that you can't disclose away."
Wedbush said in its statement, "We are highly aware and attentive to the potential conflicts that exist across our industry, including those common to publishing equity research, and making media appearances. Wedbush has robust policies, procedures, supervisory systems, and disclosures in place that are designed to address them."
Objectivity and neutrality are key tenets of analysts' work, says Brent Taylor, an adviser with consulting firm J.S. Held and a former legal and compliance executive at UBS Group and JPMorgan Chase.
"Investors depend on this information. I depend on this information," Taylor said, referencing analyst research generally. "You read an analyst report, you want to make sure that you're getting a true story."
In 2025, Wall Street analysts remain a bullish group, with Buy ratings vastly outranking Sell ratings. Even in that environment, Ives is famous for his perma-bull status. Of the 45 stocks that Ives covers, according to FactSet, he rates 41 as Outperform, four as Neutral, and none as Underperform.
As analysts tout their enthusiasm about tech stocks, the SEC seems less inclined to stand in the way. In December, the commission scrapped a 2003 settlement that required investment banks to separate research and banking operations. Former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt decried the changes in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece: "One day, perhaps sooner than most think, regulators will unearth a fresh set of scandals involving Wall Street's research."
Before the end of 2025, Ives added one more job: adviser to Zeta Global Holdings, a publicly traded marketing-tech company. In 2024, Zeta faced a short seller who accused the company of improper financial disclosures. At the time, Zeta said the report was based on speculation and false statements: "Zeta is confident in its internal accounting processes and controls."
Barron's learned of Ives' position on Zeta's advisory board from a footnote in his Finra record. Zeta's website also includes a one-line reference to Ives and other advisory board members at the bottom of its board of directors page.
"The advisors serve in a nonfiduciary, non-governance capacity. The role of Zeta's advisors is fundamentally different than the role of the company's Board of Directors," a Zeta spokeswoman said.
Zeta sells an AI agent to assist marketers. The company recently announced a partnership with OpenAI that it said would help expand beta access to the agent. Zeta's products compete with Salesforce, among other companies that Ives covers, but his position with Zeta isn't disclosed in his social-media posts about Zeta or in related research reports.
During a streamed interview in November with Zeta CEO David Steinberg, Ives sounded ebullient about Zeta's prospects and said the company was "almost like a step ahead" of an offering from Salesforce.
Ives wrote in a Dec. 1 research note that Salesforce was one of three stocks, alongside ServiceNow and SoundHound AI, that would be removed from the IVES AI 30 Winner list in 2026.
Three days later, Ives issued a separate Salesforce note in which he maintained his price target and Outperform rating on Salesforce stock. He didn't disclose that he advises a Salesforce rival.
A Salesforce spokeswoman declined to comment.
Ives has interviewed Zeta's Steinberg several times, including the November discussion, which was posted to Ives's X account. A note about Ives' role on the company's advisory board appeared in fine print at the end of the interview.
In early January, during the CES tech show in Las Vegas, Ives and Steinberg met again. During that interview, Steinberg said Zeta was partnering with Eightco, where Ives is board chairman. Eightco, meanwhile, launched a roadshow in January to meet with institutional investors.
The Zeta spokeswoman said the company is evaluating potential opportunities to work with Eightco, but the companies haven't entered into a formal agreement.
Ives' influence continues to grow at his day job, as well. Securities filings show that Wedbush plans to launch at least one more ETF with Ives's name on it: a fund of companies that build infrastructure, like data centers, to support AI tech. Ives' Finra records show that he is also now an adviser to a venture-capital fund named Ives Munster AI Revolution Fund. It appears to be a reference to Gene Munster, a prominent tech bull and former Wall Street analyst. Munster declined to comment.
Ives himself has recognized that too many jobs can be a hindrance for executives. Early in President Donald Trump's second administration, Ives criticized Tesla CEO Elon Musk while he was working with the government. Ives argued that Tesla needed to rein in Musk's outside activities so he could focus on running the electric-vehicle maker. "Shut up, Dan," Musk wrote on X.
Ives, a longtime Tesla stock bull, maintained his Outperform rating.
Comments