Wedbush

Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush, is leaving after 8 years to launch his own merchant bank focused on technology, energy, infrastructure, and financial sectors

Leadership read: Dan Ives built a personal media franchise inside Wedbush's equity research infrastructure, and his departure severs that linkage cleanly. What the firm now faces is a gap that isn't easily backfilled by a like-for-like research hire: Ives functioned simultaneously as analyst, distribution channel, and brand ambassador, his CNBC visibility and social reach were effectively proprietary deal-flow surface area for the franchise. The merchant bank he is launching commits him to principal activity (advising and transacting in technology, energy, and infrastructure) rather than commentary, which is a structurally different business and requires a different operational apparatus: deal origination, client coverage, and capital-raising functions that pure research platforms don't carry. This is one of 12 leadership-change signals we have tracked in the last 90 days. The broader set, spanning Opendoor, PhonePe, Truist, and Balderton, mostly reflects conventional succession and operational restructuring. The Ives departure is categorically different: it is a senior practitioner converting public-markets credibility into a principal-side platform, which is a rarer and more directional move. That move concentrates demand at the seam between research-grade sector conviction and transaction execution, specifically, operators who can run coverage relationships and commercial origination simultaneously across tech and energy infrastructure. Merchant banking at this stage of market activity in those sectors requires commercial leadership with both institutional relationships and the ability to close, not one or the other.

curated · 2026-07-02 · context →

Wedbush hired Steve Schwary, a veteran financial advisor and portfolio manager, to its Wealth Management division. This signals capacity expansion in advisory services.

Leadership read: The operational weight here is not the hire itself but what it exposes about Wedbush's growth model in wealth management. Adding a veteran advisor and portfolio manager at the individual contributor level signals that the firm is building AUM capacity from the book up, acquiring established client relationships and proven portfolio experience rather than building products or platforms first. That is a deliberate bet: that durable wealth management growth comes from trusted advisor density, not from technology-led distribution. The related signals set for this period is thin on direct comparables. Of the twelve strategic hiring signals tracked in the last 90 days, only Compass's hire of a luxury real estate advisor from Douglas Elliman and BTG Consulting's aggressive senior poaching from Kroll share the same logic: acquiring established practitioners with portable client relationships to accelerate revenue in a competitive advisory market. The rest of the set is scattered across media, music management, and nonprofit, not a dense pattern in wealth management specifically. Where the pattern does hold across financial advisory and professional services, the consistent functional pressure is on relationship-management infrastructure: compliance and suitability operations that scale as advisor headcount grows, and client-experience leadership that can systematize what individual practitioners do well without diluting it.

curated · 2026-06-26 · context →