IVES launched on June 3, 2025 and crossed $500 million in assets under management within its first two months. By October 2025 — less than five months from inception — it had surpassed $1 billion. As of June 2026, AUM stands at approximately $1.103 to $1.19 billion depending on the data source, with more than $665 million in net inflows recorded since launch. To put that ramp in context: the majority of newly launched ETFs never cross $100 million — the threshold typically considered the floor for ETF viability — within their first year. IVES cleared ten times that in five months. The performance record contributed significantly to those inflows: IVES gained approximately 38% from inception through mid-2026, nearly double the approximately 20% return QQQ delivered over the same period. For investors evaluating IVES purely as a new and unproven fund, that inception-to-date return differential versus the most established Nasdaq-100 ETF is a material data point that no competing holdings page contextualizes alongside the position list.

The most common misunderstanding about IVES is what the Dan Ives brand actually means at the portfolio construction level. The fund is not actively managed. Dan Ives does not sit on a trading desk deciding which 31 stocks to own or adjusting weights based on market conditions. What actually happens is this: Wedbush publishes the Dan Ives AI 30 Research Report, which is a forward-looking analyst document on AI industry developments, company assessments, and thematic priorities. Solactive — an index provider — runs a proprietary natural language processing algorithm against that report, scanning for keyword frequency and thematic density to identify which companies receive the most significant AI-related coverage. The algorithm converts that textual analysis into index constituents and position weights, which IVES then tracks passively with quarterly rebalances. The human judgment of Dan Ives is therefore upstream in the research writing process — it is encoded in language rather than applied directly to portfolio decisions. The fund manager executes against the index mechanically. This structure means IVES sits in an unusual category: it carries an active analyst’s brand and research perspective, but operates with the cost structure and regulatory classification of a passive index fund. It is also why IVES rebalances quarterly on a fixed schedule rather than whenever Ives updates his views — the index, not the analyst, governs timing.

Investors who assume the leading AI ETF puts NVIDIA at the top of its portfolio will be surprised by IVES’s actual weight structure. NVIDIA sits at 4.59% — in a tie with Microsoft at position seven — behind Micron Technology (6.15%), Broadcom (5.10%), AMD (4.94%), Taiwan Semiconductor (4.78%), Apple (4.60%), and Microsoft (4.59%). The IVES weighting reflects the Solactive NLP algorithm’s reading of keyword prominence in Dan Ives’ AI 30 Research Report, not market capitalization or consensus analyst sentiment. Micron’s top position indicates that the research report places significant emphasis on AI memory infrastructure — the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips and DRAM that data centers require to run GPU clusters. Broadcom’s second position reflects the report’s coverage of custom AI silicon and networking ASICs. The result is a portfolio that looks different from both QQQ (where NVIDIA is the largest holding at approximately 8.16%) and AIQ, where weightings reflect a broader global AI and technology universe. Investors evaluating IVES specifically for NVIDIA exposure should note they are buying a fund where NVIDIA is a top-ten position but not a dominant one — representing less than 1-in-20 dollars of exposure.

In April 2026, Wedbush launched the Dan Ives Wedbush AI Power & Infrastructure ETF under the ticker IVEP, with an inception date of April 7, 2026. IVEP carries the same 0.75% expense ratio as IVES and is designed to capture the physical infrastructure layer of the AI build-out — power generation, grid modernization, data center construction, liquid cooling, and energy transmission — sectors that IVES does not meaningfully own. IVES currently holds zero allocation to Energy, zero to Basic Materials, and only 1.27% to Utilities — the sector classifications that cover most of the companies IVEP targets. The two funds are designed as complements: IVES owns the software, semiconductors, and platform companies that produce AI applications and models, while IVEP is intended to own the physical backbone that makes those applications possible at scale. An investor holding both would gain exposure across the full AI value chain from chip fabrication and cloud platforms through to the power plants and cooling systems that run the data centers. No major ETF holdings data site — including StockAnalysis, ETFdb, or MarketBeat — mentions IVEP’s existence on IVES’s holdings page, leaving investors who find IVES through organic search unaware that a purpose-built companion fund exists within the same Wedbush product family.