The Yorkville financial group was once little known on Wall Street. Now though, it is harder to miss: its affiliates help manage Donald Trump’s Truth Social-branded ETFs, have taken over the MAGA and YALL funds, and recently hired retail-investor favorite Dan Ives to co-build an investment-banking arm.
Across its businesses, executives want to combine investment banking, asset management and principal investing under what they describe as a modern merchant-bank model. The group has also pushed into crypto and AI-themed investment products, sponsored blank-check companies and continues to look for acquisitions.
Yorkville Advisors has helped finance Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. Yorkville America advises the Truth Social ETFs, while Yorkville Securities, now Yorkville Ives & Co. after Ives joined the firm, advised on Trump Media’s planned merger with nuclear-fusion developer TAE Technologies Inc. The TAE transaction remains pending.
All told, it is a distinctly 2026 Wall Street combination: Trump-linked products, digital assets, AI and an analyst with a large retail following, all gathered across a roughly 60-person group that aims to become something larger.
“We can provide advisory, we can provide third-party capital raising and we can be the principal investor as well,” said Troy Rillo, a founding partner at Yorkville Ives and Yorkville America.
For now though, Yorkville has the ambitions of a much larger firm without yet having the scale to match. The seven Truth Social ETFs it advises collectively have about $110 million in assets, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That includes MAGA, which tracks companies whose employees are deemed highly supportive of Republican candidates, and YALL, which avoids those that have emphasized left-leaning or liberal political activism.
The lineup has attracted less than $5 million in net inflows this year, in a crowded ETF industry with thousands of products spanning everything from broad indexes to increasingly specialized themes. The Truth Social ETFs, more broadly, target companies and industries the firm views as critical to the US economy, including energy and national security.
“Politically aligned ETFs only appeal to half the population and that limits the products to a narrow market,” said Athanasios Psarofagis, ETF analyst Bloomberg Intelligence. “These are interesting strategies but, generally, when products are politicized, they have fewer chances of success.”
Yorkville executives say their relationship runs through Trump Media rather than the administration or a broader Trump circle, and reject suggestions that the firm acts as a financial-engineering arm of Trump’s business interests. “We are not political and nobody at our shop is political in any respect. We just look for opportunities like investors do,” Rillo said, adding that he has never met the president. “Trump Media is just a client.”
The relationship with Yorkville America goes further, however. In a filing, Trump Media has said it provides the majority of Yorkville America’s operating funding in return for a majority of its net profit, though it owns no equity in the business. The relationship places Yorkville alongside an expanding collection of businesses tied to a sitting president whose private commercial interests have drawn scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest, with Yorkville’s own Trump ties also drawing scrutiny from Democrats in Congress. The White House has consistently denied that there are any conflicts of interest with respect to Trump’s investments.
Yorkville says its ambitions extend beyond that relationship. Rillo said Yorkville also wants to expand its work with middle-market companies, helping them raise capital and, in some cases, investing alongside them. Yorkville says it plans to fund the new banking operation itself, though it does not disclose how much capital is available across the broader group.
Ives represents another wager on name recognition. After nearly a decade at Wedbush Securities Inc. making bullish technology calls, the media-savvy analyst built a large social-media following and put his name on an actively managed technology ETF, with the ticker IVES, that has grown to more than $1 billion in just over a year. Yorkville is now betting some of that profile can carry into investment banking.
“I felt this was the right time to build a bank that could go deep in sectors around tech, AI, energy and infrastructure,” Ives said.
Steve Neamtz, who oversees the ETF business, says Yorkville will stay in the America First category, add more digital-asset products and keep looking for acquisitions. He describes the current lineup as only the start of a much larger investment platform. One deal in the works is for an asset manager with about $1.3 billion that he declined to name.
Neither Yorkville executive would put a number on what success looks like in the coming months. Ives said the firm isn’t fixated on a revenue target so much as “disruption.”
“We will build out an entire distribution organization so that we go both B2B and B2C,” Neamtz said, referring to business-to-business and business-to-consumer sales. “First hurdle’s a billion. We’ll be taking care of that one shortly. The next hurdle is five.”
A message from Advisor Perspectives and VettaFi: Discover something new! Click here to register for our upcoming webcasts.
Bloomberg News provided this article. For more articles like this please visit
bloomberg.com.
Read more articles by Isabelle Lee
