Every registered financial advisor has a public file with the SEC. It's called Form ADV, and it contains more about your advisor than most people realize—their fee schedule, how many clients they have, what conflicts of interest they've disclosed, and whether they've ever been disciplined by regulators. You don't need a lawyer or a FOIA request. It's all public.
The problem is that raw SEC filings are dense and scattered across multiple databases. Here's what's actually in them and what to pay attention to.
What Is Form ADV?
Form ADV is a standardized disclosure document that every SEC-registered investment advisor must file—and keep current. If something material changes, the firm has 90 days to update it. It comes in two parts: Part 1 is structured data (checkboxes, numbers, yes/no fields), and Part 2 is a narrative brochure written in plain English.
Think of Part 1 as the spreadsheet and Part 2 as the essay. Both are useful, but for different reasons.
What You Can Learn from Part 1
Part 1 is where most of the hard data lives. It's how we know that there are about 41,600 registered firms and roughly 418,000 individual advisors in the U.S. right now. Each filing includes:
- Assets under management: How much money the firm oversees. A firm managing $50 million serves a very different clientele than one managing $5 billion.
- Number and type of clients: Whether they primarily work with individuals, pension funds, or other institutions—and how many clients they have. A firm with 500 clients and $500M in AUM has an average account around $1M.
- Compensation methods: Whether the firm charges a percentage of assets, fixed fees, hourly rates, commissions, or some mix. This tells you who's fee-only and who isn't.
- Disclosure history: Any regulatory actions, customer complaints, criminal charges, or financial events. About 14.6% of advisors have at least one disclosure.
- Custody arrangements: Whether the firm holds your money directly or uses a third-party custodian like Schwab or Fidelity.
This is the data you can search and filter on TrueAdvisor. It's structured, so you can compare across firms without reading 30-page documents.
What Part 2 (the Brochure) Tells You
Part 2 is the advisor's brochure—a narrative document they're required to give you before you become a client. It's where they spell out things that don't fit neatly into checkboxes:
- Detailed fee schedules: The actual tiers and breakpoints. For example, you might learn that a firm charges 1.25% on the first $500K and 0.85% above that—so on a $750K portfolio, your effective rate is about 1.12%, or roughly $8,375 a year.
- Conflicts of interest: Any situation where the firm's interests might not align with yours. Do they receive revenue sharing from the funds they recommend? Do they have affiliated broker-dealers?
- Services offered: What you actually get—investment management only, full financial planning, tax prep, estate coordination, or some combination.
- Investment approach: How they pick investments, what types of securities they favor, and how much risk they typically take on.
- Disciplinary information: A narrative explanation of any legal or regulatory events from the firm's history.
If you're seriously considering working with an advisor, read their brochure. It's not exciting, but it's where they have to disclose things they probably won't mention in a sales meeting. We've processed brochure data for about 32,000 firms on TrueAdvisor so far.
BrokerCheck vs. Form ADV
FINRA's BrokerCheck and the SEC's Form ADV cover overlapping but different ground. They're not interchangeable.
- BrokerCheck covers broker-dealers—people who buy and sell securities on your behalf. It tracks employment history, licensing exams passed, and detailed disclosure events including customer complaints and arbitration outcomes.
- Form ADV covers registered investment advisors—people who give you investment advice for a fee. It tracks the firm's business practices, fee structures, and conflicts of interest.
Many advisors are “dually registered,” meaning they show up in both systems. If your advisor is dually registered, check both. BrokerCheck will have more detail on individual complaint history, while Form ADV gives you the full picture on how the firm operates and charges.
How to Look Up Your Advisor
You have three options, from most to least convenient:
- TrueAdvisor: We pull together Form ADV data for over 418,000 advisors so you can search, filter, and compare without reading raw filings. Fee estimates, disclosure counts, firm size, compensation type—it's all searchable.
- SEC IAPD: The Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database at adviserinfo.sec.gov lets you look up any firm or individual by name or CRD number. You'll get the raw Form ADV filing.
- FINRA BrokerCheck: At brokercheck.finra.org, search for broker-dealers and dually registered advisors. Best for detailed employment and complaint history.
The SEC data is updated regularly—firms file annual amendments and must report material changes within 90 days. What you see on TrueAdvisor reflects the most recent filing available.
Data source: TrueAdvisor indexes Form ADV filings for 41,600+ firms and 418,000+ individual advisors—the same official disclosures that regulators use to oversee the industry. No advisor can pay to change their data.