About this site

Who writes it

My name is Dan Swenson. I am a Minnesota workers' compensation attorney. People often wonder why a lawyer builds websites about funeral pricing, hail damage, or energy rebates. The short answer is that I am a data nerd who hates seeing people at a disadvantage just because public information is buried in PDFs and government databases. I build this network of sites as a hobby to pull scattered public records into tools regular people can actually use. I do not use these sites to find legal clients, except for MN Comp Buddy which is my actual day job. The tools are free. The sites pay for their own hosting through clearly disclosed referral links and a few optional paid guides.

This site is an educational publication in the self-help tradition: it explains how investment advice is regulated and sold, cites its sources, and publishes numbers taken directly from public records anyone can check. It is not an adviser, not a broker, and not a law firm acting for you; nothing here is legal, financial, or investment advice about your situation, and reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. A longer bio, and the other sites in the same family, live at mnbuddynetwork.com/dan and mnbuddynetwork.com/sites.

Why it exists

Every SEC-registered investment adviser files Form ADV, and the SEC publishes the whole dataset every month: how much each firm manages, how it charges, what it sells, whether it holds client money, and whether it has disciplinary events to report. The records are public, but they live in bulk data files and a lookup tool almost no client will ever open, and the sales side of the industry is loud and well funded. This site exists to even that up: the regulator's file on one side of the table, in readable form, before you sign an advisory agreement.

The rules the data pages follow

Every number traces to the firm's own SEC filing, and every firm page links to the live record at adviserinfo.sec.gov. Assets under management is shown as what it is, a self-reported gross size measure, never as a ranking of skill; no public dataset reports adviser investment performance, and this site never implies otherwise. Firms appear exactly as named in the SEC files. And no adviser, broker, or matching service pays to appear on a data page, to be omitted from one, or to be described a certain way. The methodology page documents the pipeline.

How it makes money

Through disclosed referral links to advisor-matching services, each labeled where it appears, with a full page explaining how those services are paid including the fact that they are paid by the advisers they match. No company pays to look better in the data pages, and the tables and text never change because a partnership exists. The data pages are computed from public records and are never sold.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, email dan@mnbuddynetwork.com. Every firm page links to its live SEC record, so anything on this site can be checked against its source in one click.