How to check an advisor before, or after, you hire one

Search the firm by name. Its page here shows the Form ADV essentials in one place: reported assets, how the firm is compensated (the fee flags from Item 5.E, rendered as sentences), services, custody, and whether the firm answered yes to any disciplinary or legal question on Item 11.

What to note down: the firm's CRD number (on its page here), whether commissions appear among its compensation methods, and the disciplinary flag. Those three drive the questions in the next steps.

This site summarizes; the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site (adviserinfo.sec.gov) is the primary record. Search the firm name or CRD number. From the firm's summary page you can open its full Form ADV, its brochure (Part 2A, where the complete fee schedule lives), and its relationship summary.

If the firm reported disclosures, IAPD shows the actual events under the firm's Disclosures section: what was alleged, which regulator or court, the resolution, and the date. Read them; a 15-year-old state registration lapse and a recent fraud order both set the same yes flag on Item 11, and only the detail pages tell them apart.

Now the person. Search their name on IAPDand on FINRA's BrokerCheck; the two systems share data, and a person registered both as an investment adviser representative and as a broker appears in both. The individual report shows current and past employers, licensing exams, state registrations, and any disclosure events: customer disputes, regulatory actions, terminations, personal bankruptcies, and criminal matters.

Whether the person shows up as adviser, broker, or both also answers the standard-of-conduct question from the fiduciary page: it tells you which rules applied to which years of their career, and which hat they can wear for you now.

This is where honest reading matters most, in both directions. A customer-dispute entry is an allegation record, not a verdict. It stays on the report whether the claim settled, was denied, or was withdrawn, and firms sometimes settle weak claims because defending them costs more. One old, denied dispute on a 30-year career is close to noise.

In the other direction, do not over-discount a pattern. Several disputes with similar allegations, settlements with meaningful dollar amounts, a regulatory action, or a termination for cause are exactly the signals these databases exist to surface. And absence of entries is not a guarantee of anything; most of the conduct that damages clients (high fees, unsuitable but defensible products) never generates a reportable event at all. The dispute record answers "has a tribunal or employer flagged this person," not "is this person good."

For the events themselves, the report shows the firm's or rep's side too: each entry can carry a broker comment. Read the allegation, the resolution, and the comment together, and treat "settled, no admission" as what it is: unresolved on the merits.