Where the numbers come from

The source

Form ADV is the registration and disclosure form every SEC-registered investment adviser must file and amend at least annually. Part 1A is structured data: identity, headquarters, regulatory assets under management, account and employee counts, compensation arrangements (Item 5.E), advisory services (Item 5.G), custody (Item 9), wrap fee participation, and the disciplinary and legal questions of Item 11. The SEC publishes the full dataset monthly, and exempt reporting advisers (mostly private fund advisers filing under an exemption) appear in a companion file. Firms on this site are identified by their CRD number, the same number used by the SEC's own adviserinfo.sec.gov lookup, and every firm page links to its live record there.

What RAUM is, and is not

The asset figure on every page here is regulatory assets under management (RAUM), the number Form ADV instructions require in Item 5.F: the value of securities portfolios the firm continuously and regularly manages, computed gross, without subtracting borrowed money or other liabilities. It is deliberately a broad, comparable size measure. Three things it is not: it is not audited by the SEC before publication (firms report it themselves), it is not net of leverage (a leveraged fund adviser looks bigger than the equity behind it), and above all it is not a measure of skill or results. No public dataset reports adviser investment performance, and any site implying it ranks advisers by results is describing data that does not exist. This one ranks by size only, says so wherever it does, and explains fee arithmetic on the fees page instead of pretending to know who earns theirs.

The individuals dataset

Individual advisor pages and the individual half of the search are built from the SEC's IAPD individual compilation feed, the bulk publication behind adviserinfo.sec.gov. It carries roughly 436,000 registered investment adviser representatives: names, current employer and branch office, approved state registrations, licensing exams, professional designations, employment history (where practice and storefront names appear), and yes-or-no disclosure flags. This site reloads it weekly. Two boundaries worth knowing: the feed covers people registered as investment adviser representatives, so brokers holding only FINRA registrations and insurance-only agents are not in it; and like the firm data, it contains no performance figures, because no public record does.

Refresh cadence

The SEC publishes the data monthly, and this site reloads it monthly; each firm page shows the filing date of the firm's own most recent Form ADV and the data month it was loaded from, and the home page carries the current freshness stamp. A firm's figures can be up to a year old even in fresh data, because the underlying numbers update with the firm's annual amendment. For anything time-sensitive, the live record at adviserinfo.sec.gov is the authority.

What this site does not know

• Returns. Not published, by anyone, for advisory firms as a class. See above; this is the honesty rule the whole site is built around.
• FINRA-only brokers and insurance agents. The individuals dataset covers registered investment adviser representatives. A broker with only FINRA registrations appears on BrokerCheck but in no public bulk dataset, and insurance-only agents are licensed by states; neither is on this site, which is why the walkthrough still sends you to BrokerCheck for that layer.
• The content of disclosures. The site shows each firm's yes-or-no answer to Form ADV Item 11, and each individual's yes-or-no disclosure flags, and links to the SEC detail pages for the underlying events; it does not attempt to summarize or grade them.
• Fee amounts. Item 5.E discloses how a firm charges, not how much. The full schedule lives in each firm's brochure (Form ADV Part 2A), linked from its SEC record.